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Fishing with the sunk line (generally, done dead drift) is much the same the world over, whether you are fishing for Atlantic salmon in New Brunswick, big browns in Upstate New York, brookies in Labrador, rainbows in the UP of Michigan, black-spotted cutthroats in Montana, or sea-going trout in New Zealand or Argentina. Most of my adult life I’ve fished for steelhead, trout, and salmon (and in that order of importance) in the Western United States. It has been mainly with the sunk line.

In the beginning, I fished exclusively for trout. You might say that trout are there for us to hone our basic wet-fly skills on, but in the process we come to love and respect them, all in themselves. They still occupy an important niche in my mind when it comes to thinking about going fishing. I suspect that, in my old age (which is coming on, fast), a man who has fished long and hard for large anadromous fish may well return to trout and the subtle satisfactions involved in catching them. It has been the case with many.

Though fishing with a floating line and a fly that rides on or just under the surface is probably the most pleasant way to fish, it is with the sunk line that most Western anglers go after trout, steelhead, and salmon, usually in a river, most of the year. Hence, in this book I will be mostly concerned with fish found there. The river habitat is extremely important because it is where all wild salmonids are spawned, hatched, reared as fry and fingerlings, and some become smolts there before going back to the sea. If something goes wrong in the river environment, all is lost, including the fish, and much that is pleasurable and important in our life will disappear for good. That deterioration is happening all around us today.

So, besides looking at methods for catching fish with a sunk line, I will be closely examining what happens to the river environment during its seasonal shifts and changes, and what harm civilization has done by putting commercial uses ahead of protection. This is important for the fisher to know about because it directly effects whether or not our fishing will be successful, and what tactics and techniques will best catch big fish, and I hope lead to their release afterwards.

Our Western rivers are blessed with many species of salmonids and it is possible to catch them all on the sunk line. (But not all of them, all of the time, you understand.) If we box the year, the way a mariner boxes his compass, we find hatchery steelhead peaking in January and the first of the wild fish returning to those rivers lucky enough to still have any left. As the hatchery run expires, the wild fish become a proportionately larger part of the catch, and the hatchery fish will have spawned or been caught out of the run and some survive as scrawny kelts or downrivers, as they are sometimes called. Only about sixteen percent of the wild run will survive after spawning long enough to replenish themselves and return for a second time. Even that small a number is amazing, considering how battered and wasted they become. Oddly, the spawning process is harder on the males, or bucks, and it is their corpses you will often find along a streambed in late winter or spring. You’d think it would be the females.

In some streams, spring Chinooks ascend now and so do a special breed of later-winter steelhead that seem mysteriously to increase its numbers, then alarmingly give them up in a manner that does not seem to be hinged to our successfully catching these wonderful fish, since they are almost always fished for on a catch-and-release basis. Yet they too are disappearing in recent years. Different rivers have springs, summers, and falls, and Chinook seem to sort themselves out geographically and there is little overlapping. Chinooks in most river systems are classified as either threatened or endangered, and stringent fishing regulations are either in effect or soon will be. In Puget Sound, where I live, the situation is so serious that a general closure in both fresh and saltwater is in the process of being enacted, along with stringent land-use regulations to protect their remaining habitat. The cobbled streambed in which they spawn is disappearing fast, along with the deep pools required for them to ripen and await spawning time. If attention had been paid to the mounting problem a decade or two ago, such draconian measures might not need to be taken today.

In the rivers where I fish, there are wild winter, wild spring, and (most wonderful of all) wild summer steelhead, the last of which are becoming extinct in the United States. When I first started springtime fishing for them, there was a river closure long in effect, largely to protect the descending smolts, but for a couple of decades now most rivers have minimum keep-size established at twelve or fourteen inches, for seldom do smolts get that big, and are open to fishing; additionally, the banning of bait in the spring has protected the actively feeding and vulnerable smolts, and fishing has been permitted for the larger fish. Things have now changed back to the original reduced-population configuration, and a springtime fishing ban is in effect in many rivers--this time to protect the adults from incidental hooking, even from release-type fishing, since their numbers have been so strangely and suddenly decimated.

Summer steelhead have the deserved reputation for taking the fly well, especially on the surface, but the truth is that most anglers still fish the deeply sunk fly for them nearly all the time. In fact, I know some accomplished fishers who have never hooked a summer run on a floating fly and line, and each year, some hot July day, go through the perfunctory exercise of a morning’s fishing in this manner, then return in the afternoon and fish in their old ways, with the deeply sunk wet fly, thoroughly discouraged. I mention this mainly to illustrate how important the sunk fly is to many fishers. It is because it consistently catches fish for them, year-round.

In the fall come a succession of salmon--Chinooks, followed by coho, then chum. (They also go by the names of kings, silvers, and dogs, respectively.) In odd-numbered years there are the humpies, or pinks. With them, though many have been in and out of the river throughout the year, are dolly vardens and bull trout, which are closely related but now recognized as distinct sub-species. They are ravenous feeders and recover quickly from their own spawning and become beautiful, bright, and pink-meated again. Also in the fall the sea-run cutthroats arrive, a true trout and insect feeder that is always on the lookout for food. Find them and they will take a fly readily. And some streams, such as my North Fork of the Stillaguamish, have a tiny run of what is popularly called creek sockeyes--salmon that have no connecting lake in which to spawn and rear their brood, but somehow manage to hang on; they are noticeable in a stream because they are small and brilliant red.

All of these fish will take a sunk fly, though not all of them readily, nor most of the time. And when they have ascended a river to sections near their spawning beds, they become pugnacious and are often fished for with wet fly in a manner that snags them. It is probably best that no fishing be allowed when this is the situation, for the fish need every bit of reserve energy to complete their spawning and hooking them in whatever manner depletes their strength and may lead to an early death. Even if regulations permit continued fishing for them, it is time to quit targeting these species and go elsewhere.

Sunk-fly fishing for steelhead, salmon, and large trout is about the only productive method nine or ten months out of the year. From late October until late May or early June the sunk fly (and line) are king. Mastery of the principles of fishing this way are easily learned and will serve the angler well. Most books on the subject address themselves to how to make or buy lines that will sink to various depths. My intention is not to repeat this readily available information but to discuss what takes place on a river when you are out on a river, searching for fish and enjoying the day. To me this is what lies at the heart of going fishing. It deserves a more detailed examination.

Most of the year in cold water fish are not very active. Some days they will move a considerable distance to take a fly, but it is best not to fish as though they will do this. Instead, you must practice what anglers mean when they talk about "hitting the fish in the face with the fly." This is based on the premise of a number of fish are scattered throughout a run that has a good current and a depth that varies between about four and eight feet. If the fly is thrown and presented to them enough times, the law of averages indicates it will soon pass close to a resting steelhead. The fish either takes the fly or it doesn't.

When we are lucky (or skillful) the fish grabs the fly and we have a hook up; with a bit of good fortune we land the fish. This makes us happy and successful. If the fish evades the fly it may become alarmed and go elsewhere. Usually we do not know this, and continue to fish on as before. But sometimes in low water there is a person up on the bank spotting the pool and he gives us a clue to what's happening by calling out, "Your fish is gone. You're wasting your time continuing to cast over this spot." And we move on, or else we would have moved on anyway, for the accepted way of fishing is by moving on down through the run.

This is called "step-fishing," and it is a methodical way of covering lie water and working your way thorough it systematically. We continued stepping downstream a yard or two at a time and casting until we have a hook-up with a fish or, as chances have it, reach the end of the run without any action and exit the pool. All the while we are able to observe what is going on around us and enjoy the day. We fish mechanically, thinking little about what we are doing and performing our ritual act of throwing out the fly, fishing out the cast, retrieving the fly, and flinging it out again, which we do almost automatically.

I think we ought to think more about what we are doing and the inherent limitations of our method.

To do this we first need to look more closely at the watery world around us. We need to understand as much as it is possible about how rivers behave and what they are comprised of.

Rivers vary and how we fish them should, too, as we adapt our approach to what meets our eyes and our expectations. This is called "reading the water" and lies at the heart of all fishing. It helps to explain why and how certain experienced fishers will walk right on by a pool that is being flogged by less knowledgeable fishers. The knowing one "reads" the water and decides it is not suitable for holding steelhead or salmon, at least not under the existing conditions. (Raise the river six inches, or drop it by that much, and it might be.)

The angler is "thinking like a steelhead," or trying to, since it is impossible to do so, though there is a group that believes it can be done. So let’s give it a brief try. It is not difficult to imagine yourself a steelhead and to look around you (on the surface of the river, admittedly) and try to visualize where you would lie in a given piece of water. Normally a steelhead will not lie in a great, roaring riffle or cataract, nor in still water that is very deep. It will select something more to its taste, which is water that runs along at about the pace that a man in a hurry might be walking. The depth will be from three to six feet, perhaps a little more or less. Steelhead take up lies in water as shallow as ten or twelve inches if nobody is around and nothing disturbs them, but they are quick to flee when their solitude is violated or any noise is transmitted down the riverbank and to the substrate, which is the river bottom. Most often they lie deeper, though not actually on the bottom. Occasionally they will surprise you by being found lying well up in the water column, as scientists call it.

What do we look for when we "read water"? The same four things steelhead or large trout do:

1. A bottom that has stones that will disguise them and make them nearly invisible, with their smoky-grey backs and slim configuration adding to the deception. (This doesn't mean they won't lie over sand, as many anglers believe they won’t, for they will, but they really don't like it and become extra spooky there, quick to flee or scatter.)

2. Good water speed. They prefer fast water to slow, any day of the week, so long as it is not too fast. They will tolerate very fast water for brief periods, usually only when moving from one reach to another, for it is what they must pass through, and the river abounds with it. They move upstream late in the day, as dark approaches, and early in the morning, as it recedes. Of course they sometimes move during the daytime, too, especially when the water is high or discolored, but not so often.

3. A seam, or place where two different speeds of water come together and provide a differential of currents. This is what steelhead usually seek, and you should, too.

4. Cover or shade. Obviously shade is more important in times of low water or bright sun, but in a cold, winter river cover and a handy place to flee when danger threatens is important, too, and steelhead and other large salmonids seek it out every time. It may take the form of an overhanging bank or a deep pocket near a boulder in a flow that is uniform and otherwise unvarying, or under the shadow of a tree that overhangs the river.

Reading a river and searching for clues revealed by the current is a pleasurable activity, all in itself, and can be performed routinely, even when one is on a picnic with one's wife and children. The fisher can always plan to return to the water later and fish it, if it "reads" well. One pool on the Wenatchee took me three years to get back to after I first saw it and I had no idea of how it would fish until I gave it a try. It was excellent. My reading only gave me a clue and was no substitute for the real experience, which is always different. Often the try will prove monumentally disappointing.

An angler reads water much as a bibliophile goes through a heap of books. Even while driving along the highway, when he comes to a bridge the angler reads the reach above and below the bridge, all within the few seconds it takes him to cross to the other side. He does the best he can.

Depending on the kind of trip he is on and whether he likes what he sees, he may hit the brakes, pull over to the shoulder, suit up, and go fish. Or the glimpse may tell him to keep on driving. The trip continues and the search goes on.

But always he is reading water. When he draws a glass from the kitchen tap, he may study the flow and measure its velocity. As the author of A River Runs Through It tells us, he is "haunted" by water. It is a strong image and a good one. Norman Maclean doesn't bother to tell us the water must be running. You have to read the book or else see the movie to know it and why.

How do you learn how to read water? Good question. Analysis is the beginning point. You must learn to use your eyes. Hydrologists define a healthy river as one that has "a pool/riffle" configuration. This tells us everything and nothing.

