Charley Waterman - Charley Watermans Tales of Fly-Fishing, Wingshooting, and the Great Outdoors

M y friend was standing in an anchored skiff in New Jerseys Barnegat Bay throwing streamers at striped bass. He had a nine-weight fly rod and was double hauling for distance. This was the kind of fishing he liked as he had been a pretty fair linebacker and athletic angling suited him fine.

A pair of fishermen idled past, watching with what appeared to be clinical interest. My friend decided to show off a little so he peeled off more line and fired a clean hundred feetthen pretended not to notice his gallery and waited to hear an admiring comment.

Look at that! said one of the observers, plainly audible over the outboard. Ill bet that one wears silk underwear with lace.

That was years back and my sputtering friend survived. Only now are fly fishermen wading out from the general publics idea that they are a little strange. I recall when the editor of a very popular mens magazine was writing about the thrills of sports car driving and was extolling a particular model.

This car is very easily handled, he said. If you arent man enough to drive it, you should take up fly fishing.

Back then, a bait fisherman asked me if I had been catching anything on my sissy stick. The effete label was partly dispelled by some prominent athletes of the time who became fly fishermen, and baseballs Ted Williams probably had the most effect of all. Jack Sharkey, former heavyweight champion of the world, also did some fly fishing, although some of his trout angling associates said he was a splashy wader.

Fly fishing has recently become an in thing, of course, but it still has its enemies, many of them impromptu critics who dont quite see how it works and arent interested in that part. It has not been long since a guide I knew was driven out of a Yellowstone Park stream by disapproving spin fishermen. He had waded into a creek which was not yet mandatory catch-and-release and found the rainbows very willing to gulp dry flies of almost any pattern. He caught and released a number of them and had paid little attention to a gathering audience when trouble started.

On that particular day, hardware throwers werent doing much good and some of them took exception to the local who kept catching and releasing fisha procedure they felt was a demonstration of some sort of elitism and a subversion of the American way.

So the audience began to throw spoons at the wader while yelling that he should quit fooling around and let real fishermen fish. Until that time he had not realized releasing fish is sometimes considered a public insult. He had not been with me the day the tourist at a fishing pier told me he had seen someone throwing back fish and wanted to know whom to report it to.

For a long time in many areas (and in a few today), the completely equipped fly fishermans costume has made him a comic character. Although waders, vest, and assorted dangling gadgets are worn proudly (and often expensively) in many circles, they stir the juices of professional newspaper and magazine cartoonists. Lately the fly persons equipment has become a little dressier and more expensive than the nearly forgotten Dacron leisure suit. For years I have bored my friends with the tale of Fred Terwilliger and me meeting mounted Argentinean gauchos in the moonlight when we were wearing waders and everything that went with them. The gauchos huge black dogs bawled fearsomely. The resultant rodeo was happily masked by dust and darkness but I have no doubt the gauchos are still telling the story.

Although I may have been called strange names by many who have seen me wading small streams, it is in outboard boating areas that yesterdays fly rodder was most likely to hear the publics opinion of him. Few of its users know that the things they say loudly over an outboards mutter can be heard for some distance.

In the South, when wading and casting flies for shad, I had heard innumerable derogatory comments, but I was surprised to hear from a big outboard cruiser the following:

Look at that damned tourist with the fly pole. Watch me gun this hooker and fill his rubber pants full of water!

Thats what he did. In most parts of the U.S., even those largely dependent upon tourist trade, the word tourist has generally been derogatory when used by locals. Even if you have grown old but a few miles from where you are throwing a fly, youll hear things like:

Lookit the tourist with the fly rig after bream. I wonder what hed do if an ol bass grabbed that thing!

In recent years the routine landing of hundred-pound saltwater fish by fly casters has gradually changed the perception of other anglers, but a few years back I was interrupted while talking about snook at a tackle counter.

A bystander walked up to the counter, leaned around so that he could look me in the face and stated:

Nobody can catch a snook on a fly rod!

Such places are pretty scarce now, but until recent years there were quite a few resort operators who did not understand that fly fishermen had not turned to the method as a last resort. I wanted to go back to a Colorado resort and called to ask about the fishing. The owner said the fishing was great and I arrived there in a hurry, tired and sleepy, and he met me with enthusiasm.

I wanted to surprise you, he said. The rivers so high and muddy you dont even have to use flies. You can catch em on worms!

Please dont repeat this, but there are certain times and places when other artificial methods are better than flies. Some fly fishing converts take great effort to level this off and I have read complete books on ways of slinging all sorts of weighted lures with fly rods. These lures range from plugs that would work fine on spinning gear to deep-going flies with heavy sinkers. There was the backcountry bass fisherman who put a big live shiner on a fly rod, lowered it into a desirable spot, rowed seventy-five feet away, dropped his anchor, and waited for action. He said he couldnt cast the bait with his fly rod but he was fly fishing.

Of course for a very long time anglers have trolled with fly rods for landlocked salmon, using canoes, and it was accepted as a sporting method. Only a few years back, I knew some trollers who caught shad on fly rods, and there was a special method in that madnessthe gentle nodding of the long rods gave the tiny lures an action the shad loved, but now most trollers use soft spinning rods.

I dont know if yuppie is complimentary or derogatory but it is often applied to fly fishermen. I didnt know how far I had strayed until I met an angler who had read some of the things I had written.

Oh, I know who you are! he said with a recognition that made me feel warm all over. Youre the guy who writes all of those articles with pictures of somebody in greasy jeans landing a fish on a fly rod!

After that, I got some nice duck pants and some of those shirts with special ventilation gussets and my wife bought me a new fishing vest with red pockets. I also took a little more interest in my tackle. Oh, Id spent more than I could afford on rods before that, but I had been a little careless about my reels. I had good, big reels that would handle almost anything I could get hold of, and I put about the same ones on most of the rods, but I saw the big reels made my fish look smaller in pictures so I got some little shiny ones.

In country where there werent many fly fishermen, I learned long ago to ignore comments from others. I am not as quick on the trigger as my old friend who used to play tackle for a pretty good university football team and appears rather large at his upper end. He slid into a cove in his floater bubble and began to cast over clean trout water, ten feet deep. There was a boat and two fishermen already in the little cove and one of them told him they were there first and he was taking away their privacy.