Review

More on “No Shortage of Good Days” — Are Fly Fishing’s Class Wars Fodder For Gierach?

May 19, 2011, by Tom Chandler 28 comments

I’m about 2/3 of the way through Gierach’s No Shortage of Good Days and noticing it seems rife with comments about what I’ll loosely label as fly fishing’s class wars, a thought which just became fodder for my upcoming interview.

In the meantime…

“Many of us had taken up fly fishing not so much as a sport, but as a possible path to enlightenment, and as everyone knows, those routes aren’t the same for everyone and they’re never clearly marked. You just head out into whatever seems like the right direction at the time.”

See you reading, Tom Chandler.

Gierach On Getting Old and Beat Up (or, We Live Blog, You Snicker)

May 18, 2011, by Tom Chandler 2 comments

Because live blogging John Gierach’s latest book is a lot cheaper than paying him to guest blog, I’m offering up yet another passage from No Shortage of Good Days.

This one is tasty, though it plunges the knife a bit too close to my own heart being as I recently achieved geezer status myself, and after a winter largely spent sitting and coughing, feel it:

From my own experience, I can say that a bad back makes you hike slower, stove-up knees keep you from walking confidently, tendonitis of the elbow buggers your casting, and a dose of giardia can send you dashing into the bushes fifteen times in an afternoon, but although none of this is fun, it’s discernibly better than not fishing.
— (From page 47 of the Nook ebook version)

Not to quibble or anything, but I’m pretty sure “tendonitis” is a commonly used but incorrect spelling of “tendinitis.”

Clearly, being a geezer has its advantages.

See you at the ereader, Tom Chandler.

Gierach on (What We’ll Call) Small Creek Syndrome

May 18, 2011, by Tom Chandler 8 comments

Thirty-four pages into Gierach’s No Shortage of Good Days we find one possible explanation for Small Stream Syndrome (in my case, the wholesale absence of the rest of humanity enters into the equation).

“As it is, I feel that I fish my local creeks as well as anyone and better than most, and although that may or may not be true, so few people care that I can go on believing it in peace.”

More from Gierach’s latest book as it’s consumed on this — the first live-blogging of a Gierach book ever attempted on this blog.

Undergrounders, you’re a part of history.

One Page Into “No Shortage of Good Days” (or, Live Blogging a Book?)

May 17, 2011, by Tom Chandler 4 comments

I was supposed to receive an advance copy of John Gierach’s latest book, but mine — apparently like a few others — never showed. With my Gierach interview scheduled for Friday and feeling oddly reluctant to interview someone about a book I hadn’t read, I figured it was time to download the ebook version.

I’m only one page into the thing and already wondering if this isn’t the book where Gierach loosens his collar a bit:

I have met some high-brow fishermen who bragged that they only fished at the best places with the best guides at the best times of the year and who claimed to not only always catch fish, but to always catch lots of real big ones. If true, a life without drama must be awfully boring, and if false — as you have to suspect — then lugging around an ego that requires that much preening must be a terrible burden.

Amusingly, this reminds me of not only “high-brow” fishermen, but more than a few pretending to be dirtbag trout bums.

More Gierach to come.

See you slaving over a hot ebook reader (the Nook, but more on that soon), Tom Chandler.

Underground Book Review: Threatened Species

April 28, 2011, by Tom Chandler 6 comments

Threatened Species is a short fiction collection by Underground Regular Jeff Vande Zande, and while the fly fishing hovers in the background of several stories, these are not fly fishing-centric tales.

(click image to read more)

Instead, most of Threatened Species’ tightly-written stories deal with people struggling with loss or change, and while the writing is engaging, it’s far removed from the happy trails normally trod by fly fishing writers.

In truth, those expecting typical fly fishing fare may find themselves struggling to enjoy this story collection.

It’s good stuff, but at times unremittingly dark, and I’m reminded what Thomas McGuane said about contemporary American literature:

We’re at the point now where Dostoevksy is funnier than the average American novel.

Vande Zande’s collection does not refute McGuane, but it does provide us a glimpse at characters teetering on the edge of the abyss, and it’s well written to boot.

Threatened Species — the novella that anchors this collection — follows a father who has two weeks with his son before his divorced wife moves to Paris (with the son and new husband).

They take to the road on a fishing trip, which quickly derails as the father struggles with his son’s departure. Thankfully, the author finishes on a hopeful note.