A river alternates its pools and riffles. You may not have noticed this before. It is the key to understanding. First there is the one, then the other. What is more, the river alternates its cutbank side. A cutbank is nothing more than where the current erodes the land on the side opposite from what is called the wading bar or beach, which is generally made up of cobbles. (The English call this shingle, and it is a nice word.) As a river drops from its winter high, the bar is said to "emerge." This means it grows larger, as more and more of the cobbles on the bar side are left high and dry. Cobbles are also called substrate, though usually not when it is dry. The exposed bar is where non-fishers like to go for a walk on a summer's day. And it is great for beach fires.

The pool/riffle configuration is nothing more than your basic geology at work. A river's job is to claim land by cutting into the steep side of its bank and creating meanders. An "old" river is one that has done a nearly complete job of undercutting its banks and has formed a series of wide S-curves in its channel. (Sometimes these are called oxbows.) In doing so, it has slowed its course almost to a stop. A river becomes old nearest to its mouth because the terrain is usually flat and more subject to being overcome with meanders; towards its headwaters, its terrain is steeper, the meanders more difficult for the river to manufacture.

Whenever a river starts to claim a bank that is deemed important, engineers panic and bring in quarry rock and riprap it. This is so valuable land won't be lost by a landowner with political clout and, perhaps, plenty of money. A riprap effects the river downstream from where it is installed, obviously, but not so apparent is the fact that a riprap effects a river upstream from where it is installed. There are water-quality experts and river scientists who don't believe this or understand the principles at work.

My point is only that a pool/riffle configuration, alternating each and also changing sides of the river on which the highbank exists, is normal and natural--the sign of a healthy river. A fisher reading an unknown river will soon spot the location of the channel, that is, the part of the river where the current flows the fastest. This is done by reading the surface of the river and looking for signs. Always the fastest part is where a major slick or vee-groove forms. It may be on the observer's side or farther out. Almost always it is near the side where the cutbank is. To put it a different way, if you are standing on the bar or beach side of the river, the channel is most likely more than halfway toward the far bank, which is steep, or anyway steeper than it is on the side where you have waded.

A fisher who wades a river usually starts out from the bar or beach side and strides out into the graduated shallows and fishes toward the deep or cutbank side. This is your basic steelhead and salmon drifting and step-fishing situation. If he is wearing hip boots, he can wade only so deep--usually to within an inch or two of the tops of his boots, which tend to sag and admit water; I know many fishers who routinely wade over the tops of their hip boots, yet they will not buy waders. Perhaps they like the shock to the system cold water brings on a warm day. Not me.

Similarly, a fisher wearing waders and entering the water from the bar side will walk right out until he is standing waist-deep in the river, as near to the channel as he can get. His fishing vest routinely gets soaked, especially the lower pockets where he houses his flyboxes. Even though he knows the hooks will rust he continues to wade deep and forgets to dry out the boxes at the end of the day. Soon he will need to tie more flies.

Fishers make their throws toward the channel or across it, aiming for the far bank. They do this because they think it is where the steelhead and salmon will lie. Often they are right. But many times they are wrong and they have waded out on top of the fish and have scattered them. Don't worry: they will soon return, but probably not until you have moved on.

I say the river has a pool/riffle configuration and the fisher concentrates on the pools. But some pools are fast and shallow and resemble riffles, though deeper by definition. And some riffles have pockets or small deep stretches within their swiftness, and fish can be found there, too, especially in low water when the temperature is warm. These lies have more oxygen than the slower, deeper pools, which by now are growing stagnant. So when I say the experienced fisher concentrates on the pools, not the riffles, there are exceptions. These should be noted and acted upon.

Since a river alternates both its cutbank sides, and its pools and riffles, the fisher finds he has to cross the river repeatedly to reach water that can be entered from its shallow side and fished towards its deep. This happens with nearly every pool. It is another good reason to wear waders instead of hip boots, no matter how hot the day. Not to be able to cross a river to reach the next pool shortens the fishing day and reduces by half or more the chances of getting a good fish.

If a healthy river alternates its pools with riffles frequently, and in a manner than is beautiful to behold, a wasted river does not. It becomes ugly. This is what has happened to my favorite stream, the North Fork of the Stillaguamish, as a result of many factors, logging the chief one of them. First, the Forest Service overcut on its land, busily financing roads at the public expense for the logging companies, which it believed it had a duty to serve. When its own fish biologist pointed out to them that their logging had destroyed fish habitat and a rare race of wild summer steelhead was threatened with extinction, they deliberated and then halted all logging. It was a wise and prudent decision, however late arriving.

On state and private lands no ban was enacted, not even when a horrendous slide on Department of Natural Resources land poured a zillion tons of sand and silt into DeForest Creek, then into Deer Creek, next into the North Fork, and finally into the main Stillaguamish River and Port Susan in Puget Sound.

This is not news, merely the background on how this fine river lost its pool/riffle configuration and incidentally gave me an opportunity to observe at first hand what a ruined river looks like. I is simply awful, resembling a slate-colored highway more than a normal river. There is neither pool nor riffle but some kind of crossbred creation, the river running fast its full, shallow length. You can locate a pool or a riffle only from memory. You wait for the river to clear after each rain or snowmelt, and time passes slowly. But the river does not clear. When this condition persists, the fish-breeding and -rearing habitat of the river is destroyed. Not only is it ugly to look at, but it has lost its capacity to produce fish. Its spawning substrate is choked with silt, its clouded water supportive of little insect life on which young fish feed.

After almost a decade of such abuse, with logging reduced but not halted anywhere except on Forest Service land, the river began to recover a little. Its pool-riffle configuration is returning and the bottom throughout its length is showing some stretches of rocks again. The fish population of Deer Creek--almost destroyed--is recovering slightly.

A similar situation occurred in the North Fork above the mouth of Deer Creek. A full section (one square mile) of steep, unstable private land was clearcut far upstream and a slide (or mass-wasting event) took place; all the upstream pools were filled with sand and peagravel. Wading bars appeared in the middle of the river, instead of where the angler normally waded on the bar side, after each high water and the river precipitated out its bedload. One by one the major pools disappeared--Fortson and Boulder Creek but two of them. The spawning and rearing substrate was greatly reduced.

Gradually the silt washed away. But many small stones and peagravel flats remained. The river is a long ways from returning to its former healthy pool/riffle configuration, but the water the angler reads shows growing promise. Just as the ugliness of a wasted river is heartbreaking, a recovering river reveals reaches of beauty and grandeur. The North Fork now has these. Caddis come to life on clean stones, and there are reaches where fish can spawn and not have their eggs overcome with silt and become smothered. Young fish hatch out and find food and grow, though not as robustly as the did in the past.

The North Fork above and below Deer Creek has shown improvement over the past few years. Much of the river is readable again. True, the Deer Creek Riffle remains a big sandy hole, with no depth to it. Last April--daring myself to do so--I crossed it in off-color water with a wading staff, depending on my eyes (my reading of the water, that is) to find the channel and the pathway across. The tailout was comprised of large stones--a big surprise. The crossing was a bit tricky but I made it easily.

A decade or more ago, the river was not crossable here, even in August. The bottom was huge boulders, the distance between them considerable, and the water was deep and fast. In 1965 Jerry Wintle--a formidable wader--crossed the riffle late in the summer on a bet. He used a green stick and made his way from boulder to boulder, standing on the tops, moving very gingerly. He made it across and won a $5 bet.

I mention this to illustrate the great change that has occurred. The river is improving by degrees. It like a football team that lost all of its games last year, say, sixteen of them, and winning maybe one or two this year. Fish do not like to lie in the Deer Creek Riffle, winter or summer. They used to seek it out and stay there. The riffle has no shade, no depth, no current, no bouldery bottom except now at the tailout. Farther downstream the Elbow Hole is a ghost of itself, sandy and shallow, posing no wading difficulties and with lies to accommodate only a few fish. Yearly I look for signs of it improving, but I can find very few. It may be one of the last pools to recover. Upstream there is more hope.

Once there once was a nice pool near my camp above Deer Creek that deepened its channel and revealed some boulders on my side. I assumed similar rocks ran down the center of the river, so I fished it intently in the high water of spring. It was only after the river dropped and cleared that I saw the pool was full of sand everywhere else. The river fooled me by showing me its shallows and I misread what I saw there.

The same pool provided a valuable lesson in stream dynamics. It was destroyed by a major flood in the early 1980s. The crest took out 900 feet of railroad track, which had to be rebuilt with a huge crane and quarry rock brought in by truckload after truckload. The riprap was extended as protection from another flood of such magnitude and was heavily reinforced. Now the river takes a 90-degree turn and heads downstream at an acute angle. It strikes the base of a soft cliff a couple of hundred yards away, badly undermining it. (This might be called the billiard effect.) The owner--a neighbor of mine named Reynolds--lost about three acres of land, all of it steep riverfront with a grand view. The bank is continuing to crumble and reveals a face of blue clay, alternating with bands of pressed sand; it keeps slumping and will discolor the river for decades. Each time it sprinkles, the river turns gray and holds its cast for a few days or longer.

Elsewhere I see signs of improvement. Rocks are emerging from flats of coarse gravel. The number of juveniles being reared is on the increase. These include two year-classes of steelhead--this year's fry, which will grow to three inches or more before winter shuts down their feeding, and parr that will migrate as smolts the following spring.

This portend a future better than what we have recently experienced, but nowhere approaching the rich past that lies only ten years back.

Like many good things seen in the classic sense, a pool has a beginning, middle, and end. So does a riffle; if a riffle has any depth to it, as a river drops it becomes something like a small pool and can be fished accordingly. It will have guts and pockets and slots and seams. When the water is low it is the riffles that produce, for the pools are like lakes and the worst of them will be growing eutrophic.

The top of a pool is where the angler begins fishing. It is tempting to wade into a pool where the current slackens and the bottom becomes apparent and you can see the lie of boulders where the pool deepens. This makes for easier wading. It is the old mistake and I make it often.

Enter higher, where the wading is difficult. It will put you over more fish--more taking fish, which is what you are after. Two men who enter a river without exception higher than I do, and are better off for it, are Ed Weinstein and Trey Combs. Both know the fly moves faster through water that is not deep and still has a cobbled bottom. It is where they regularly hook fish and, chances are, other anglers out for the day have passed it by because the very top offers difficulty in wading-- and in casting because of the many hanging branches usually found there.

The top of a pool is a pretty thing, riffley and bright and fast. It is narrow and spreads out and deepens as the pool forms. By degrees the pool slows. Previously the river could be read only from the surface and what the angler surmises lies below. Now the pool begins to reveal itself and its bottom by bits. Bottom is paramount. It is how you judge the pool's ability to attract and hold steelhead and salmon. What you see near your feet is what you presume lies out further, too, where the river deepens and you lose visibility. You presume, that is, unless there are clues that it might be different, and then you adjust your technique accordingly.

The tops or throats of pool vary considerably. Some are narrow and fast, with a chute of white water pouring like a funnel into the main part of the pool, where the chute starts to slow. Other pools simply spill over the tail of the pool above and are marked by some degree of shallowness but no outstanding chute or plume of white. There will be a narrowing, though, and the water will look different, for it will have speeded up markedly and be developing a funneling characteristic.

Some such throats can best be fished while standing in the tailout of the pool above and casting into the very top of the one below. The Kalama is one such river, for the pools are carved out of bedrock and some of them are small and appear in quick succession. To come into them too low is to miss fishing over most of the fish, especially during times of low water. And often in water like this the fish will be occupying shallower lies, for the water is swift and broken, with a boulder bottom. They will rise the short distance necessary to grab the fly as it is rapidly swept along in front of them.

