Beyond Complacency

I have fished for trout for about as long as I can remember. I was born in Gore about 60 years ago, no more than a kilometre from the Mataura, and while no one else in my family fished, I had the bug right from the start. As a child I was so attracted to rivers that my grandparents, who lived only a couple of paddocks from the Mataura, tried to put the fear of God into me about the dangers that lay beyond the flood banks.

While my enthusiasm has remained firmly in place for most of the time I have fished, my angling prowess developed in an uneven, lumpy manner. Serendipity was involved, as it is with many of the key turns in our lives. Chance meetings and subsequent friendships with those few extraordinarily gifted anglers usually proved the catalyst for a shifting forward of my own abilities.

There’s nothing like getting back to the car for lunch after a morning fishing the Waipahi, hoping to bask in the glory of landing three or four fine trout, and finding that your companion has landed three times that many, to encourage a lifting of your expectations. These periods of improvement were often followed by a comfortable complacency. The success that came from fishing familiar water, often at the same times of the year, accentuated the sense I had of not needing to grow as an angler.

I still loved it, and enjoyed the outdoors and rivers in particular almost as much as ever, allowing for the fact that at 50 my capacity for unadulterated excitement had, like muscle tone, subsided just a bit. About that time I went saltwater fly fishing.

My first trip was to the Florida Keys—nothing like starting near the top. I was confident enough that I don’t recall putting any preparatory work into my casting, and was under-prepared to take on the many tarpon that ghosted past me on that trip. I had however read Thomas McGuane, so had some sense of my quarry, and the game I was supposed to be playing. I did land a 12 kg permit on that trip. Fortunately for the reputation of permit generally, and the development of my own fly fishing, that fish took a live crab, so didn’t really count.

That trip started the demolition of my overconfidence. A couple of years later in Cape York, in his dry, intimidating but ultimately helpful way, ‘Fish’ Philliskirk finished the job. He started another period where my angling expertise was challenged enough for me to actually make some progress.

SKILLS EXPOSED

Fly fishing in salt water exposed my skills in a number of areas. Casting was the most obvious area in need of an overhaul. Generally, fish in salt water move more quickly than trout. In a river at least, trout are often fairly stationary, or move only slowly. That allows the angler a chance to get positioned for a cast that is often a ‘sweet’ distance for both the angler and the rod. I find that in salt water most of my casts are either too short, or too long for the sweet casting distance.

This distance problem is compounded by the havoc bulkier and heavier flies create. A small dry fly or tiny nymph has no perceptible impact on the loop and the feel of the cast. The same can’t be said for a 1/0 Clouser or crab pattern. Any imperfection in your casting technique is quickly exposed by such bulky cargo. Casts made to fast moving fish in the sea often need to be made instinctively, with little time available for sizing up the most desirable approach.

I purchased a book by Lefty Kreh soon after my first trip to the Keys, and quickly adopted his side-arm casting style. I can add power to my cast using Lefty’s approach, and there is the added bonus of keeping weighty flies away from my head.

For trout I still favour casting on a more vertical plane, as it offers me greater accuracy than the side-arm method. Throwing a mend while the line is in the air also comes more naturally when casting over my shoulder. In salt water I look to throw a straight line to the fish, and stay in direct touch with the fly.

My eyes had become accustomed to seeing trout pretty well. The different colours, shapes and positioning of most salt species renewed the challenge for my spotting skills.

I had become comfortable with the limited range of knots required for trout fishing. The speed of longtail tuna and power of blue bastards (painted sweetlip) forced me to think about knots for the first time in years. Knots remain a work in progress for me. The Albright knot I had favoured for my saltwater leaders does have a nice symmetry and is strong when well tied, but when tied under pressure on the water has sometimes failed. I was recently left feeling shattered after seeing a hard earned permit depart with my crab pattern, leaving me to ponder the remnant pigtail of a knot failure.

My enthusiasm for gear has also been expensively re-ignited. Many of the reels in particular are not only works of art, but necessary to deal with the sort of raw force that trout just don’t bring to the game. It took me only one rod broken on a poorly played fish to change my fighting technique, and convince me that I did need two rods for each line weight.

FRESHNESS & NOVELTY

I have been consumed by the freshness and novelty of saltwater fly fishing. The sport is still in its infancy when compared to fly fishing for trout, and like a new passion of any sort, this can be exciting and destabilising in equal measure.

I found myself caring much less about trout, a fish with which I had developed a comfortable familiarity, and more about the elusive and distant charms of permit, milkfish and perhaps my favourite—the blue bastard. Much has been written about permit. They are not regular attendees at my fishing parade, and even when present, behave at best in an enigmatic manner. Milkfish are more reliably present in the places I fish, but until recently at least, were a fish more likely caught by accident than design. Blue bastards do it for me. They can be found if you look, and they have a chunky charm that has me well captured.

On my first visit to Cape York in 2005 little appeared to be known about blue bastards. It was a couple of years before we considered them a realistic proposition on the fly. They usually appeared mooching close to the shore, around rock structure and in water often less than a metre deep. I wasn’t sure what they were feeding on, but assumed the smudged and pot-holed trails they often left as they meandered along the bottom were a clue to their feeding pattern.

Blue bastards pose many challenges for fly fishers. The fly usually needs to be on the bottom, in the path of the feeding fish. It took many attempts before I could execute that simple task regularly. The extent to which I lead the fish is determined by the depth of the water, and the sink rate of the fly. Cast too close and the fish is often startled, whereas leading the fish by more than a metre risks the fly being on the zig path, when the fish has chosen to zag.

I mostly use a size 4 crab pattern for blue bastards, but I think it is less important than the position of the fly on the bottom, and the short strips used to impart action to the fly.

I lost the first blue bastards I hooked because I wasn’t prepared to apply the improbable force required to keep them out of the rocks. I can still recall the first time I applied enough pressure to stop and roll one of these wonderful fish, just short of the sanctuary it was seeking. The sight of the sun flashing on the azure side of that fish, as it was turned over, will never leave me.

Fly fishing for blue bastards has all the complexity of fly fishing for trout, although unlike trout, I don’t ever expect them to be easy. Hooking five or six in a day, and landing two or three, is about as much as I will ever expect—at least until the day someone near me lands twice that number!

REGAINING BALANCE

For a time, saltwater fly fishing threatened to overwhelm my interest in trout. The beauty and warmth of exotic locations, along with the challenges posed by new species was almost irresistible. Now I have regained a balance of sorts between the two. Trout offer an intimacy and subtlety that still captivates me. I love the visual aspect of trout fishing, and casting a dry fly to a rise is what I cherish most about fishing. I now have less interest fishing a deeply sunken nymph for unseen trout, even if at times that method can be highly productive.

My attitude to saltwater fishing has also changed over the last decade. Longtail tuna don’t excite me as much as they did, because once found, they are not that hard to hook. Queenfish, magnificent as they are, fall into a similar category. I’m now much happier spending most of the day trying to catch a permit, blue bastard or milkfish, because they remain a challenge, and the whole experience of chasing them is highly visual. I suspect this tough-to-catch trio will keep my complacency at bay for some time yet.