The other works are shorter and — in large part — grimmer, and it’s these stories that account for much of the collection’s sharp edges (including a particularly unpleasant image involving a well).

Vande Zande’s prose is taut and spare, and the cumulative effect of his writing is that of a snare drum; staccato bursts of energy interwoven with characters struggling — in many instances — to maintain any semblance of equilibrium.

It’s wonderful – if sometimes dark – reading.

See you reading, Tom Chandler.

Threatened Species and Other Stories is available in multiple ebook formats ($4.99) here.
You can buy the paper version of Threatened Specieshere ($14), or directly from the author here.

Is The “Best All-Around” 5wt Fly Rod A 6wt? (or, Yellowstone Angler’s Fly Rod “Shootout” Misses The Target)

January 26, 2011, by Tom Chandler 43 comments

First, congratulations to Hardy, whose 9′ 5wt Zenith fly rod won the Yellowstone Angler 5wt Fly Rod Shootout (and by a handy margin).

In recent decades, Hardy was the manufacturer you turned to if you smoked a pipe and spoke like Rex Harrison, but it’s interesting to note that they – and the formerly tweed-friendly Orvis – both now offer cutting-edge fly rod technology (they’d suggest “industry-leading” technology), which is proof, I suppose, that you write off the old guys at your own peril (I’m not drawing parallels to the Underground, though you kids should stay the hell off my lawn).

Despite the win for an Underground advertiser, I’m compelled to offer a couple comments about the testing, which – despite the language – doesn’t appear to be a search for a truly “all-around” 5wt.

Only Speed Demons Need Apply

In fact, a quick glance at the criteria suggests a test that’s highly biased towards strong, fast-tapered rods – the kind of rods that are often more useful in daydreams than on small and medium-sized rivers.

For starters, the testing was conducted with an SA GPX line – the “half-line-weight-heavy” line that falls perilously close to 6wt territory, and represents (to me anyway) a sad admission that many modern fly rods are simply too stiff to function at “normal” distances with normal fly lines.

For other signs of what I’d consider a skew towards fast “power” tapers, look no farther than Yellowstone Anglers’ own evaluation criteria:

If you’re in the market for a good 5-weight rod, we are going to assume that you want one rod that will do it all – a rod that will cast in close with delicacy and accuracy with small drys and fine tippet, a rod that will launch larger drys like hoppers seventy feet into stiff breeze, and a rod that has enough backbone to throw a couple of nymphs, a wind resistant strike indicator and maybe a little split shot as well. It also must have the guts to chuck a streamer with a split shot clamped next to the eye, and put it on that cut bank 80 feet away.

Uhh, casting weighted streamers 80′? Throwing hoppers 70′ into a “stiff” breeze? Really??

It’s interesting to note that the only two “medium” tapered rods in the test (both by Orvis) finished no higher than the middle of the pack.

And that – to my eye – two of the four critera aren’t exactly the native habitat of the 5wt fly rod.

Finally, the use of the GPX line means the “5 Weight Shootout” is actually a “5.5 Weight Shootout.”

Merge those realities with repeated uses of marketing power words like “backbone,” “guts” and “launch” and I had to wonder why they didn’t simply test 6wts – which would actually handle 3/4 of the tasks far more comfortably than a 5wt.

In simple terms, Yellowstone Angler might have actually picked the best “All-Around 5wt” – but only if you were trying to sell overlined fly rods to people fishing big, windy western rivers.

That’s not the world faced by most fly fishermen – the vast majority of whom have never actually cast 80′, and probably never will.

Still, let’s not forget commerce is involved, and that reality always finishes a distant second to fantasy when you’re selling people things they probably don’t need.

Before The Emails Begin…

Before the nasty emails begin to pour in, let me be clear: the folks at the Yellowstone Angler state their criteria right up front, and I’m not alleging hidden agendas.

What I am saying is this: before you start buying your way down their shootout list (or any Top “XXX” list), consider the criteria, and see if they even remotely match your particular reality.

Being as I live in the mountains of Northern California, my “all-around” 5wt isn’t anything like Anderson’s.

Mine would cast wonderfully at small stream ranges, yet still throw a Green Drake (or October Caddis) on a medium-sized freestoner like the Upper Sacramento or McCloud. If pressed, I’d say it looks a lot like a medium-tapered 8.5′ 5wt that wouldn’t necessarily launch every 6″ or smaller small stream trout I hooked.

