Some folks grew up fishing. I envy them. The fishing of my youth was limited to a trip or two in the summer, and it was generally the same old thing. We’d go to the lake and fish Zeke’s Floating Bait for trout. Even when it worked, which was rare, it was still rather boring.
My dad was set in his ways. Bait fishing for trout was his jam and he seldom tried something new.
I was a fishing-curious lad, however, and with the liberty that adulthood, a job, a driver’s license and a car provide, I experimented with some of the fishing techniques I wasn’t exposed to when I was younger. I picked up fly fishing first. Then I played around a bit with other techniques. I remember catching my first bass on a plastic worm. It was a hoot.
I spent my early years as a fly fisher adhering to orthodoxy. Dry flies only. The lightest tippets I could get away with. A split cane rod, for a while at least. It wasn’t fancy. I bought older cane in decent shape from a friend who needed some quick cash. It served me well until I got over my wicker-creel phase.
I fished dry flies most of the time. I’ve mentioned before that the Renegade was my favorite in those early years. It’s an odd fly, with dual hackles fore and aft of the peacock-herl body. The hackle up front is white. The rear hackle is brown. There’s no tail, but the fly does get a wrap or two of gold tinsel just behind where the shank meets the bend in the hook. It doesn’t look like any bug in particular, but it does look buggy. That’s the miracle of peacock herl iridescence. There are plenty of manmade products that bend light like that, but with a Renegade, it’s all peacock shimmer.
I have other attractor patterns I now favor. If I’m searching with a dry, it’s usually some sort of parachute mayfly, a Purple Haze or Blue-Winged Olive or an Adams. If I’m feeling especially bawdy, I might tie on a Stimulator, orange if I’ve got one. Especially if I’m fishing cutthroat water. It seems they’re suckers for orange. An Orange Stimulator has come to replace the Renegade as my dry-fly “bait” of choice.
In those early days, a friend jokingly suggested fishing a Renegade was the equivalent of using bait. That was a good one. These days, I mostly chuckle at the way some fly fishers impose a rigid orthodoxy on what constitutes true “fly fishing.” Unless you’re using a split-cane rod with a click and pawl reel holding silk line with a cat-gut leader and a classic Quill Gordon tied on the business end, however, I’m not sure you’re in a position to judge another fly fisher’s authenticity.
We all have better things to do when we’re on the water than virtue signaling.
I loosened up when I got older and determined catching fish was more fun than being a zealot. Eventually, I even came to love fishing nymphs, trolling the depths with weighted flies. For the longest time, my best producer on a leader full of nymphs was a simple pattern: a bare nymph hook wrapped with red floss down to the bend. That’s it.
Something about that sparsely dressed fly seemed right. And it produced. But eventually, my fishing buddy in those days caught up and passed me in our fish counts at the end of the day. His secret weapon was the San Juan Worm.
That ended my resistance. The worm is deadly, whether midge larvae are present or not. The San Juan supposedly mimics midge larvae in its eponymous river, but I’m not buying it. Trout like worms, imposters, or the real thing. They don’t care if we match the hatch as much as we think they do.