There is a strong correlation between the swiftness of the water and the likelihood of getting a strike from a resting fish. Fish in shallow water are easily spooked, most of the time. But since the surface is broken, this helps negate what might be called "the spooking factor" and cancel it out. Since such riffles are usually shaded with overhanging limbs and have boulders of varying sizes on the bottom, several other criteria of good holding water are met. Fish love to lie here, especially early in the morning--summer or winter. Such places should not be idly passed by without a cast or two. The action can be sudden and dramatic.

A pool begins to widen and to slow. It also gets deeper. To me--as I step-fish through the upper part--this is an exciting time. I expect a strike at every throw, every swing. My enthusiasm is maintained, yard by yard. I am slow to discourage.

The throw must be progressive farther out, for the river grows wider. I find myself beginning to pump out line and reach for my maximum distance. The longer the throw, the greater the drift and the swing. Theoretically at least the chances of hooking a fish increase. But more effort is expended. Often I discover myself making throws right up to my limit. This is tiring. If wind is present (and it usually is), it is even more exhausting. This hastens the time when you will be ready to go home.

The long middle of a pool looms. Because of its length, I always feel optimistic--much as I do at the start of eating an ice-cream cone. So much that is good still lies ahead. And there are often interesting features in a pool--an overhanging limb that poses some casting challenges; a rock that rises out of the current and may have fish in front of it, alongside, or below it; a sunken rock that may grab the line or the fly but may also mark the location of a big fish or of several of them. Here--because of the smooth, even rate of flow--the fly fishes best and its swing is uniform and most effective. If the fly touches bottom directly downstream at the end of its drift, this is means the water is probably being covered thoroughly and the fly is moving at the right speed, which is just short of hanging up. Because the act of fishing is so pleasurable in its easy rituals and routines, and has an automatic aspect to it, there is usually plenty of time to look around and observe what is happening. Often it is nothing on a grand scale. The minutiae is another matter. More is happening in the world of nature on a microscale. One observation leads to a speculation about its source or cause and its relationship to the whole, that is, the ecosystem.

A peeled branch from a black cottonwood, for instance, with an end that looks like it was chopped off with a hatchet while circling the tree, or run through a giant pencil sharpener, marks the work of a beaver. Often a beaver can be found in an urban environment. There are several at work on the edge of the city where I used to live, Seattle. The discovery comes as a surprise. They shun open water during the daylight hours, but occasionally surprise you. Under a cloudy sky, I've seen them a few yards out from shore on Lake Washington, moving from here to there. The evidence of their nightly activity is awesome in the volume of downed timber they leave in their path. They are non-selective. Where we have the fewest trees they seem to be most active. Soon the park department will have to entice them into traps set to save the trees. Sorry, but there are not enough cottonwoods for us to share.

On a river there are often otters, plus mink and weasels. When winter comes, the weasel becomes an ermine, and accomplishes this feat by degrees, becoming most interestingly colored in the meanwhile. My goal is to see one any color than the rich summer brown. When snow comes, my chances decrease to zero, unless my less-than-keen eye detects some movement in the peripheral range. I know there is not much chance.

To see a mink, you have to think mink and believe that one might be there. You have to key to mink-like scurrying movements along the rocks and stones opposite you. Then you may be surprised by what you see. You will see . . . birds. You will see many small brown nondescript birds. You can call them in your mind sparrows or wrens, but they probably are not. What are they, then? Ah, you have to remember what you see and carry home your memories in detail to a bird book. Then you will be met with a wealth of similar and disturbing detail.

It is also a book about thinking about what is going on around you while you fish with a wet fly, and this includes all in the non-world of salmonids. Nature is dominant, wonderful. It surrounds you. It includes the woods, the water, the weather, the creatures. You and your possible big fish for today are minor characters in the drama.

The vast middle of one pool is remarkably similar to another, its attractions subtle and low-keyed. The pool fishes best in its center, for here it has a uniform rate of flow and a depth that does not vary much. A long throw is required and the fly moves at a consistent speed as the line adjustments necessary for it to fish well become fewer. A Spey rod is excellent for this. It is the place where the take of a large fish may surprise you--though you expect one, all along, and have almost given up hopes of it happening and are beginning to relax in your boots.

The long middle of a pool is also a good place to hook and play a big fish, for there is plenty of room below you until the bottom of the pool is reached and usually there is an expanse of cobbled beach behind you on which to land your fish. (We disdain the use of nets and gaffs and tailers, and prefer to slide our fish gently onto the stones or, better yet, strand it in the shallows, where it remains wet and in its native environment while the hook is gently removed and the fish reversed in the water and allowed to swim free.)

Hooking a fish in the middle of such a pool and not moving downstream with it, as it runs repeatedly in that direction, allows the angler some elbow room in playing it. There is a temptation to follow the fish down to the tail of the pool, especially if it is a big male that keeps returning there, but I advise against it. Keep high in the pool and make the fish come back to you, if you possibly can. Most will, but there are a few that won't, and good luck there. Fish don't like to leave tailouts and tend to remain there, rather than swimming downstream through them and into the fast water below; in fact, when a fish leaves the tailout of a long pool, it is generally for one of two reasons: either it is being held too hard, all the while, and continues pulling against the restraint, or else, it is very tired and unable to swim or hold its position in the current, and the current carries the fish over, probably unwillingly.

The seemingly uniform long middle of a pool will reveal much variety to the angler who can read its surface swirls, its multiple seams, the topography of its cutbank (which indicates what might be under the surface), its depth or lack thereof, and its rate of flow. All this can be observed without being able to see more than a few inches beneath the surface. If you can see deeper, you will discover more. But it is not really necessary, in most cases.

The angler soon develops a feel for what is good holding water, after giving it a cursory read. This the kind of water that big fish love to lie in, and it does not change its characteristics from river to river, or fish to fish. If you hook a fish in a certain kind of water (sorry not to be able to be more explicit here, but there are many kinds of holding water and steelhead and salmon react to them all similarly), you should return to the same spot, or spots like it, and you will often find a fresh steelhead has quickly replaced the one you caught earlier. This can go on day after day, year after year, in season and out.

Such a place is often called a locker. Lockers get named after people who are most successful there. (In the Manure Spreader Hole, before its great change from the DeForest Creek slide, there was a slot near the far bank, up high in the pool, called Rad's Locker, after Rad Russell, a doctor, a long-time dead. Such lockers lose their names or acquire new ones, their short fame swallowed up by new scores, the old names remembered only by a few.) It is considered an honor to have a locker named after you, and many anglers vainly name them after themselves (as they have their flies), only to have them ignored by others. But every angler who fishes very much will have acquired many personal lockers that he returns to repeatedly, hopefully, and if it is a true locker it will remain faithful to him and give him many a fish. My Camp Pool on the Wenatchee was one of these.

Lockers are not found only in the long middle of pools but anywhere in them. However, because of the stream channel's geologic morphology, most of them lie out in the middle. They differ from other portions of the channel in ways that are not always obvious The experience angler will try to locate them by non-changing characteristics so he can return to them precisely on a future trip. To do this he must line up his locker with objects on the bank and take bearings from there. Since one object, or even two, will not give him the exact same location, he often picks a third object. This is called triangulation and is a technique borrowed from military map-reading. It is an essential part of stream-reading, as well.

The corner of a porch, a peculiar rock on the cutbank side of the river, a fence post, a culvert , a tree--all are good bearing points. I find I don't have to memorize them, only recall them dimly from past takes. They file themselves indelibly in my mind and can be called up when required. I would argue that I haven't forgotten a single place in a run where I've hooked a fish, not in several decades. But my notebooks indicate otherwise, and some of the entries and the points of triangulation I simply don't remember, or can't recall well enough to be usable. So the unforgettability aspect is not what I would like it to be, and I admit it. Best make notes.

What you do is this: you stand in the water at your usual wading depth and look upstream and down. Then you look behind you. The first bearing spot is the critical one; you adjust your position from it according to the other two, moving your eyes up or down until you are lined up, as you best remember the spot. You make your cast to the memorable distance. If it feels too short, you fish it out, but make the next one longer; if too long, then you shorten up on the one that follows.

Once you are convinced you are where you want to be, both with your body and the placement of your fly, you must try to duplicate the speed and depth of the fly's swing. If you touched a rock at the bottom of the swing, originally, and you do so again, so much the better: you are right on. Try to duplicate the location, the throw, and the way you fished out the drift, using whatever data memory provides. I repeat: this is most often done on a less than conscious level. I am trying to make it obvious only for the purpose of analysis and discussion.

What happens if a fish doesn't take in the remembered location, with a throw and a drift that imitates as best you can the one that hooked a good fish, either recently or long ago?

The tailout of a pool is my favorite place in all the world, but on the North Fork tailouts have largely vanished, one by one, as a result of environmental degradation. The amount of bedload deposits to the river as a whole and to my best pools have made pool and riffle look much the same, and have shallowed the great pools and ruined their tailouts.

A tailout is where the current quickens, the channel remains broad, the morphology tilts upwards and is broken by a number of good-sized boulders, and the river prepares to spill over into the riffle that lies below. It marks the end of the pool.

It is a place where steelhead and salmon running a river are inclined to stop and rest. In the tailout they are usually ready takers. I could bore you with multiple examples, but will not. On a high winter river, with a suitable sinking line and a fly that gets down near the bottom, it is where an accomplished angler expects to hook a fish. Occasionally he does.

Perhaps because the current quickens there, my expectations do, too. Or they are evenly matched. Years ago Fortson had a great tailout. So did the Boulder Creek run. And so did the Flats, my favorite pool. A fish hooked in any of these places practically guaranteed a good fight. Fast, shallow water is where fish perform their best. They can't seek bottom and hold there easily. They can't find soft water at the edge of a seam and move out of the current, where fighting both the river's pull and the rod will tire them fast. The river is similarly fast and shallow everywhere, and the fish must resort to running hard, with numerous leaps at the end of each run to try and rid itself of the fly. These efforts tire it and enable it to be defeated.

Sport most likely occurs in a tailout. It is also--because of the speed of the current, the uneven bottom where the angler balances, and the added depth to which he has waded in order to reach the far bank--where the angler's situation is most precarious. The tailout is where he is more apt to loose his balance and fall in. It is where he may take a serious tumble and be swept into the white-water chute below.

Tailouts are fun and exciting, too. They are challenging to wade, even if you don't have a fish on the end of your line, way out there, porposing.

After hooking a good fish and getting it slightly under control, the angler is faced with the problem of working his way back to the beach and landing his fish. Often this blind, backward wading is difficult and treacherous. It is easy to stumble and fall on your back and be spun around by the current. You must pick your way slowly, carefully, step by step, putting your booted feet in between rocks which have no room for them, all the while a fierce pull is being exerted by the fish from the opposite direction. And you are facing away from where you are going, all the while, at least until the water grows shallow and slow enough that you dare attempt a turn around and face the beach.

Fun, I say? Great fun and adventure? Yes. It is not often that you fall in and, if the fish doesn't come off during the first leap or two, you probably will get it to the beach and land it.

To read a river well, you need to acquire some technical information. A river is a channel holding a fixed volume of water. The volume varies over time with the season, temperature, rainfall, etc. In time of drought, the volume is low; in flood, high. But another factor is important, since a river is not like a lake. Our water is moving. The rate of speed varies with its volume.

The volume of a river is measured in cubic feet, like much else. Refrigerator interiors, for instances, and box cars. Roderick Haig-Brown tells us, "A river never sleeps." Hell, it doesn't take a coffee break. It doesn't hang on its oars, panting, not even for a moment. It is always forging ahead, always performing work, always gaining new ground. Work can be defined by moving a volume (measured in cubic feet) a distance (feet, yard, meters) over time. The unit of time most useful in measuring large volumes of water is the second. The two units expressed together are called velocity.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency takes daily readings of rivers in my state, Washington, and passes them on to fishers and white-water enthusiasts over a toll-free telephone line. (206-526-8530.) It is also available in more comprehensive form over the Internet: http://wwwwatcm.wr.usgs.gov/rt-cgi/gen_stn_pg? One data is the rate of flow in cubic feet per second (cfs). Sometimes in winter, when there are heavy rains and snowmelt, the change from day to day is extraordinary. On the web the data is available in either numeric tables or in a moving chart. The chart provides a dynamic means of measuring what a river does over a set period of time, such as a week or month. But the data will also reveal by the hour a river’s often wide fluctuations, such as when water is release from a dam or when a heavy storm hits.