In all likelihood, it would barely lift a weighted streamer, much less cast it 80 feet.

It might even be bamboo or fiberglass, and could have been made upwards of half a century ago – an admission which suggests I don’t need to sell modern, high-modulus fly rods to fly fishermen.

In other words, consider the Yellowstone Angler 5wt Fly Rod Shootout a highly subjective test of strong, fast-tapered 5.5 wt rods in situations where you might normally fish a 6 wt, give Hardy their due for their apparent comeback (or simply welcome them back to the party), and let’s all move on with our lives.

See you testing anything but fly rods, Tom Chandler.

“A Passion For Tarpon” Coffee Table Book Impresses (It’s Big, It’s Complete, And It’s $100…)

January 24, 2011, by Tom Chandler 7 comments

Fly fishing’s full of coffee table books, but if you added legs to Andy Mill’s “A Passion For Tarpon” book, you’d have a coffee table unto itself.

A massive volume of 510 pages – jammed with a mix of essays, interviews (of greats like Stu Apte) and a fair amount of Andy Mill’s “how-to” – A Passion for Tarpon is clearly meant to be the definitive volume on fly fishing for tarpon.

And it largely succeeds.

Andy Mills has dedicated a lot of time and money to the pursuit of tarpon, and while I’m unqualified to suggest he’s the best tarpon fly fishermen extant, I will say he’s certainly the best to publish a 500 page book.

Table of Contents (see anything you like?)

A Passion for Tarpon crosses a few genres; it’s a pretty coffee-table book filled with nice photographs, but it also offers a handful of very interesting interviews with heavy-hitting tarpon anglers, and yes – it’s also jammed with “how-to” and scientific information about tarpon.

It even includes episode one of Jamie Howard’s acclaimed “Chasing Silver” series on DVD.

Even includes the first episode of "Chasing Silver"

I’m not a tarpon angler and I’d be lieing if I said I read every word of this book, but I have read most of it and know that – if it were about small streams – I’d buy it despite the sizable price tag.

It’s clearly written and the interviews are – to a small stream guy – more interesting than the articles, but overall, the book holds together beautifully.

I’m Impressed, But…

I’m just going to say it; the typeface the text is set in isn’t really suitable for a book-length project. In fact, it’s a little startling to see amateur typography appear in a book of this caliber.

That tyographically geekish nitpick aside, A Passion For Tarpon probably will find its way onto every tarpon angler’s bookshelf.

The information, interviews, photographs and other goodies will probably be too much to ignore.

See you at the bookshelf, Tom Chandler.

A Passion for Tarpon - 510 pages of stuff about tarpon...

An Underground Book Review: An Entirely Synthetic Fish

December 13, 2010, by Tom Chandler 17 comments

The last century has seen the rapid spread of the rainbow trout across the USA, and Anders Halverson’s award-winning book An Entirely Synthetic Fish) does an excellent job of chronicling the rainbow trout’s manmade diaspora – along with the negative effects on native fish populations.

An Entirely Synthetic Fish is a worthwhile read

Halverson is a thorough researcher and a fine storyteller, and his engaging book never lags or lapses into biologist “geekspeak.”

Instead, it’s an engrossing read – one that’s hard to put down, and just as hard to forget.

Halverson dives into the history of the rainbow trout starting with the expedition up the still-wild (and dangerous) McCloud River to establish a hatchery.

With sportsmen cheering every step of the way, Halverson highlights the rainbow’s rapid spread across the USA (and the planet), and the displacement (and wholesale extinction) of the native species who get in the way.

Fortunately, he manages to do this without casting the fisheries managers behind the rainbow diaspora as “bad guys.”

It was a “conquer the wilderness” era, and it wasn’t until the watershed event on the Green River – where biologists used tons of Rotenone to poison out every last native species so millions of rainbows could be stocked – that fisheries people finally blinked.

Halverson’s account of the Green River project was gripping, and in fact, read a lot like a novel (I half-expected Bond to show up).

Later, Halverson examined Montana’s “no stocking” legacy, the impact of whirling disease on several key fisheries, and the ill-fated decision of Colorado’s hatchery program to knowingly stock whirling-infected rainbow trout in almost all the state’s waters.

