by John McPhee
May 14: This would be humiliating if it weren’t inconceivable. Four fish were lost after long battles because the knots came untied! Knots are not one of my failings, or used not to be. Five other fish simply got away. Three hours, nine AWOLs, one shad.
May 15: After thinking about my lost fish for twenty-four hours, I remembered that I was using old line. Dried line is difficult to knot snugly and may slip. I bought new line.
May 23: At the end of an hour and a half, the last of several fish simply leaves as the dart unties—a complete-fault AWOL. Careless. Inspect the darts, jackass. Retie the darts.
May 25: In the net, the fish had nothing in its mouth, the dart was not tied to the line. The dart was hanging in the mesh of the net. Evidently, the knot untied in the moment that I netted the fish.
Things have become so bad that I have been to see a fishing shrink. This was after a record loss of nine out of ten hooked shad. I had of course consulted Merritt but I wanted a second opinion. The slippage in old dry line was surely the problem, the doctor said. Yes, I told him, but most fish I lose, I lose in other ways. He said that I probably hold the rod high and straight up and keep the line taut like everybody else, right? Right. That’s what they all do. Whenever you see a shad fisherman with a shad on the line, the rod is high and he is working in a plane straight in front of his nose. That’s not the way to deal with a fish. The fish is always upright and knows where he is and what he’s doing. You want to control, confuse, and direct the fish. Hold the rod horizontally off your left hip. Firmly, not too firmly, direct the fish that way. Make it move that way. After a time, swing the rod over until it projects horizontally to the right. Lead the fish that way. Now lead him the first way. Now the other way. He will become so confused he will turn on his side and take orders.
I also told the shrink I had particular trouble with freshly hooked fish that came near the canoe and were too active to control at close quarters. A just-hooked fish that gets close to the fisherman has “freedom” written on every scale.
Do you know how to make a fish turn over on its back? he asked.
Not without shooting it, I said.
He was holding a rod in his hand. You do this, he said. And he plunged the rod straight down. You plunge the rod into the river as if you were a matador killing a bull.
Returning to the river, I hooked into only eight shad, but I landed them all, and each time I held the rod on the horizontal. I drew them to the left, then drew them to the right, switching from the one side to the other every half-minute or so, and more frequently as the fish came closer to the canoe. In the end, I was switching from left to right every five or ten seconds. The shad went schizophrenic. Even when they were fresh and only seconds on the line, they got so addled that they turned on their sides and frog-kicked. They were so cross-eyed they were not alarmed by the net. In close proximity to the canoe, one shad was a good deal more vigorous than the others had been. I plunged the rod tip straight down into the river. The shad turned belly up and backstroked into the net.
On a June morning, dawn to sunrise, Erwin Dietz—as usual—was catching shad as if he were eating potato chips. After I pulled anchor and got ready to depart, I paddled over to have a look at his equipment. He was using two lures: a dart, larger than a quarter ounce, and—three feet farther down the line—a flutter spoon. He said, “If you hit the daily double, it’s a bitch.”
All that rigging depresses me. I refuse to fish that way. In the words of the master, Merritt: “Don’t do it if you don’t like it. You fish on your own terms.” Merritt uses two flies sometimes: a dropper and—a couple of feet farther out—a point fly. In Erwin’s rig, the dart is the dropper and the flutter spoon is analogous to the point fly. Shad fishermen call it the stretcher. Maybe, after all, I should try doubling up just once. I tie on two darts, a couple of feet apart. On the second cast, two shad strike simultaneously. In the comedy that follows, one goes AWOL. After catching another fish or two on the double rig, I revert to the single mode. As Shane said to Joey: “One gun is all you need, if you can use it.”
Two weeks later, with a small dart doing nothing on my fly line, my resolve weakens again, and I tack on a flutter-spoon stretcher. Fish hits, nice weight, slowly comes toward the canoe. Fish digs in, becomes heavier and tougher, dives. Line goes out against the drag. Ten minutes. No progress. Twenty. Every time I move the fish, I lose the ground I have gained. Thirty minutes. Two fishermen on the New York bank have stopped to watch. I cannot bring the fish upriver. Thirty-three minutes. I am saying to myself, “This is not going to end well. Before long I am going to feel the weight go off the line.” I can see a fish at the surface, evidently exhausted, but the pull is too hard to shorten line. Something is going to break. Therefore, I reach around with one hand and weigh the anchor enough to get it off the bottom, and step on the rope to keep the anchor from dropping. The canoe drifts downriver, while I reel toward the fish. There’s a roe shad on the shad dart. I lift it into the canoe. The line to the flutter spoon is still taut. What to do? I pull it in by hand, and lift into the boat a second big roe shad. Two on one cast. Thirty-four minutes. It’s a bitch when you hit the daily double.