In the winter I study daily readings from the North Fork of the Stillaguamish and the Skykomish in order to know which river will be in best shape. In early spring, in addition to these rivers, I keep a keen eye on the Sauk and Skagit. In the fall there is the Wenatchee to monitor, along with the Grand Ronde. I jot down key data on the backs of old envelopes, along with the daily gauge-heights, if I am planning a trip, which is apt to be long distance. But then—because I am not very well organized—this data gets mixed up with other slips of paper and I lose them. Well, the NOAA data is easily retrievable from the Web. My old methods are not so critical anymore.

Gauge readings are important because they measure the true vertical measure of a river taken at a fixed location and at about the same time every day. But cfs tell you more, once you get to know and use them. Cfs will tell you the ideal fishing height and the degree to which the river is either rising or dropping, and how slowly or quickly.

The real height of a river measured this way may be misleading to one who is used to judging it by the amount of wet sand glimpsed along a favorite beach, when starting out for a day’s fishing. Fishers often jam a stick in the wet sand to come back to (and are dismayed to return and find it has fallen over, the hole filled in with water.) This is so they can determine how much it has dropped since their last visit, say, yesterday. Well, good luck. If the river has risen much, the stick is covered with water, has loosened, and soon floats away.

The height of a river measured on the gauge always seems less than when measured with a mark on the beach. This can be expressed geometrically by a right-angle triangle. A one or two inch drop of the level may be considerable in a twenty-four hour period of time, but the stick on the beach will have been retreated from the edge of the river by a much greater distance and will lead to misleading conclusions. Hence, it is a poor measure. When some fisher informs you that the river has dropped "a foot," it may have dropped only a couple of inches when measured vertically. You may make a wasted trip to a river that is still raging.

On a river such as the Sauk, with the right NOAA data on the river gauge, I can often calculate within an hour or two of when it will snap back into shape. On the Wenatchee, on the other hand, I go entirely by cfs. The location of the gauge on a river, and whether or not it is above or below a major tributary, can be of utmost importance. For instance, measuring the Skagit above or below the confluence with the Baker, can make a lot of difference in terms of both height and turbidity. In the case of the Wenatchee--and other streams that flow through agricultural country where there is a seasonal diversion--it is important to know whether the river is being measured above or below the irrigation outtake, for the diversion represents about a quarter of the river's total volume..

The Wenatchee varies hugely in its rate of flow. It is a wonderful, wild river, draining a big lake, fed by many thousands of acres of pine forest, which is snow country, and in torrent in spring it is awesome. In floodtime it is taken over by bold kayakers. Its cfs rate then is in excess of 3500 and is unfishable. The kayakers can have it then. By the time I get interested, it is flowing so slowly that they have gone elsewhere. Its cfs will be running from 600 to about twice that number. The river is easily wadable, its chief topographical features clearly visible beneath its clear surface.

I first fished the Wenatchee one year when the snow runoff had peaked and the river dropped quickly to 1350 cfs. It was mid-July, a time when no fish should be expected to be in the river yet. I determined that one or two of my favorite pools might be barely fishable. I hopped in my car off. The Camp Pool was barely wadable and under two feet of heavy water. Just getting out to the casting bar was more excitement than I wanted. I hooked a fish quite soon and had great difficulty landing it. Finally I brought it into a tiny slough that in normal water would be but a dip in a high gravel beach. The fish was bright and wild. I released it in the company of three nosy Labrador retrievers. (This is called the hat trick.) It weighed about nine pounds.

The next morning I fished again and caught nothing. The river was now at a perfect height, according to its cfs. I caught nothing. But it was great fun to be fishing a familiar river running at ideal height. I did not return for a month and a half. Meanwhile the river continued its steady fall. I knew this because I regularly monitored its cfs. I was busy and could not get back until its cfs read 420. This was very low. During September they dropped to 360, 350, 340. Nobody had heard of such low readings. In October they descended to 320 and vast sandstone ledges rose out of the water like snow moguls. Every pool was dead and the broad riffles had turned into backwater eddies.

Determined I stuck it out. The fishing did not improve. The irrigation diversion ended late in October and the river obediently rose a couple hundred cfs. It remained close to dead-low but this was a marked improvement. The riffles sped along, the pools showing a channel, a seam. It rained, and the river rose a few more inches. I didn't collect the cfs readings, but my eye said they were about 700 and headed up. The river predictably rose to 900 before it started to drop slowly again. I took a few fish, but it was a dismal season and I soon broke camp and headed for home. The river looked to be back up to 400 or 450. My eye told me this as drove along the canyon road.

One must fish one's water as best one can, and take potluck with what the river offers. But learning to read the data will save an angler a lot of wasted time, and make the time that he has to spend on fishing much more productive.

Data such as NOAA provides over the Internet is available throughout the United States and is a valuable aid to fishers, wherever they live. Such information is highly regional and subject to interpretation. When I write about the streams that I fish, and use their data, it is because I know them best. But what I’ve learned is applicable to other rivers--East, South, Northeast, Southwest--once you’ve learned what to look for and how to interpret it. No matter where you live, if you fish streams, you will soon have your own network of places to go, depending upon the vagaries of weather, largely rainfall and sometimes snow. Perhaps another fisher can extrapolate from what I’ve learned locally. (All fishing is local, by the way.)

In winter the gauge height on my favorite rivers is around 5.5. This is a little high for the Sauk, but about right for the North Fork of the Stilly and the mainstem Sky. The similar number is a coincidence. On the Skagit a gauge reading of 18-20 is good, at least for the fly. And of course, the farther up in a river system you intend to fish, the higher the admissible gauge height and the more cfs the river can stand.

So on the North Fork 5.2 may be too high for the Oso reach, but is getting too low for pools in the Fortson area to fish well. Similarly on the Sky at Monroe, which is low down in the system, or at Reiter Ponds, where the rearing ponds are located, high up on its main stem.

Height is not all, not by any means. Turbidity is important, too, perhaps more so. Turbidity is simply how dirty a river is. It is measured by how far down a person can see bottom. On still waters, such as a lake, a white plate about a meter in diameter is lowered on a cable until it disappears. The plate is called a Secchi disc or dish. The depth at which it vanishes indicates the visibility or water clarity. It is usually measured in meters and centimeters, but feet and inches will do practically, if that seems easier. It does to me. But fishers measure the depth according to where their wader bootfeet disappear. It is a rough measurement but a good one. From it they can tell whether a river is marginally fishable or not. (Of course there is a "gray" area, in which a really determined fisher will persist, while a less determined one will reel in and go home.)

For most river fishers eleven inches is considered to be the worst possible acceptable amount of turbidity. Eighteen inches is okay for some bait fishers. Two feet about the least a fly fisher will accept. Three feet is ideal. And more is probably "too clear." If a river is too clear in any but summer dry-fly time, even sunk-fly fishers get discouraged, for fish are thought to "hole up" and go off the take. It is even worse when the temperature drops below freezing at such a time. All of which is nonsense, of course, and is daily violated by fishers who are out for a day's fun and think they know better. But at the same time these are known rules-of- thumb and attention should be paid to them.

More important than absolute matters of turbidity is the kind of particulate matter that in suspension colors the water and reveals the particulate's source. Here we leave applied science and enter the vast unknown. Fishers divide dirty water into several broad types or classifications. Silt and sand and logging debris in the turbidity are bad news and portend a wasted river, one with bad fishing. Water flowing from a bog with downed timber in it and fallen leaves has a tea-colored look and is called steeped. It has false clarity, for while you can see some distance through it fishing usually is poor until the color runs out and the green returns.

Steeped water, like water carrying some soil types, can clear quickly. This is not so bad. Water with a brown cast turns green by degrees, and green is what we seek, we fishers. I've found dirty water on the Sauk in April that was quickly turning, and I knew from experience it was only a matter of an hour or two before it would be acceptably green. I planned my activities accordingly and caught fish.

You can learn to recognize "turning water" by experience and determine how soon it will be fishable. This varies from river to river. It is one sound argument in getting to know one or two rivers well. You will be wrong many times at the start, but you will learn from your mistakes and make fewer of them in the future. You will return to your favorite river at the time that is just right.

Clay-colored water is not the abomination many people think it is. The North Fork used to be gray all summer and we caught plenty of fish. Clay is particles of aluminum oxide held in suspension and the distance between them is considerable and that space consists of clear water. The light bouncing off of the particles makes the water look dirtier than it really is; as daylight lowers, a decided green cast returns to the water and you will be surprised at how deep you can see into it. Fish see well, too.

The degree of clarity is measured by its light-scattering properties or coefficient of the particles. This is measured several ways; in lakes it is read with the Secchi disc. There is no similar device for a river. The important thing for us to know is not to turn away from a river that has only a small amount of clay clouding it. It may be highly fishable. Bright colors are called for in flies or, oddly, purple or black. Both these dark colors show up exceedingly well. And the fish seem to like them.

I've noticed an odd correlation between the length of time it takes a river to rise and the time necessary for it to fall and clear. If it rises quickly, it drops about as fast, but when a river rises steadily and stays high for days or even weeks, it will take a similarly long time for it to drop and clear. I've never heard this commented on before. It holds true for winter or summer and I guess the seasons between. When a river comes up suddenly as a result of hard, steady rain, snowmelt from the sun, or the infamous "rain-on-snow event," it turns an opaque color and it is probably useless to continue fishing or to fish again until it has settled back into its banks and cleared a lot. This will take days, perhaps a week. It is to some degree temperature dependent. The colder the air gets, the quicker the river drops and clears. The opposite is also true. The warmer the air, and the more rain that falls, the longer it will take for a river to resume its normal flow.

It is paradoxical. Rain is what brings the river up and makes it unfishable. But rain is what calls the steelhead and salmon in from the sea, especially in winter. In fall and in spring, as well, a river is out of condition much of the time, but when it drops and clears the fishing is often superb. A freeze will hurry along the clearing process, but brings other problems in its wake. Too cold is as bad as not cold enough. And since a river is constantly changing its rate of flow, etc., the ideal time for fishing is short and must be seized upon, or lost.

One cold day in mid-December, with the Green River near Auburn unseasonably low, I went out armed only with fly. There were steelhead in the river, but it had dropped so quickly and so far that the gear fishermen could barely get a drift through their favorite runs. And because the water was so low so early, few fishers were out. I hooked my first fish just below the mouth of Soos Creek as a train roared across the bridge. By friend, Billy, who worked for Northern Pacific there, couldn't hear me shout over the noise from his train and missed the whole spectacle of the fish jumping before the hook straightened out. Afterwards, my waving made absolutely no sense to him, for he could see nothing was going on.

I crossed and began at the top of the Car Bodies Hole. I soon hooked another fine fish, which jumped and showed me how winter-bright he was. But he soon swam round a snag--there are many of them in the Green--and I had to break him off. At the bottom of the run, perhaps a hundred yards downstream, I hooked a third fish. I saw this one, too. It was small, probably only five pounds, so I decided to horse it to the beach. It came in splashing--and flipped off in the shallows, swimming free.

I was ecstatic. Three fish in less than two hours, all hooked in a cold winter river, with snow along the edges? It mattered little if I lost them all. I returned, but could not repeat the feat, or come close. Soon the weather warmed and the rains returned. The Green rose and went out. When it came back in, it belonged to the bait fishers.