Halverson’s examination of the Sierra lakes hit closer to home, where rainbow trout introductions into formerly fishless alpine lakes played havoc with amphibian populations.

As someone who lives and fishes in the mountains of California, I’ve heard a great deal of grumbling from “sportsmen” about the high country fish removal policies, especially since “our” trout are being removed to protect frogs, which most people don’t fish for.

Clearly, the “sportsmen first, natives second” attitudes of the past century still loom large in many of today’s outdoorsmen (witness the cutthroat recovery and wolf reintroduction issues of the Northern Rockies), and while it’s tempting to dismiss Halverson’s book as documenting a bygone era, that’s more self-delusion than reality.

Overall, An Entirely Synthetic Fish is an engrossing book that sometimes reads like a novel (though its 30 page bibliography will dissuade you from that thought).

It deservedly won a National Outdoor Book Award, and is well worth any fly fishermen’s time.

Our Department of Fly Lines (And Geezerhood) Reviews The RIO Gold Fly Line

November 11, 2010, by Tom Chandler 37 comments

In the midst of my recent trip to an alpine spring creek, I realized I’d more or less settled on fishing small streams with the RIO Gold WF fly line I was given a couple years ago.

Reasoning that three years offered enough testing time to arrive at some conclusions, I sat down to do two things:

Write a review for the Trout Underground
Order RIO Gold lines in DT4 & DT5 for my “everyday” reels

Which is when I made a revolting discovery; the RIO Gold line isn’t available in a double taper.

Which means I’m recommending a fly line to my readers, yet can’t buy one for my own use.

Life, it seems, is rarely simple.

The Testing

I was given the RIO Gold line for testing about the same time SA gave me one of their then-new Sharkskin lines.

The Sharkskin floated nice and high (just as claimed) and cast nicely, but it made a lot of noise in the guides (I’d have gotten used to it) and over the course of a day, tried to saw my index finger off (I couldn’t get used to that).

The RIO Gold fished wonderfully too (it’s the current choice of noted fly line & leader crank [Name Redacted]), and did so without delivering third-degree rug burns. I even liked the moss/gold color scheme.

We had a winner. Or so I thought.

It turns out my beloved double-taper fly lines are slowly fading from the mainstream.

And in the style of bewildered geezers everywhere, I’m certain it’s not because I’m obsolete.

It’s because everyone else doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Like RIO, who makes a fine fly line, then mucks everything up by only offering it in a WF design.

The only high-end DT actually available from RIO is a “delicate presentation” line whose taper charts suggests it would run (screaming like a little girl) if you tied on a stonefly or streamer.

No dice.

The Case For The DT

Fishing the 5wt RIO Gold WF on small streams renders its WF flaws a non-issue; I rarely get past the shooting head, so life is good.

On bigger rivers and lakes, I often get past the shooting head and into the running line, and that is a problem, especially when long roll casts are in the mix (a reality more often that you’d think).

In fact I’m going to firmly entrench myself in Cranky Geezer Land; I can’t fathom the popularity of the short-belly WF lines which seem to dominate the fly fishing world.

Much is made of their ability to “shoot” more line, but frankly, you can “shoot” plenty of DT line too. What’s the real difference in distance?

And how often does it really matter?

Meanwhile, the DT line offers us a powerful pair of reasons to buy:

Great line control
A second shot at life

The beauty of a DT (besides its ability to roll cast to great distances) is this: you can reverse a DT line on your reel after you’ve worn it out (or stepped on it or cut it or accidentally sucked it up in a vacuum cleaner, or…).

It’s basically two lines in one, which should mean a lot to fly fishermen paying $70-$100 for fly lines.

Cynics might suggest that’s precisely why DT lines aren’t pushed by manufacturers, but when confronted by a cranky, delusional blogger, the manufacturers simply blame “market forces.”

In fact, an industry marketing exec once happily told me the availability of a “delicate” tapers in WF formats meant DT lines no longer had a reason to exist.

I wrote back and suggested that specialty distance and stillwater lines had rendered the general purpose, trout-weight WF obsolete – unless you were a line manufacturer interested in selling 2x as many fly lines as necessary.

Oddly, I never heard from him again.

So why, I ask, are manufacturers – and anglers – so unwilling to make or buy DT lines?