In the near darkness of an early morning, a towering mist was moving south across the surface of the water. Wading, I was spin casting and catching fish. After a time, the dawning sun made shafts in the mist, gilding the line when it was in the air, and shining on the dart as it fell to the river. The dart was a -ounce chartreuse with a dark-green head, and for some reason I didn’t lose it. I lose at least a hundred darts a year to bottom snags; it’s just routine. This dart had a charmed existence. In late afternoon, I anchored the canoe high in a New York eddy, and resumed catching fish with the same chartreuse dart. From time to time, I ran my fingers over the monofilament and felt so much abrasion made by fish dragging the line over rocks that I snipped the dart away, removed the weakened line, and tied the dart back on. As dusk settled down, I became anxious to preserve and retire this amazing dart. I cast it gingerly into the middle of the channel, jigged it lightly along, retrieved it early, but kept on catching shad. For the day, six roes, eleven bucks, and three AWOLs—twenty shad on a single dart. It’s one that I keep at home, mounted on a small cedar shake.
I made that dart with the lead wrapping from the neck of a bottle of wine—a messy, inadvisable process with highly impure metal, but I could not resist the idea. You heat up the lead in an electric pot and pour it into a mold in which you have first set a No. 2 O’Shaughnessy hook. A machinist in rural Pennsylvania fashioned the mold in his basement. It makes only one dart at a time, but perfectly—the head guillotined flat. The painting takes me several weeks, because I’ve got other things to do, also because I want time to pass between coats—the white undercoat, the two color coats, and then a dip of the head in a differing color. In a fly-tying vise, you tie on the bucktail at the tip of the cone. You seal the tie with head cement.
Essentially all shad darts are homemade. If you don’t make your own, you buy darts that someone made at home. Scattered tackle shops make them on the premises. Behind the cash register, waiting for customers, the owner kills his day wrapping bucktail. Most tackle shops get their darts from nearby residents. The quality of shad darts is therefore as varied as the quality of organic fruit. Some darts that look beautiful lose their paint on the first rock they hit. Most look as if they were painted by someone watching television. Darts are sufficiently idiosyncratic to be traceable to the zip code where they were sold. A friend of mine likes to swim in the river with fins and face mask, picking up lost darts. He hooks them into his T-shirt until it weighs so much he almost drowns. He throws away the shirt and keeps the darts. On this planet, there may be fewer languages than varieties of shad dart.
I would be unforthcoming if I did not tell you that my darts are terrific-looking darts. Their colors are bright and sharply defined. If my darts were for sale, I’d be cleaned out. Their durability is as high as their gloss. Yet for quality, consist
ency, appearance, and allure, it is an adventure in pretension even to allude to them on the way to further discussion of the shad darts of Armand Charest.
When he was a kid in Holyoke, Massachusetts, fishing off the Willimansett Bridge, shad darts were unknown to him. He used brass spoons, and spinner blades with beads. Hand over hand, he lifted the shad from the river and pulled them thrashing all the way up to the roadway, never mind that his line could have lifted a mako shark.
His forebears were French, Scottish, Micmac, and Malecite. His father was a loom fixer. Armand’s grammar school was Precious Blood, his high school Holyoke Trade. He was trained as a linotype operator in an era when a linotype operator was soon to be as current as a tailor of chain mail. He became a wire-strander operator at a manufacturing plant in South Hadley, a job he held until an industrial accident led to his retirement at the age of thirty-five. He did not stop fishing.