Winters in the Pacific Northwest are notorious for rivers being out of shape all weekend and coming into fishing condition briefly at mid-week. Often this is for only a few hours, say, on a Wednesday afternoon. It is pretty hard to make a season out of such short outtakes. But we try.

Armed with data on cfs and from river gauges as reported by NOAA, a fisher decides the time is ripe for a trip to a selected river. It is either rising or falling, and it will have a variable amount of clarity which he measures by the depth at which he can see his bootfeet when waded out in the shallows. From this he determines whether it is worth his precious time to keep fishing, or head for home.

If he decides to stay, what he observes in the field and from the data gathered before his trip will determine his fly selection and the kind of sinking line to use in order to get his fly close to the bottom but not repeatedly hanging up on it and having to break off his fly and tippet. Flies--even if he ties his own--are annoying to lose. And hooks cost money, good hooks a lot of money.

Are there any other important things to know that will effect his chances of getting a fish, today?

Oh, yes. There are seasonal considerations. Another way of saying this is he is more apt to run into fish at some times of the year than at others. These fluctuate according to river and region. And there are annual variations among the seasonal, as well.

Some rivers get a heavy run of winter fish by December first. Most do not. To fish one river then may be a waste of time from a fish-production standpoint, while another river may be ideal. To learn these things is why some anglers join fishing clubs, hang around sporting goods stores, and stand along the riverbank asking questions and guardedly recording the answers in their minds. They are trying to telescope the learning process in a field where the truth is not always evident and sometimes is intentionally obscured.

One year on Thanksgiving--again on the Green River near Auburn--I went out for an afternoon's fishing before The Big Meal. The river was high, but wadable. There was little competition because of the holiday, I guess. I hooked a big fish and had a terrible time with it. I was waded far out in a swollen river, fishing the bank pockets, and the fish took with a surge, then headed South. It hung for a moment in the swift tailout, then plunged over into the top of the Car Bodies Hole.

For a few minutes I thought I could follow the fish; I believed I could cross the river and work my way through a narrow gut on the far side, but as I neared it I became fearful. The river was a few inches higher and stronger than I had ever crossed here before. I got to the edge of the gut and lost my nerve. Meanwhile, the fish came to a rest in the center of the lower pool, right where the water slowed--a point about 200 feet below me.

I decided to backtrack my course through the shallow fast water, but now my route was slightly upstream and the current was powerful. I sloshed along, throwing my hips from side to side in order to move my heavy feet and swinging my shoulders, too, one of which had a fish attached to the arm below. Halfway back to the barside I became exhausted. I stood panting, trying to get my strength back, feeling as though I had an onslaught of the flu. The last hundred feet was a nightmare. Twice I fell in the shallows; twice I picked myself off my knees and continued, always battling the bent rod and straining line.

Coming out of the water at last, I reached for a piece of riprap to sustain me, slipped, and cut my hand where my thumb joins my first finger. (Today the half-moon scar reminds me of that day and the fish.) Anyway, I clambered up on the rocks and followed the fish down the top of the riprap, which was flat and paved. I had to keep clearing my strung line from the leafless willows that lined the bank, but I managed to and continued chasing my fish. Halfway down I came across a gear fisherman with a salmon-sized dipnet. We crammed the tired fish into the net and lugged it up on the plateau behind us, where I killed it.

It weighed fourteen pounds. So tired and sick, I lugged it back to the car and drove home with an aching fever. I could eat no turkey. Perhaps it was the flu, but maybe it was simply that the big fish in heavy water unstarched me, I don't know. Later, I read in the newspaper that the Green had been blessed with an early run of big native steelhead. A number had been caught. The fish went between 12 and 16 pounds, or slightly more. My fish was about average.

So, might an angler expect to encounter big, early-run, wild winter steelhead in the Green?

Usually what you run into in the Green is a lot of silver salmon, which are also called coho. For every steelhead you catch, up until mid- December, you will hook and release about six coho--dark fish that are ready to spawn. And if this is what you don't want, and believe as I do that salmon near spawning time should not be molested with lure or fly, you will be greatly disappointed with what the river has to offer.

Similarly, in the Snoqualmie and my river, the North Fork, what you encounter in December is apt to be the vestiges of the dog-salmon run--ripe fish with violet bars and white fungus, fish whose scales have turned to slime and whose bodies are soft and mushy. You ought not want these, either. It is an in between season, one when the hope if for bright steelhead but the likelihood is dark salmon and summer-run steelhead

One day in early December I caught a bright fish that I judged to be a fresh steelhead of about five or six pounds. Standing in fast water, I grabbed the leader and the fish spun around, belly up. To save my fingers, I used needlenose pliers to reverse the hook quickly, not noticing the two orange slashes under the fish's jaw until it was too late. The fish was gone. Then the difference in the spotting pattern became clear. I had released the biggest searun cutthroat of my life. I would have been tempted to keep it, I know, so it was probably all for the best.

Off-season fishing in a river containing runs of various anadromous fishes can be exciting. These are rare events. Most of the time the fishing is drab. Between the major runs of winter or summer steelhead, your chances of getting a fresh fish decrease substantially. Often such fishing isn't worth the serious angler's time.

Still, there is the odd chance of something unusual happening. One Halloween, years ago, I found myself fishing with my old companions Ed Weinstein, Bob Taylor, and Jerry Wintle. It was unusual for us to be fishing together, all at once. The river was high and the most we could hope for was some rusty old summer run. And this is what Frank Snyder had caught and kept in the Manure Spreader Hole; we saw the Deer Creek native lying on the wet sand, as we passed by.

Jerry caught a nice searun cutthroat, I remember. But it was my day. I caught a big cutthroat, too, plus a mint-bright nine-pound steelhead from the Flats. It took in the tailout and jumped and jumped. I suppose I killed it, too. I was used to providing my family with a fish, every now and then. I don't know if it was a summer run or a winter, or whether it mattered to me. This was back before hatchery steelhead were clipped. The fish remains an enigma, a highly memorable one.

Another year, in March, large bright steelhead were reported taken in the main stem of the Stillaguamish. These were fish with "no eggs in them"--an indication they were either spawned-out winter fish (unlikely because of their brightness and general condition) or early summer runs. If the latter, their eggs and milts were so tiny they could be easily overlooked when the anglers cleaned them.

The season closed and I thought no more about them, not having caught any myself. I forgot all about them. When the summer season opened my friends and I started catching big, bright hatchery steelhead in the Fortson area. Sixteen pounders were common; I remember seeing several before I caught one myself. Ed Nivens caught six that were verified--one remembers thing like this. I saw another sixteen pounder horsed up on the beach. My own big fish came from the Boulder Creek area in June, nearly a month later.

These were the same fish reported in March in the lower river. I finally puzzled it out.

Seasonal timing is important. Before the days of hatchery winter steelhead, the first sizable runs could not be expected until the first of the new year. New Year's Day, in fact, commonly marked the start of the season.

Things changed. In the Sixties, if you started this late, you might miss a third of the run. These were predominantly hatchery fish. There were so many of them in most rivers that anglers such as myself cut our eyeteeth on them. They averaged six to eight pounds; often the females went six, the males about seven and a quarter. Those in the Puget Sound area came from the Chambers Creek Hatchery near Tacoma. Similar hatcheries were placed around the state and in Oregon.

I caught so many of these small fish on gear that I soon put a set in my cheap fiberglass rod. Since I was fishing from the left bank, the rod developed a turn in that direction, never to straighten out again.

The runs of hatchery fish were dependent on high-water conditions. A flood or near flood would fill the river with fish, but a drought or cold snap kept the fish out in the bay, not ascending until the hard rains returned.

When the Indians were acknowledged as having the right to net steelhead in their usual and accustomed places, they targeted the hatchery steelhead. They did this for practical reasons. A netset in December or early January was productive; the rest of the year it was not--at least not for steelhead. And since an Indian fisher is no more ambitious than a white one, he wants to maximize his fishing time. He wants to fish with the least amount of effort and take his catch to market and pocket the change. I don't blame him any; I would, too. It is why he goes after the hatchery fish, not the wild ones. It is a good tradeoff.

This has changed the expectations of when a flyfisher may encounter a fresh winter steelhead. The Indian commercial fishery has captured the bulk of the run, according to treaty rights. This is legal. But it adversely effects sportsfishers, who now must wait until the nets are pulled before they go out seriously after winter steelhead. We do this because, so many times in the past, we have been greeted by a river in perfect shape but with no fish in it.

Nets are usually pulled at the end of January or up to mid-way through February. Anglers scan their newspapers for reports of the good news. They venture out in droves then. Most often they find the rivers bereft of keepable fish. They must wait for the runs of wild fish at the end of February.

So the traditional winter steelhead season has been truncated by the tribal net fishery. And since the Indian chum- salmon fishery overlaps the start of the winter steelhead season, the nets are pretty much continuously in the rivers and estuaries throughout late fall. What I'm saying is that to venture out in early December through January--traditionally our peak winter time--we are apt to be met with disappointment by an empty river. The fish will have been taken by the nets to the extent that there are not enough of them running the river even under ideal high-water conditions to be worth pursuing.

In February we may encounter hatchery fish that have escaped the nets (they have to be pulled out of the river, some time) and spawned. These are skinny, wasted fish that are next to inedible and are easily caught but of no value to the resource. But about the twentieth of the month we experience the arrival of the wild late-winter steelhead. These are superb fish that take the fly well and fight extraordinarily. Since they are wild, and in most rivers there are not enough of them to exceed escapement goals of the fish biologists, they have to be released. I don't mind doing this, nor do many of my friends, but the chance of a steelhead dinner is slim, in nearly every river in the West.

Wild late-winter fish may be found until late in April, when only spawners are around. Some years on the Sauk I catch such a high percentage of ripe fish that I am ready to ask the Wildlife Department to close down the fishery. But just about the time I reach for the phone, a run of brilliantly colored fish arrive in the river and I change my mind. The fact that these fish are disarmingly near to spawning, too, is forgotten. We keep fishing for them and have good sport.

The bright April steelhead we prize so highly and is the object of so much photography is about to spawn, and the egg or milt masses it contains would be a dead give-away, if we ever killed and cleaned such a fish. (In sharp contrast, the dark steelhead from the Babine that looks like it is spawning in early fall is still months away, and the sexual development is about what one might expect from a September or October fish in any other river systems; the fish is about half-ripe.

This is a reminder that steelhead and salmon have no reason to enter the river except to spawn. This is so self-evident that it hardly needs stating, except I and others tend to forget it and treat steelhead as though they arrive for personal reasons, and will hang around and remain bright indefinitely. This idea is based on our experience with summer runs and our capacity for self-delusion.

About the time the late winter fish are starting to spawn, the smolts of both winter and summer runs are departing the river for the sea, where they will migrate surprisingly long distances and feed voraciously. They will travel far to find the schools of forage fish that are moving, too. In April and May wild summers and winters are spawning in reaches usually far removed from each other. Fry will not hatch out for a couple of months, but last year's fry begin serious river feeding as soon as the river warms and insect life resumes. And then fresh summer runs enter the river and will provide excellent flyfishing over the next several months.

Temperature and rainfall express the eternal verities. Rain brings up the water level--the old cubic feet per second of velocity. Cooler water in fall and winter is what moves fresh fish into our rivers. It is exactly the opposite situation from spring, when warming water temperatures is critical in moving the juveniles as smolts down to the sea.

So temperature matters--both that of the air and the water. Temperature controls the amount of available dissolved oxygen in the water, which is necessary for fish to survive. This is called the biological oxygen demand, or BOD. In warm water plants thrive in sunlight and consume more and more oxygen. If they take too much of it, there is not enough left for insect and fish life, and a body of water is said to be eutrophic. The plant life runs short of oxygen and dies. The water produces a terrible stench. It smells like sewer gas.

