A Fly Fisher's Sixty Seasons

by Steve Raymond

  The reel worked perfectly for my intended purpose. Corrosion didn’t seem to be an issue and several times I hooked cutthroat large or strong enough to pull a few turns of line off the reel, but it never overran and the check never applied enough tension to pop the leader. I even landed a few small salmon on it. I fished it several years and never had a single backlash or any other problem.

  I didn’t know a much bigger test was coming.

  It happened on a cold, clear January afternoon. I’d been fishing for hours on an outgoing tide with only a single cutthroat to show for my efforts. Now the tide was swiftly emptying the small estuary I was fishing, apparently trying to see if it could drain the estuary before the sun sank below the row of ragged fir trees along the shore. Things had been quiet a long time and I was about to give up hope when a sizable fish broke water not far away. I cast to the spot and started retrieving, but nothing happened; whatever fish had made the rise apparently wasn’t interested in my fly. It had looked like a big fish, though, so I clipped off the small fly I’d been using, replaced it with a larger pattern, and cast again to the spot.

  This time the fly was taken hard by a strong fish that started a long run across the shallow flats of the rapidly emptying estuary. The Ocean City spit line in eerie silence as it tried to keep up with the fish, which finally revealed itself in a magnificent leap—a chrome-bright steelhead whose sides flashed brilliantly in the fading light. But when it returned to the water, my fly was no longer in its mouth.

  I tried a few more casts, but the tide was now running so fast I knew I’d have to hurry back or my small boat and I would end up on an isolated sandbar for half the cold night until the tide returned. Reluctantly, I pulled anchor and started rowing hard against the rushing outflow of water. It was tough going, but eventually I reached a large tidal pool not far from where my truck was parked on the shore. I was pretty well worn out from battling the tide, so I stopped to rest for a moment in the quiet water. Automatically, I surveyed the pool, which was about a hundred yards in diameter. Oysters were beginning to show their craggy shells above the sinking tide around the edges of the pool.

  Then I saw something else—a small, subtle rise. Probably a cutthroat, I thought. I’d pulled in my line long before, but it was still lying in loose coils on the boat deck, so I picked up my rod, false cast to work out line, delivered the fly to the vicinity of the rise, and began a quick retrieve. A rising mound of water appeared behind the fly and followed in fast pursuit, then abruptly turned away and disappeared. Based on its size, I knew the pursuing fish was probably another steelhead. As if in confirmation, a large, gleaming shape cut through the surface nearby, and even before the ripples from that rise had disappeared I saw several more rises. It looked as if at least a dozen steelhead were in the pool, waiting for the tide to return and lift them closer to their destination, a small stream at the head of the estuary.

  In the next hour, until it was too dark to see and almost too shallow to float my boat, I hooked five steelhead. One slipped the hook immediately after the strike, another ran into the oysters and broke off, but I landed and released the others. All were fresh-run fish, superbly bright and in peak condition, and fought with twice the strength of a river-hooked steelhead. The largest was twelve pounds and the smallest about half that size. They made the spool of the poor old Ocean City spin in a blur, forcing it to yield line and backing as never before, then gain it back while I cranked the spool as never before. I doubt the people who designed and built that reel ever dreamed it would be put to such a test. I hadn’t either, but the old reel proved quietly and unspectacularly equal to the task.

  After that I tested the Ocean City against steelhead on several more occasions, most notably a great day when I hooked eight and landed six. The two escapees were my fault, not the reel’s. I always carefully released every steelhead I caught in salt water because they were wild, native fish, belonging to small, vulnerable runs.

  I fished that reel several more seasons and it never failed. But one day I was signing books at a fly-fishing show and got to talking with a reel manufacturer who was displaying his latest wares. He offered to trade one of his new reels for a signed copy of one of my books, and although I didn’t really think I needed a new reel, it seemed too good an offer to refuse. So we made the swap.