He bought his first shad darts in a barbershop. He bought them also in Ma’s Bait Shop. He couldn’t find a good one anywhere. The paint was dull. The paint came off. The adhesion of the paint is fundamental: a shad dart relates to bedrock as a basketball relates to the floor. Charest therefore—in the middle nineteen-eighties-began to make his own darts. Selecting paints, he began with lacquers and was later drawn to “glo-in-the-dark” vinyls. That first year, he made four hundred darts and went shad fishing in the Connecticut River, leaving darts in a box on the bank behind him, with a sign: “3 for $1.”
The following year, he made eleven hundred darts and sold them out of his tackle box in a single weekend. For the next season, he made three thousand darts. Selling them, he moved around—from the South Hadley Cove to the dam tailrace to the rapids above the Willimansett Bridge to the Chicopee boat launch to the bottom of Granby Road. He stopped at the waterwheels of Holyoke—the industrial-power-canal outlets that attract fish. He sold darts at Gas House, Valley Paper, Crocker A-B. Across the river, at the South Hadley boat launch, he parked his Toyota with the tailgate open and a card table beside it displaying his wares. Naturally, the scene attracted police. They told him he needed a Massachusetts hawker-and-peddler’s license. He got one, but governments were not through with him. Enter the Internal Revenue Service. If you sell fishing lures, you must have a federal tax ID. Did he have an ID number? No? Really? Had he been selling shad darts in the previous fiscal year? The year before that? For some time, he paid the IRS twenty-five dollars a week.
Charest’s darts, with their shifting levels and colors, are like the stratigraphic miniatures of Paul Klee. I would have thought it took him hours to make just one, but visiting his house in South Hadley a couple of years ago I learned that he could give a coat of paint to sixteen hundred darts in ninety minutes. He had added dimension to the term cottage industry. We ranged from second floor to basement in a house that was essentially a workshop. Striper jigs were drying on the second floor among rods he was making and rods in for repair. The living-room couch was the workbench where he and his wife, Denise, would sit side by side in the evenings with racks of darts before them, tying their own blend of Flashabou and Polarflash in lieu of bucktail. In the basement, though, was the machine that had put this whole operation into a class by itself. Consisting of tricycle wheels, bicycle chains, hexagonal nuts, and threaded lengths of stiff wire, it would not have looked amiss beside an orrery. Functionally, it circulated in the way that an escalator does, with the difference that it not only revolved but also porpoised in and out of paint. Each wire was thirteen inches long and was threaded with enough hex nuts to make ten spaces where darts could hang wet and not fatally adhere to one another. The two ends of each wire intersected a bicycle chain, from which Charest had removed rivets so the wire would fit. When Charest turned the tricycle wheels, the whole rig moved. Rising, descending—into the paint or dripping above it—sixteen hundred darts were in simultaneous motion. At the time, his bestsellers were “hot pink and purple” and “hot pink with eyes.” His personal favorite was “glo-yellow chartreuse and blaze.” The red-and-white dart is still the classic of the craft—as enduring as the black hockey puck. Yellow-and-red is nearly as traditional. Charest makes darts in bewildering variegations of hue, saturation, and brilliance. (“It matters to the fisherman.”)
I learned from George Bernard, at the Shad Museum, in Connecticut, that William C. Miles, a Pennsylvania patent lawyer, poured metal into a turkey quill in the nineteen-thirties, making his patented Quilby Minnow, from which shad darts evolved.
Charest makes them now in Inverness, Florida, in smaller volume and with simpler apparatus, delivering them to the post office. His retreat from the bank of the Connecticut River was less a matter of retirement than a matter of moral choice. He says he became more than disgusted by “the needless slaughter of the fish,” and was made uncomfortable by the thought that he was contributing to the slaughter. “My presence there was more harm than good. If I wasn’t there, maybe they wouldn’t have did that.” It gave him a sense of acute discomfort “to watch a person take what you made, catch a fish, and throw it in the bushes.” He saw too many fishermen “from out of state” ignore the six-shad Massachusetts limit, fill up coolers, and go home to sell the fish. “Somebody’s got to be a guardian,” he once remarked to me. “People on the bank catch shad and kick them up into the trees. That’s pathetic. It’s not fair to the fish.” One day, sitting in his van, he watched two guys in a boat catching shad. With a small baseball bat, they bashed the shad, and then returned them to the river. After a while, they came ashore to buy darts. Charest told them he had seen what they were doing. One of them shrugged, and said, “I’ve got to get them off my hook somehow.” The guy was addressing the last person who was ever going to sell him another dart.