High temperatures alone kill fish, too. If it doesn't kill them outright, it stresses them and they die for related reasons. It is best if temperatures never rise much over sixty degrees F. Of course they do, and fish survive. Steelhead juveniles and adults can tolerate temperatures in the 70s, but not for long. They get so high as a result of solar loading, but even in summer the sun is not overhead the full day and when it dips the temperatures do, too. And night brings a respite.

Ken and George McLeod believed that the boulders in Deer Creek caught the sun and stored it, radiating it into the water all night long, and that was why the creek historically ran so warm. I attributed it to the fact that the stream ran East and West, which permitted the sun to track it most of the day, and there was little shade provided by its wide floodplain (caused by snow runoff). But I think the McLeods may have been more right than I. Ken told me he took the temperature on an August morning at the mouth and it was many degrees warmer than the North Fork, which was back in the high 60s.

What do juveniles--who are supposedly more heat sensitive than adults--do, when it grows so warm? They retreat to wherever they can find shade or cooler temperatures, such as springs and tributary creeks. But even so, there is much mortality. Heat and predation are the two main reasons why only a tenth of the fry that hatch ever reach smolting size. And heat, along with a shrinking river, contribute directly to predation, for a river drawing in on itself concentrates its fish populations into the portions with the most dissolved oxygen and coolest temperatures. With so many small fish in so confined an area, the effectiveness of all predators increases. This include man.

Under drought and warm weather conditions I once caught a big Dolly Varden. It was about the right size for dinner for two and kept me from killing a hatchery steelhead, I reasoned. When I opened up the fish with a knife, I found two steelhead parr inside. Both were around seven inches in length. One was digested down to the head, tail, and a skeleton that was visible, with flesh that had turned to mush. The other was only hours old and looked like it could swim away.

The Dolly--on a feeding frenzy based on the opportunity to predate concentrations of small fish--fell victim to a big, bright steelhead fly. (Tough luck, fella, but you deserved it.) The survivors of drought and warm water are the hardiest, which biologically makes them the most deserving. One does not often see the scores of dead fish that didn't make it, or made a meal for fish that had survived, like my Dolly. But the following spring there will be fewer fish to smolt and go to sea, and one or two years hence there will be fewer adults to return. Thus the products of drought and warm water extend far into the future and directly effect the returns and the fishing for several years to come. They may impact it permanently, if the years of drought persist and there is no relief.

Global warming, the effects of El Niño, low rainfall, and high average mean summer temperatures--all of which the Pacific Northwest has experienced of late, year after year, without pause--can reduce the size of a race of fish and lead to its demise.

Add to these negative factors one more important one, the agricultural diversion so necessary to producing apples and pears East of the Cascades in an industry that gives livelihood to thousands of people and nourishment to millions of others. It cannot help but hurt the runs of salmon and steelhead. It is a sad tradeoff that tips the scales in the direction of the "tragedy of the commons."

If warm water kills fish, and you remove a quarter of the flow from a river like the Wenatchee, what happens to its fish populations? How are they to endure? These are not entirely rhetorical questions. Certainly salmonids become stressed, and natural mortality increases. But it may be worse than that. They may die outright from low flows; they may die unobserved and vanish from the living biomass of the river. Or they may adapt over a long period of time, like the Deer Creek fish are thought to have done. Their biosystems may learn to tolerate warmer temperatures. Nobody knows how many generations this takes, if it happens. All we know is that the steelhead is an amazing, plastic fish--"plastic" meaning he is highly adaptable. He is present in so many river systems for this reason.

The steelhead will adapt, probably better than any of the other salmonids. He tends to prevail. When necessary one race will interbreed with another. When required, one race will go off and colonize another river, if the conditions are right. (Often they are.) A wild fish will breed with a hatchery fish, if the race is dependent on this for survival. A steelhead will do this without a qualm. (Steelhead, in fact, have no qualms.)

Temperatures have an upper limit but apparently not a lower one, not in rivers. I have caught steelhead on a fly when the water temperature was 36 degrees. Fish must move however slightly to take the fly, for the chance of my actually threading the fly into a fish's mouth is astronomical, let alone doing so on several occasions. But I know they don't move much or far. You fairly must hit a fish in the face with it.

The time was February, at the end of a prolonged freeze. Housebound for long, I had to fish or go nuts. The river was shrunken, with only a few places to house fish. I fished as though it were mid-summer. The fish didn't fight much. It was too cold, the river icebound. To land it, I had to lead it to the edge of the flow and pry it over the lip. This the fish permitted. The seven-pound hatchery male was the color of coal. I took him long ago, at the time when I frequently did silly things like fish in miserable weather, and I caught it on my favorite Hardy bamboo rod and Perfect reel. The fly was a full-dressed Durham Ranger, and the pool the Manure Spreader, one I knew well. So happy was I, I quit fishing for the day and walked back to the Oso General Store, where I plunked my fish down on the newly ploughed snowbank, propped up my rod alongside, and went inside to drink coffee and gloat for the rest of the short afternoon.

It was an opportunity that doesn't happen very often, I knew. Best make the best of it.

Bill McMillan tells a delightful story about catching a steelhead under even worse conditions. He knew where a fish would be lying in the Washougal from long experience, and also that his line and guides would ice up after only one cast. So he waded into position, made exactly one cast, and caught the fish. Then he went home. He proved what he set out to do and realized that any further fishing would be subject to constant freezing of the line in the guides. The conditions made it pointless to continue, so he didn't.

Where do steelhead go, when the river freezes up? Well, the really small ones winter under the gravel. Sometimes the fingerlings do, too. The adults "hang out." Only the edges of the river ever freeze solidly. The rest of the water turns cold, harshly cold, but continues to flow (however slowly) and contain enough oxygen to sustain the demand of a creature whose metabolism has slowed to its lowest point.

If a river ever truly slept, we could capture it and study it, fixing it in place forever. We could bottle it, like a genie. There we'd have it trapped in glass, the way scientists look at a specimen in vitro. Constant, contained, steadystate, it would remain ever the same for us. Of course it wouldn't be a river then.

Sometimes it is necessary to define something by saying what it is not. This way we come closer to saying what it is than if we had set out to do so.

Rate of flow (velocity, measured in cubic feet per second) and water temperature (however you measure it--in degrees Fahrenheit, or Celsius and Centigrade) are vital elements in the riverine equation. Perhaps a crude drawing will explain the relationship and how steelhead are effected:

INSERT TEMPERATURE/CFS CHART

The left side of the graph shows temperature, the coldest at the bottom. We can assign this a theoretical number, such as 30 degrees F., below which water freezes; the top of the temperature side can be established at eighty degrees, a temperature at which all salmonid life will cease. Thus the numbers we are concerned with will lie in the graph's middle range.

Similarly, the bottom of the graph represents the rate of flow in cubic feet per second on a mythical river, one much like the Wenatchee. At the left of the chart we can establish the lowest possible flow so far experienced, something in the neighborhood of 300 cfs. In a river like this one, we could put the top of the flow chart at 6 or 7,000 cfs (twenty times the low rate of flow), which is what the river reaches in flood stage, but this is impractical for fishers. Let's say the useful maximum flow is around 1500 cfs, which is still above the height at which I will start fishing a few of its pools. So now we have realistic minimum and maximum flows, at least from the fly fisher's standpoint.

Let's plot temperature against rate of flow and see if we can determine when fish are inclined to enter the river. Of course I am speaking of one particular river, but change the rate of flow to fit another river's average mean flow and you might have a rough formula that would fit most of the rivers that flow into the Columbia and Snake, which include many of the principal rivers of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, at least the Washington region that lies to the East.

On the Wenatchee, let us say that fish will start moving up from the Columbia when the river temperature is in the 55-60 degree range and the cfs have increased to about 750. If we plot this is absolute terms, with no gradients, the lines should cross at around this mythical point. Increase the rate of flow and decrease the temperature and the fish ought to move faster.

They will, if there are any and the season is right. By season I mean that historically steelhead can be expected to arrive at a river's mouth and be prepared to ascend it in late summer and early fall. Year after year the first fish trickle in during low water, starting in July, slightly increasing in August, increasing more in September, mounting greatly in October, and beginning to taper off from the peak in November. This will prescribe a classic, bell-shaped curve if averaged-in over a long enough period of time. Any given year, however, might show a wide variation.

Let another graph show the shape of what might be expected in an average year. (Of course a low percentage of years might turn out to be average.)

INSERT ACTUAL/HARVESTABLE RUN SIZE TABLE

Again we must use mythical numbers. If 2000 fish are caught in a year in a certain river (whatever number of them are released) we might pre-suppose that the run is four or five times larger. In rivers that are heavily fished, or have many readily accessible fishing runs, the numbers of fished-over fish that succumb to flies, bait, or lures is greater. It might be half the run size, or sixty percent that get caught and often killed. Again we might suppose that the number of fish released (when the regulations don't mandate this) and the number of fish lost to fishing mortality are about equal. So it can be assumed--under these hypothetical conditions--that all hooked fish are caught and killed.

Thus the numbers of fish accessed by anglers is equal to the numbers killed. Theoretically it could be up to 100 percent of the run, but this never happens. Fishers are nowhere near so efficient. Not even gillnets are. Probably the maximum numbers of a run of fish caught and killed never exceed sixty percent, not unless they are hatchery fish whose ascent is limited by a collection point and fishers are allowed to pound this water until there is nary a fish left.

Anyway, the situation involving hatchery fish (which are expendable, at least for reproductive purposes) is not important from the standpoint of protecting wild stocks, not unless there in a management plan in place that targets wild/hatchery mixing. In this case, escapement of hatchery steelhead is necessary to supplement the wild run, and regulations will disallow a kill of even hatchery fish. Most years this is an atypical situation.

The arrival of the run measured over enough time will resemble a bell-shaped curve. The amount of fish harvested can be shown as a fixed percentage that will also resemble the bell curve and parallel it. This is useful to indicate the impact of seasons on the numbers of fish in a river.

Fishers have an easier way of determining the availability of fish. They depend on experience and memory; they also have a grapevine in which expected seasons and their variations are reported to each other at the speed of light.

A club of steelhead flyfishers meets monthly in a Seattle restaurant. They have two annual fishouts, one on the Skagit in April, the other on the Wenatchee in October. These are optimum times for each river's predicted run of fish. The years bear out these dates.

Alec Jackson once proposed as a joke that they hold their spring fishout on the Wenatchee, their fall one on the Skagit. This was funny because in the spring the Wenatchee is in near flood and there no fish except spawners. Similarly the Skagit is bereft of steelhead in fall and only offers the tag end of its small, well-dispersed summer run. Many believe it is not worth going after.

What he was suggesting is that they fish each river at the time it had its least number of steelhead. Nobody would show up. Then he would have the fish all to himself in the river that did. Everybody saw the humor and laughed. It was how each of them felt, in his heart of hearts. He wanted a monopoly of a good run of fish.

So seasons are important, and keen knowledge is a good way for a fisher to maximize his time afield. We who fish the North Fork, year after year, know better than to be anywhere else at the end of June and all through July. And in winter, late December and all through January are historically the critical months, but they have been decimated by the Indian commercial net fishery in the past dozen years or so.

It is okay. We now have the catch-and-release fishery of March and April for wild late-winter fish. True, it is non-consumptive (meaning you can't kill any of your fish), but the sport is superior, the fish larger, and the water has warmed enough so that the fish are more active and likely to take a fly. To me this is worth the tradeoff in killing small hatchery fish in much larger numbers.

Seasons mean changes in weather, changes in temperature of the air and water. A drought in winter greatly resembles one in summer, with the river dropping to about equally low levels and permitting fishing with the same sinking lines and flies of the same size. Similarly the dissolved oxygen content of the river is low and the biological demand for it high. But the air and water temperatures are vastly different.