  The new reel was a handsome thing, carefully machined from aluminum bar stock and anodized within an inch of its life to prevent corrosion. It also had a high-tech, adjustable drag system, with settings that seemed to range from “help yourself” to “hold everything.” The reel’s only fault was that it, like the Ocean City, was silent, or nearly so, although if you listened very closely (and perhaps used a stethoscope) you could hear a very soft click when you reeled in.

  After pondering what to do with the new reel, I decided its extra-strength anodizing would make it good for saltwater use. It lacked sufficient line capacity for large quarry, however, so by default it became the replacement for the Ocean City. After more than sixty years of faithful service to my father and me, I figured the old reel had earned a graceful retirement berth on my cluttered shelf, where it’s been ever since.

  Even before I retired the Ocean City, I had noticed to my infinite regret that the precious small runs of wild steelhead that once returned to the diminutive estuaries of Puget Sound had all but vanished, victims of the cumulative effects of logging, “development,” and other environmental abuses. That meant I never had a chance to test the new reel against a fresh-run saltwater steelhead. But one banner day when I was prospecting for cutthroat, I blundered into a posse of bright, feisty coho salmon and exercised nine of them on the new reel. It performed well, if in almost total silence, but a six-pound coho is not the same as a twelve-pound saltwater steelhead, so the reel got off easy. I still use it, though it’s never earned the same respect I had for the old Ocean City.

  I have to admit the new reel is prettier, though.

  The front position on the other side of the shelf is occupied by a Hardy Featherweight reel. It’s in near-mint condition, so people ask me what it’s doing there with a bunch of old reels. It was one of several Hardy reels I bought back in the 1970s, when you could still get them for less than a week’s pay. Their great and well-earned reputation for reliability was one reason I got them; another was that I’ve always liked Hardys for the lovely racket they make when a big fish is taking line. The Featherweight is the only one I no longer use, not because anything is wrong with it but because it turned out to be too small for my intended purpose. That was my fault, not the reel’s.

  I was at the height of my obsession with small rods when I bought the reel. I had acquired the previously mentioned five-and-a-quarter-foot Fenwick rod for a 3-weight line, and thought the Featherweight would make a perfect companion. Then I discovered that even a double-tapered 3-weight line would barely fit on the Featherweight’s diminutive spool, leaving no room at all for backing. At first that didn’t overly concern me because I planned to use the little rod for little fish—trout of twelve or fourteen inches or less. It worked fine for that purpose—I never had a fish take more than a few turns of line off the reel—and when the big Atlantic salmon began to disappear from Oregon’s Hosmer Lake in the early 1980s, I thought the little rod and reel would be a good match for the much smaller landlocked Atlantics being stocked to replace them.

  For years, Hosmer had been one of my favorite places. It was stocked originally with hatchery-reared descendants of sea-run Atlantic salmon from Quebec. They adapted quickly to the lake’s heavy caddis and mayfly hatches and many reached weights of four to six pounds, sometimes more. For more than a decade Hosmer provided some of the best dry-fly fishing anywhere.

  But the sea-run stock had always been difficult to handle in the hatchery, with less than desirable survival rates. Continual interbreeding also led to increasing genetic defects—loose scales and short gill covers being most evident. Biologists who managed the lake said the sea-run fish also had a bad habit of e
scaping over the lake’s outlet dam at high water, after which they disappeared into watery caverns, never to be seen again. No matter how many salmon were stocked, fish numbers in the lake continued to decline, and when it finally became obvious the hatchery program just wasn’t working anymore, the state went looking for new fish. It settled on landlocked Atlantics from Lake Sebago, Maine.

  The landlocks were very different fish. They were accustomed to feeding on forage fish in their native habitat and never did fully adapt to Hosmer’s prolific insect hatches, nor did they rise as freely as the old sea-run fish. They also ranged deeper, keeping their noses in the muck so persistently that they actually carved trenches in the lake’s shallow bottom. Worst of all, they didn’t live as long or grow nearly as large as the sea-runs. Salmon of more than twenty inches became rare; most seemed to top out around fourteen or fifteen inches.