A dart that weighs a thirty-second of an ounce is so small that it can call to mind the dorsal hump of an ant. Thirty-second-ounce darts are in all respects like other darts, but Charest will tell you that some fishermen refer to them as “shad flies.” The list would not include this fisherman. A shad fly is a furry, bead-eyed product, not a little drop of lead. Some fly fishermen—casting for shad—use tapered thirty-foot fly lines that are backed with monofilament. The thirty feet of fly line shoots through the rod guides and over the water like a javelin, with the monofilament hanging on behind. It is a way of crafting an extra-long cast—more, sometimes, than a hundred feet. When the fly descends toward the water, the line coming off the reel is the same kind of line that comes off a spinning reel. Shooting tapers, as they are called, come in a variety of sink rates, in order to give you an opportunity to buy three of them instead of one. A sinking fly line is an alternative to the shooting taper. In the Delaware, you might want a line of special density in the higher water of early spring. When the river quiets down and warms up, you will want a floating line with a sinking tip, a so-called wet tip. This requires enough reels and spools to fill a closet. Nelson Bryant, writing his fishing column in the New York Times, once pointed out candidly that fly fishermen trying for shad “cannot cast as far or as often” as spin fishermen can, and in high water have more than a little difficulty keeping the fly deep, even with full sinking lines. He went on to say, “Blind casting with a fly rod for hours is also hard work, particularly if one is standing waist-deep in cold water.” To anyone hardy enough to ignore these truths, he suggested using a weighted fly with a five-foot (or shorter) leader and a one-foot tippet of ten- or twelve-pound test. The largest shad ever caught on a fly rod came out of the Feather River, in northern California, on a tippet of two-pound test—a seven-pound four-ounce roe shad, the foster progeny of Seth Green.
In Fly Fishing Quarterly, Robert Elman wrote that shad will hit “sparsely tied yellow, white, or orange streamers,” also White Millers, Royal Coachmen, Parmachene Belles, White Marabous, Dark Edsen Tigers, and Silver Yanks. The Delaware River guide Michael Padua has caught shad on a size 14 green-body caddis—a dry fly, always an uncanny achievement with a fish that has no interest in food. Padua says “you can cat
ch shad on just about anything” from Twister-tail jigs to No. 2 and No. 3 spinners. Above Callicoon, he once saw two shad fishermen using No. 6 bare gold hooks.
Jim Merritt, who ties dry flies and can lay one on a floating leaf far across a current, will attach to his leader, without the least loss of self-esteem, an ordinary small shad dart—even a not-so-small shad dart weighing an eighth of an ounce. He nevertheless insists that he is fly-fishing for shad. After all, he is surrounded by people with spinning rods, slinging, as the phrase goes, hardware. He may say that he is fly-fishing for shad, but I would say that he is shad fishing with a fly rod.
Now another June has arrived, and the river is low and therefore tight in the sense that fishermen on the two sides of the main current are not as far apart as they would be in times of high water. I am in my canoe, and across from me is the great Erwin Dietz, standing on a rock, catching nothing. This happens to him so infrequently that he shows bewilderment and annoyance. While his spinning gear sweeps the channel, I slip into the river a small yellow dart by Armand Charest. In my hand is a nine-foot fly rod that Merritt made for me with Winston blanks. It is strung with a six-weight sink-tip line, five feet of braided leader, four feet of lead-core leader, and a 3X tippet. In no time, the rod is an arc, and I am dealing with a roe shad. Soon, I am dealing with a second shad. A third shad. My routine is risible, but it works. I am not casting a green-body caddis. I am casting weight, and there is nothing feathery about the motion. I flick the dart behind me (there’s plenty of room) and let the line load up on the water. I cast it forward a short way into the current, then backcast it farther into the eddy behind me, where it lands and reloads for the long shot across the river. The rig is so heavy the water helps. With so much weight, you cannot conventionally forward cast and backcast, forward cast and backcast, making flattish loops in the air until you are ready to let the whole enterprise go. You’d be cracking a lead-tipped whip. Finally, I bring the rod forward and let it all fly. The dart goes out maybe sixty feet. It connects with another shad.