In warm air and water, fish are concentrated and stressed, subject to predation by fish, birds, and man. But in cold weather the predation factor and stress factors are minimal. Cold-weather drought conditions seem to hurry on the spawning process, or at any rate the fish quickly darken; Curt Kraemer tells me this is mostly because no fresh fish are arriving. They aren't running the river because it is so low and--this time--cold.

Summer fish in the Columbia system require cool or cold water to move them, along with an increase in cfs. But winter fish are moved along by warm water--an increase in temperatures from the cold-snap drought conditions that have made them inactive in rivers and, out in the bay, unwilling to ascend.

In both situations a rise in river levels, or cfs, is required. This normally takes place only from rain--though snowmelt approximates the effects of rain but doesn't seem to move fish nearly as well. Perhaps it does the opposite. Snowmelt in spring cools rivers, while rain warms them; fish then want warmer flows in order to ascend. (And so do the smolts, in order to descend.) Then in fall, there is not yet any snow to melt and cool the rivers in its own peculiar way. It is cold nights that do this, along with rains that are not very cold in themselves, or else they'd be snow. So rain warms the rivers that are naturally cooling and brings them up rapidly, since none of the moisture now is falling as snow in the mountains and all runs down to the river and the sea. This mixture of cold air and warm rain triggers steelhead and urges them to ascend.

Cold air and no rain inclines them to remain where they are. If they are out in the bay (or in the Columbia and Snake), they are apt to stay there.

Rain is the fisher's friend, even if it colors up the rivers and makes them unfishable for a while. Eventually they will clear and they may be full of fish. Seldom are they ever full of fish without any rain.

One of the most sought-after situations for winter fishers--gear or flies--is a river that rises from rain fairly fast, then begins to drop slowly and clear from cold temperatures at night. (If they drop too far in the daytime, the line will start to freeze in the guides and halt effective fishing.) Run after run of fresh fish is apt to be found arriving.

Rivers rise and fall constantly. A river in freshet (this is something just short of a flood) is difficult if not impossible to read. Its chief characteristics are buried in a sea of brown froth. The river is moving at a dizzying speed, the water resembling a chocolate highway. The fisher wades out a short distance into the froth and tries to read the visibility on his boot feet. He finds there isn't any. An inch or two, but that is not enough to count. Fishing is impossible.

Driving away from his favorite river on a Saturday, he is surprised to discover cars parked along the shoulder near popular pools. He wonders if he isn't missing out on something? He pulls over, dismounts, and peers over the edge of the riprap. Sure enough, men are casting lures and bait into the slate highway.

No, no. He is the one who knows, they the ones who don't. Sometimes men will fish brown water with great globs of salmon eggs and pyramid sinkers, hoping to attract a passing steelhead, for it is commonly known that rain attracts steelhead and brings them into the river. And the truth is, these passive men--with their little fires and rod holders jammed into the sand, little bells attached to their rod tips--do catch fish before anybody else does, on a dirty river. But it is a miserable activity, if activity it is at all, they are so stationary. We do not choose to fish this way. Rather, we would go into a store and buy our steelhead from an Indian, who does not get rich from what his gillnet yields but only manages to support his family on a subsistence level.

But we don't. The idea occupying our minds is not to bring home a steelhead, any way possible, but to have some intelligent fun in a way that is challenging and active--on the wet fly. We don't subscribe to the myth of being Great Providers. We know that our fishing costs much more than it brings in measured by fish caught and eaten.

No, we fish for pleasure, and whatever meat we bring home is incidental. It is possible today to fish entirely for wild fish and not be able to kill a single steelhead in a year. The punchcard we carry in our pocket, along with our fishing license, is a joke. It allows us to kill and punch thirty steelhead a year. Let's see--that is 210 pounds of meat, if the average fish weighs seven pounds (and it does). We do not need or want that much.

Today's beginning angler who is learning to read water, throw out a fly, and fish effectively, is probably already a greater sportsman than most of us were for decades, when we killed our fish. It is not uncommon for a dude, fishing with an exclusive flyfishing guide like John Farrar, Dec Hogan, or Scott O’Donnell to release the very first steelhead he ever catches. I saw a picture of a famous golfer, Tiger Woods, who did this. It may be a hatchery fish or a wild one; it makes little difference to him. He will put it back gently, straighten up, smile, and say to his guide or friend, "That was fun. Let's do it again."

And he will be right in everything else that he does that day, for catching a fish is like that.

Let's put it all together, so far. The fisher goes afield alert, his eyes on the river, trying to read as much that is there as he can. He studies books during odd hours in order to learn more, but he depends on his senses--eyes mainly--to tell him what is out there and is important.

He finds, as he learns to read rivers, that he scans the land, as well. And the sky above. He is keen to all that is going on. Wasn't it Emerson who defined the American scholar as "man thinking"? Well, today's scholar is one who reads and thinks about what he has perused and confirms it with experience. There is no other kind of genuine experience except that which is gathered first-hand.

Try to be one on whom nothing is lost, will you? Please? Somebody else said this first, but I don't recall whom. Emerson again or Henry James or Socrates, or maybe none of them. Maybe I just made it up, I don't know. But it makes a certain kind of weird, good sense.

For example: Years ago I would walk my dog around a lake and observes the specks bobbing out there on the open water. I called the dark-headed ones mallard drakes, the nondescript ones mallard hens. I didn't pay any closer attention. It was beneath me. Ducks were ducks, weren't they? Oh, yeah?

Then I met a man on a ten-speed (or twenty; he was the kind to have a twenty-speed bike, if they make them), with a pair of binoculars around his neck, standing at rest, his eyes glued on my mallard drakes and hens. He studied them from afar, intently.

The binoculars were Leitz--the same people who make the Leica camera whose optics I know to be superior to nearly everybody else's. This guy appeared sharp, cool. Then why was he studying a bunch of dumb ducks? I asked him, in words a little less crass.

He told me there was a wide variety of ducks bobbing out there on the lake. He could identify them all, but only with the binoculars, and though the light was low, the light-gathering quality of most optics falling off rapidly, he could still make out their distinguishing characteristics.

He told this to me, who could readily tell the five Pacific salmon from each other by the way they moved through a riffle or by the substrate in which they chose to spawn.

He looked at me, no, not pitying, but with sad resignation. He named some species. Gadwalls, widgeons, buffleheads, coots, scaups.

"Take a look." He handed over the light-weight binoculars and I took a peek. The lake gleamed and sparkled. The colors and markings of the ducks leaped into my eyes.

A week later I had binoculars of my own--not Leitz; I had to wait seven years for those, and they were worth it and the price. I couldn't have afforded them unless they were on sale. And now I owned the Golden Birds of North America, which is not as good as the National Geographic's book of the same title, but I had to learn this, and by the time I did I could recognize most of the ducks, but I still had much to learn about their behavior. I still do.

I learned about birds the same way I learned about fish. I taught myself. That doesn't mean I did it all by myself, only that I did it alone, without attending classes. But I required help--first the man on the bicycle, and later anybody or any book I could come across that would answer my specific questions, which grew more complex and confusing, and which changed day to day.

A few weeks later, on my morning walk along the lake, I saw more than a hundred birds. I knew every species and most of the sexes by sight. I mean, I recognized them at a glance, even without my binoculars. I could identified them by shape alone, or silhouette, where they floated on the lake, by the size of their grouping, and by their individual behavior patterns. My binocs were used only for confirmation.

There were five buffleheads, the first of the season. It was November 11, a day which felt like winter but wasn't, not quite. The buffleheads divided into two males and three females. They are easily told apart by anybody who knows Rudimentary Duck. The males are brilliantly black and white, with a triangular bright spot on the tops of their heads. The females--more subdued in their coloring as are most birds--were beautifully marked, too. They had a little oval patch under their eye, which was unique. The sun caught it and made it shine. Perhaps this is how the male buffleheads recognize them, I thought, for it is surely how I do.

Farther down the lake were the first flock of scaups of the year. They are also a diving duck. I could not tell without binocs whether they were greater or lesser scaups, and didn't really care a lot, for if it doesn't make any difference to the scaups, why should it to me?.

Scaups always occupy the same locations on the lake, perhaps because they find their food supply there. It must be vegetative, though they are known to be fish and insect eaters. Half the time they are under water. When they are afloat, often they are asleep, their heads tucked under their wings, sort of blindly bobbing along. Males and females are quite different and I can tell them apart at 150 yards, though they have silhouettes that are nearly identical. I like them a lot, though not as much as the buffleheads.

I don't know why I like the buffleheads so. Perhaps it is because they are smaller, and I enjoy the way they take off from the water, flying low, their little wings whirring. They seem obviously paired and I, a long-married man, acknowledge our bond and my identification with this aspect. But since there were five in attendance, with an extra female mixed in, they did not exactly pair up evenly, and I wondered about the odd one. A sister, perhaps, or an old maid, or maybe a juvenile who wouldn't leave home.

Why not? What was the reason? Hanging around rivers and constantly reading them, it is the kind of question you ask. There is nobody to hear your reply, even if you had one. No question is entirely stupid, though: it is only one you haven't found the answer for yet.

Answers are often ringed with ambiguity. The ambiguity is part of life, inescapable. Better get used to it, for the answer you so badly seek may not be ready ones.

If you start reading water, you will soon read the sky and the land. You will say something to yourself like, "Those birds--I wonder what they eat?" "Where were they, before they came here?" "Where do they go, when they go away?" And this will lead to a study of migration patterns, wintering grounds, mating habits, food supply, etc.

Soon you will drive your wife and friends to distraction with such thoughts randomly uttered aloud, at any time of the day or night. You will be regarded as a certifiable eccentric, a genuine nut.

There are two kinds of widgeons, American and European, sometimes called Eurasian. The Americans exist in large flocks and are normally shy. They have a distinctive tweet, a kind of whistling chirp, melodious and cheery. The tops of the heads of the males have a silvery-white stripe that runs front to back and gives them the nickname, baldpate. The females, as with all the surface-feeding ducks, are dun and greatly resemble each other. They are drab.

A very few of the Eurasians are mixed in with American flocks. But there are some. The males have a rust colored stripe on their skulls but otherwise look much the same as the Americans. Females--if you see them alongside Americans--look a little different, but your eye forgets as soon as the two drift apart and are close enough to be practically indistinguishable.

Question: Do the widgeons care if they are American or Eurasian? I mean, for breeding purposes? My book says they don't. They will mate with each other. "Birds of a feather," and so forth. Obviously they have a near-identical genetic makeup and their chromosomes do not differ, or not by much. So why are there a few of the odd guys mixed in? What is the purpose? What use do they serve? And--over in Europe and Eurasia, where I suppose our odd guys exist in small numbers--do they serve the majority of red pates the same way for reproductive purposes? Why again?

Another thing. In the bird books there is only a wild guess at what many birds eat. "Insects and crustaceans" it often says. Or in the case of divers, "small fishes." Not close enough, I am afraid. I know how to get the answer, though. You kill the birds and do stomach autopsies. I never will; I'm not the type. But it is what Audubon would have done, if the question pressed hard enough on him, for I know he was not adverse to killing birds and, in fact, killed hundreds, which he drew from.

I don't want to kill birds, but I want to know. I want somebody to do it for me and put his findings in a book or a technical report. I do know that pied-billed grebes catch perch and--flipping them around and catching them again and again, until they can be swallowed head first because of the spiny rays which will choke and kill them--they will eat them. I know for I have seen them do it repeatedly. They are effective fishers and I admire them. I even envy them. I respect them because they need to catch fish to live and I do not.

How does the grebe know enough to swallow his catch head-first and thereby survive? Obviously he did not try it the other way and die. It came to him via the genetic code. How does it work? Nobody has the faintest idea. Nobody knows anything much or of any substance.