  That’s what made me think it was time to start using my little rod and the Hardy Featherweight. But just to make sure, I fished several days without seeing a single big fish before deciding to risk the little rod and the reel without any backing. You can guess what happened: When I stood to make my initial cast with the little outfit, the first salmon I saw was the largest I’d seen during the entire trip. There was no time to pick up another rod, so I cast ahead of the cruising salmon and watched it rise obediently and suck in the fly.

  The ensuing fight would have been a real nail-biter if I’d had the luxury of biting my nails while it was underway. The little Hardy sang its electrifying song as the salmon ran until the spool’s bare metal was showing through the last few turns of line, and I waited for the inevitable outcome—a broken leader or, worse, a lost line. But the salmon blessedly stopped short just as it looked as if it would strip the spool, giving me a chance to regain line. Then we went through the whole business again, several times, until the salmon finally tired and I brought it to hand. It measured twenty-five inches and I guessed its weight around five pounds—the biggest fish of the trip, and certainly one of the very last big fish in Hosmer.

  That was the Hardy Featherweight’s single moment of glory. After that experience, I decided I didn’t want to run the risk of getting “spooled” again, so I retired the reel. It now occupies the front spot on my shelf by virtue of being so small it would disappear if I put another reel ahead of it.

  Behind the Featherweight, and looming over it, is a battered Beaudex reel, one of five models made by the old British firm of J. W. Young & Sons. I won it in a raffle back in the 1960s and thought it was my lucky day; it was the first addition to what was then my meager assortment of hand-me-down reels. It also was the first reel I’d had that seemed large and rugged enough for steelhead or salmon. Not only that, it also had an adjustable drag and a reasonably loud click. What more could anyone ask? At length I discovered one could have asked for quite a lot more, because the Beaudex turned out to have several critical faults.

  I started fishing the reel for Kamloops trout in British Columbia, and while the great majority of those fish don’t reach salmon or steelhead size, they are far and away the hardest-fighting trout I’ve ever encountered. The Beaudex held its own against them, which I thought proved it capable of bigger things. Unfortunately, I badly overestimated how much bigger.

  I found out one day when I went fishing for fresh-run Chinook salmon in the lower tidal reaches of a large river. The tide was flooding and the salmon were hard on its heels. I could see them rolling nearly everywhere in the large expanse of water, fish ranging from ten to maybe thirty pounds—larger fish than I had ever caught. I started fishing a large fly, which I thought appropriate for fish of such size, but the salmon ignored it, so I replaced it with a smaller pattern and hooked a fish immediately. It exploded out of the water in a great flash of silver and popped the leader as if it were a cobweb. Nervously, I tied on a heavier leader and resumed fishing. I hooked four more salmon on the small fly, but the hook pulled out of each one and none was on long enough to give the Beaudex a workout.

  Frustrated, I replaced the fly with a larger one, but the salmon ignored it as before, so I finally switched back to the small pattern. A big salmon took the fly near the end of my first retrieve and ran with awesome power. The Beaudex began yielding line with a baritone stutter that rose in frequency to a near falsetto; music to my ears! But I barely had a chance to appreciate it before the reel seized up, the leader snapped, and the fish disappeared—all in less time than it takes to tell it. I’d found the limits of the Beaudex’s capabilities.

  After the reel cooled off, I doused its innards with oil and grease until it resumed functioning and I kept using it even though the salmon episode cost whatever faith the reel had earned from me; it was still the largest-capacity reel I had.

  Then I found another fault, which I should have noticed in the beginning: The Beaudex’s reel foot was attached to the reel with a pair of small screws; most reels use rivets for that purpose. I discovered that one day when the reel suddenly fell off my rod in mid-cast; the screws had become fatally loose. It took some searching to find replacements of the right size, so when I finally found them I purchased several to carry in my fishing vest with a small screwdriver to make emergency repairs. I also began periodically checking and tightening the screws.