A Quick Look At The Market

While RIO doesn’t offer a single “general purpose” DT fly line, Scientific Anglers does a little better, though their newest “textured” Mastery lines aren’t available in a DT taper. (The Textured Mastery lines are likely a response to complaints about abrasive Sharkskin lines leveled by sore-fingered anglers, and the dimpled lines received all sorts of fly gear love from the notoriously cranky and wanted in seven states Singlebarbed).

In total, SA offers six different series of fly lines, three of which are available in a “standard” DT format (including the regular “Mastery” series).

Meanwhile, Orvis offers their highest-end Wonderlines in a DT format, though I’ve never tested one (the Olive Dun color looks nice) and can’t give it a thumbs up or down.

Sadly, Cortland’s lineup – which includes “Premium” fly lines and a whole wad of “species specific” fly lines – relegates the all-around DT to the same product lines you’d have bought 30 years ago.

I’m not much of a fan of technology developed solely to sell fly lines – and never bought into what appears to be rampant over-specialization of the fly line industry – but I do like fly lines that float high and pop off the water nicely.

The Sharkskin and RIO Gold lines both did that better than my aging peach lines, and I was interested.

It’s a shame the fly line manufacturers can’t find their way to sell the two-ended version commonly used by cranky geezer types holding low-modulus fly rods.

See you on the river (and hey, you kids get off my lawn), Tom Chandler.

A Pair of Category-Defying Underground Book Reviews: Lift, and Fat Of The Land

November 9, 2010, by Tom Chandler 5 comments

I sometimes receive review copies of books that don’t fall directly within the fly fishing category (or any category for that matter), yet they’re simply too good to ignore.

Lift and Fat of the Land are two such books, and as a fan of good writing, I can’t relegate either to the “Unreviewed” pile simply because they don’t fall into the fly fishing category.

Who knew good writing existed outside of fly fishing?

Lift: A Memoir

Lift is a powerful book about a woman’s lifelong obsession with falcons, and focuses on the year spent “training” a particularly difficult peregrine.

(click cover to buy Lift)

Like most good books, it covers far more ground than its one-sentence summary suggests, and in fact, it’s really a memoir, though if truly pressed, I’d suggest it was the chronicle of a woman and a falcon teaching each other to trust again.

Rebecca O’Connor populates Lift with jaw-dropping honesty, and the book prompted me to write this review at Goodreads.com:

This is a wonderful book – jammed with jaw-dropping honesty, lyrical beauty, and enough information about falconry to intrigue.

Ms. O’Connor writes of the journey she takes while training a peregrine falcon, relating significant moments back to her not-always-easy life. A history of abuse haunts her, and yet – as she supposedly “trains” her falcon – it’s clear the learning is a two-way street.

Ms. O’Connor trains the falcon how to hunt, yet the two are really training each other to trust.

Of the two, the latter is far more important, and by the end of the book, I was cheering for the pair.

O’Connor describes hunting with her falcon in direct – even savage – terms, yet doesn’t gloss over the difficulties she faced while training her peregrine.

O’Connor even managed to write a brilliant article about the difficulties she faced getting Lift published and the lackluster sales of the book (Lift doesn’t neatly fit into an established category, which makes sales difficult).

In online venues, Lift has alternately been described as a falconry book, a memoir, a “chick book” and a few others.

I think it’s just plain brilliant, and worth buying if you have any interest at all in falconry – and frank, honest writing.

(You can buy Lift at one of the online stores listed here. Her blog is here.)

Fat Of The Land

Another book that defies easy categorization, Fat Of The Land is a funny and informative journal of a writer’s attempts to gather and eat wild food in the Pacific Northwest.

(Click cover to buy Fat Of The Land)

Written from a sportsman’s perspective (he wholly avoids preaching about local foods), writer Langdon Cook adds a healthy dose of humor to each food gathering expedition, and like Lift, I read Fat Of The Land twice.

Cook finds himself foraging the ocean for clams, shrimp, salmon and ling cod, combs recently burned forests for morels, and harvests dandelions from the median strip of a busy street.

Along the way, Cook describes his expeditions – and the characters who populate them – with humor and insight.

Though he includes recipes at the end of each chapter, this is not a cook book or primer on local/organic foods.

Instead, it’s a humorous journal of expeditions into the wild, told by a master storyteller.

You can compare Fat Of The Land prices here, or visit Langdon Cook’s blog here.