  Despite these precautions, disaster eventually caught up to me again. I was playing a summer steelhead in the North Fork of the Stillaguamish when it happened; the fish started a long downstream run and I was heading for the beach to follow when a backlash suddenly formed on the Beaudex and it abruptly stopped turning. I pulled frantically at the snarled coils of line, trying to free it, when the screws let go again and the reel fell into the river. Desperately, I scooped it up and continued downstream in pursuit of the fish. As I did, I found that if I held both the rod and reel in my left hand and kept the reel pressed tight against the rod grip, I could wind the reel with my right hand.

  I managed to gain enough line that way to cover up the backlash, and when the fish started another run I chased as fast as I could to keep it from taking the line covering the backlash. The steelhead finally stopped in some quiet water and, after a long, stubborn, and very awkward struggle (at least on my part), I guided it to the beach—a bright hen fish that I measured at twenty-eight inches before release.

  By then I thought the Beaudex was probably jinxed. Subsequent events seemed to confirm my suspicions; somehow—maybe it got banged against a rock or something—the reel got out of alignment and would no longer turn in either direction. Lubricants didn’t help, and my clumsy application of force succeeded only in breaking off a piece of the spool’s ventilated plate.

  That was the last straw, and the Beaudex went on the shelf.

  The biggest reel in my little collection of has-beens is a Cortland S/S Magnum. I bought it before my first trip to Christmas Island, not because it was a high-end reel—it wasn’t—but because the trip was expensive, I was on a budget, and the Cortland was the lowest-priced reel that had the features I wanted. Made in England, it was corrosion-resistant with an adjustable drag and had a relatively noisy click. Most important, it also had capacity for a weight-forward 7-weight line plus 200 yards of backing. You rarely need that much backing for bonefish, but on those occasions when you do need that much, you really need it.

  The Cortland performed satisfactorily on that trip and I took it along on my first visit to Salmon Brook Camp on the main Southwest Miramichi in New Brunswick several years later. Initially, the reel did its job there, too; on my first day I hooked a large Atlantic salmon and played it almost to the beach before the hook pulled out, and later I landed a nine-pound fish and several grilse. Toward the end of the week, however, I noticed the reel’s click was functioning unevenly. When I opened the reel I found that the screw holding one of the pawls in place had come loose. I tightened it as best I could and finished out the week with no further problems.

  The reel accompanied me on another trip to Christmas Island a year later. Right away I noticed the cl
ick was again starting to run in hit-and-miss fashion—definitely not something you want when fishing for bonefish. I opened the reel and found the same screw loose again, and when I tried tightening it I discovered its threads were stripped. Finding a replacement screw on Christmas Island was out of the question, so I coated the screw with epoxy cement and reset it as best I could. It worked OK for the next day or two.

  The end came on the best day of bonefishing I’ve ever had, before or since. Wading a shallow flat, I hooked fish after fish, and after every release it seemed I’d look up and see another within casting range. Nearly all ran as only bonefish can run, usually well into the backing, but my emergency repair to the Cortland seemed to be holding up.

  Until it didn’t. I’d hooked another fish, no larger than most of the others, and it was well into its first run when the reel suddenly fell silent, started spinning freely, and big loops of line flew in all directions, forming a giant snarl that caught in the rod’s stripping guide, causing the leader to snap. I opened the reel, found the screw broken in half and the once-attached pawl completely missing. Retrieving my line by hand, I stowed it and the broken reel in my fanny pack and took out the backup reel I was carrying.

  The backup was an old Hardy St. John. I’d brought it because it had adequate line and backing capacity, but it wasn’t made for saltwater use and I knew I’d have to wash it in fresh water and apply lubricants lavishly after each use. I put it on and went right back to catching bonefish, enjoying the day even more because of the Hardy’s joyful racket. I used the St. John for the rest of the week, washing, drying, and anointing it with oil after every use. It worked perfectly; it still does, though it hasn’t been used in salt water since that trip.