Nature is like this. You ask, it doesn't answer. You go away from reading a river, reading nature in general, with your questions still in your mouth.

Like a three-year-old, you say, Why? Mother Nature does not answer your childish question directly. If she answers them at all, the reply is guarded, hidden, and must be ferreted out via more evidence, more observations. More reading of the river, land, and sky.

What does the river do? Describe it. It slides by. That's good, but not sharp enough. Look some more, that is: read. What is this river like? How does it differ from similar rivers? Think about it. Think some more.

If you flyfish a river that is always changing, always adding to or subtracting from its sediment content (sometimes called burden), its rate of flow, altering its pools and its riffle configuration, modifying its substrate composition, as you throw your fly out onto its murky surface and reach for the depths, you will have lots of time to reflect on what you are doing. Its purpose? You are wasting time, but doing it in a way that is meaningful (taking writers as your authority) but not immediately apparent.

At the end of the day you feel well exercised and invigorated. You will not be able to put a name to the process that has so renewed you, only recognize it as having done its job. All your principle muscle groups will have been well worked over. You may ache and have trouble getting to sleep. On the other hand, you may sleep just great--what is called the sleep of the just.

If you have caught a fish or two to show for your activity, so much the better. But to catch fish is not really necessary.

All right. We have examined many of the basic factors involved in reading a river like a book. This may be enough for many wet-fly fishers. It is not for me. In order to learn more we must turn to our old nemesis, the U.S. Forest Service.

The Forest Service has long led a schizophrenic existence, and many of its employees seem to suffer from a similar disease. Since way, way back, the Forest Service has believed its main mission in life is to sell old-growth timber from the land it exists to manage. In other words, it believes it has a mandate from Congress to sell trees (often at a loss) that range in age from 100 to 600 years old, just as fast as it can. To help the buyers of its timber, the Forest Service will push new roads into wilderness areas, penetrating and violating them in a process that resembles rape. Depending on how much revenue is generated from its timber sales, a proportion is returned in the form of K-V (Knutson-Vandenberg Act, 1930) Funds designated for replanting. Other money is appropriated for road maintenance and stream repair, but the two monetary sources are related.

So on the one hand, the Forest Service is engaged in wholesaling the timber it is supposed to manage, on the other it is in the business of protecting the environment, especially the streamside habit it has just ruined. Boy, talk about your mental illness. The Forest Service is very much like the man who beats his wife into a bloody pulp, then rushes her to the hospital, saying to the emergency room physician, "Save her, Doc. Don't spare the cost. This woman is my wife."

The Clinton administration fired the chief of the Forest Service and his deputy, and appointed Jack Ward Thomas as successor, though he came out of the same institution that did the abusing. He was the biologist responsible for the spotted owl set-asides, however, and was one of the originators of the ecosystem-management concept. This was largely in his favor. He was able to implement a series of positive steps and, of course, the timber-cutting mandate was greatly reduced. Now, with a Republican administration in office, there is apt to be a return to old programs and much more timber harvest. Things will again resemble what they were in the past. All this portends great change, starting at the top.

The Forest Service has not always been seen in such a negative light. A job with them has been desired by many students in the sciences. The Forest Service has been able to offer career jobs to the best and the brightest from the nation's graduate schools. These young men and women are dedicated and knowledgeable professionals. They want to do good work in their chosen fields, but by degrees they are bureaucratically processed and taught to choose lesser goals, often ones that to an outsider seem ludicrous. And often there are "make-work" projects that sadly undermine the morale and effectiveness of good employees. To effect environmental improvements requires change, but change is slow, and old-time career mangers will hang on until retirement, their staffs sent out into the field to keep busy and not rock the boat. The "boat" is the old way of doing things.

The Forest Service is schizophrenic too in the way it relates to other organizations. Like somebody who stays too long at home, it grows agoraphobic and introspective, preferring to talk only to its own people in situations that are not new or challenging. Put a long-time Forest Service employee on a committee with other agency people and environmentalists and they often end up spouting a specialized jargon that is unintelligible to others. They speak of “scoping” and “time lines.” The meeting over with, the ranger and his staff retreat to the district office, a shelter in the dripping woods, where their only daily encounter is with each other and the wet conifers.

I exaggerate, of course. These are good people, with the best of intentions. The vestiges of the ideals and goals they acquired in graduate school and while wandering around on their own time in the woods are still with them. They want to do good, but they are in an organization that will not permit them to do so, at least not directly, and whatever good they accomplish seems incidental. Perhaps in the future things will change just enough so that real-world goals will be established, their degree of attainment measured, and most of those goals achieved over a short-range of time.

Imagine a situation like this: You take the best scientific minds with the best academic training and put them in a deep woods environment and tell them to define their jobs and keep busy. What will they do?

They will come up with hypothetical approaches to unreal problems and divine some frenetic way of measuring their success.

In the case of streams they will determine complex ways of evaluating and measuring them. They will do this in lieu of offering real situations, such as telling their bosses they shouldn't sell any more timber-harvest rights to private companies on land that is steep, unstable, and shows evidence of having slides.

Besides, the financing for their jobs is based on the amount of timber sold, in many cases. When the courts tied up future timber sales and prevented the cutting of timber already sold, funding for jobs quickly disappeared and so did the talented people holding those jobs. I can speak first-hand of only one ranger district, the one in Darrington, Washington, but their solitary fish biologist recently left, along with several other people whose positions had to do with implementing remedial work along streams. Reduced budgets and loss of timber-harvest income was partly responsible.

Oddly, the Forest Service has done some of the best work around in regard to analyzing stream behavior, assessing stream-channel conditions, measuring healthy stream habitat, and determining the amount of degradation that has taken place in streams under its management. But one central point is overlooked in all of this paperwork: it is easier and cheaper not to damage a stream in the first place that to "restore" it afterwards, once the damage is done, and return it to anything resembling pristine shape.

Restoration is a key word in the environmental literature today. People each year give out of their pockets large sums of money to restore streams to a ghost of what they had been. Most of it is wasted. A stream can't really be brought back. A lot of expensive activity can take place along its edges and in its channels, but it can't be returned to its former productivity and beauty. All that can be done is to create new channels, new high banks of riprap, new artificial in-stream structures, new quick-growing vegetation (of a type that wasn't there originally and may not be compatible with the indigenous species).

It is better not to destroy the stream and its fish-spawning and -rearing capability in the first place. It is cheaper and wiser. Damage done, the stream can't be returned to its former healthiness and productivity. It is a sad fact of life. Nobody can name me one ruined stream that has been restored. Instead, a hatchery is introduced, with the stock coming from either remaining native stocks or a foreign source, and everybody prays that it will work out, that is, the experiment prove successful. Often it doesn't, and the only way to know is to try it out. This practical test is called "adaptive management" and has led to some hideous crimes against nature, the chief one of which is loss of biological genetic diversity and the destruction of runs of wild fish.

If you want to learn how to read a stream, and to examine it further, deeper, you must turn to ecological literature. Oddly again, the best of it has been written by the chief culprit, the Forest Service. Read primarily by and to each other, and used as training method for new hires, this literature is produced in volume and regularly added to. It has an academic flavor, for often the Forest Service managers hold complementary academic appointments, and alternate working at universities and at research stations out in the field. This offers them an excellent opportunity for study combined with practical experience. Jack Ward Thomas came out of such an environment and so did Jerry Franklin, two leaders in the environmental movement.

How they kept both their effectiveness and their jobs over their careers is a study in personal integrity.

The Forest Service has much to tell us. It is as though their best minds first stood farther away than any of us and looked at the planet with keen optics from a space station. In a manual from a decade ago entitled Stream Reach Inventory and Channel Stability Evaluation: A Watershed Management Procedure, the authors begin with a quote from John Playfield, dated 1802: "Every river appears to consist of a main trunk, fed from a variety of branches, each running in a valley proportioned by its size, and all of them together forming a system of valleys connecting with one another, and having such a nice adjustment of their declivities that none of them join[s] the principal valley either on too high or too low a level; a circumstance which would be infinitely improbably if each of these valleys were not the womb of the stream that flows from it."

The author of the manual appears to be Dale Pfankuch, a hydrologist, assisted by Dave Rogen and Lee Silvery, operating out of Boulder, Colorado. Pfankuch gives credit to his mentor, Dr. Walter Megahan, from Utah, who did the pioneer work. It probably goes back no farther than this. Hydrology (as opposed to hydraulics) is a fairly new science.

To approximate what the early stream-channel morphologists thought, it is not necessary to go to the moon as Mayfair did in his mind in order to look down on Planet Earth and see how its river valleys were formed and what they consisted of. The image is much like one of the trees lining a river being abruptly turned upside down and the dirt shaken from its root system. (A debris torrent will offer numerous such instances.) Like a root mass, the tiny tributaries and branches of a stream collect minutely and flow downhill in their valleys, gradually adding to their volume (remember velocity and its measurement in cubic feet per second?) until they become of notable size. The Forest Service divides these into four groups or classes, according to size. One is a "perennial or intermittent stream[s] or segments there of that have one or more of the following characteristics:

"Direct source of water from domestic use. . . for cities, recreation sites, etc.

"Flow enough water to be a major contributor to the quantity of water in a Class I stream.

"Class II is: Perennial or intermittent streams of segments thereof that have one or both of the following characteristics:

Used by a moderate through [stet] significant number of fish for spawning, rearing, or migration.

Flow enough water to be moderate or not clearly an identifiable contributor to the quantity of water in a Class I stream, or be a major contributor to a Class II stream.

Class III: All other perennial streams or segments thereof not meeting Class I or II stream criteria

Class IV: All other intermittent streams or segments thereof not meeting Class I or II, III stream criteria."

I include so much for two reasons. One is to give you the flavor of reading a Forest Service technical manual. (It is vanilla.) The other is to show you how the lower the number the bigger the stream is and the more fish it contains. "One" is as big as they come, while four disappears in summer.

The Department of Natural Resources in Washington state has its own nomenclature for classifying streams. The numbers run in the opposite direction: one is small, while four is big. So when managers from these two natural resource agencies--each with considerable responsibilities for timber harvest and fisheries--get together, they are immediately speaking a different language. It is a wonder that there is any communication at all, let alone that they sometimes understand each other.

Next comes the stream-reach unit. A reach is commonly described as a length of stream channel limited by line of sight. In other words, if you walk down to the river and stand at its edge the reach is what you can see, looking first upstream then down. If you come to the river at a different spot, the reach changes, for your line of vision will be different.

The Forest Service was forced to alter this definition for practical purposes and I am sympathetic with those. Pfankuch defines reach as "a stretch of stream having an average gradient of at least three percent greater or smaller than the average gradient of the stretch of stream above or below it." What he is saying is that a reach is either a pool or a riffle, and is demarcated by the ordinary differences of current speed by which we recognize each of them.

The fact that he acknowledges that others may not accept this useful definition is indicated by the three question marks with which he follows the definitions, which I assume was originally an in-house query to his associates that became incorporated by the typist into the final draft and reproduced in many printed copies. This gives a nice, tentative touch to the definition and means we need not agree to stick to it literally.

I rather like it, though, and am inclined to go along with him, at least for a while.

He continues: "In the case of braided channels, the main stem reach will not be interrupted unless significantly changed by the alternate channel. A braided channel is larger than 500 feet and is treated as a separate reach. A side channel is less than 500 feet long and its habitat is rated the same as the mainstem, as long as the habitat or the stability stay the same as the mainstem." If they change, a new reach is indicated.

The words "side channel," "habitat," and "stability" are new, words expressive of particular conditions that can be quantified, that is, measured and rated on a scale. Also, 500 feet is indicated as about the maximum length of a reach, and he says that when the length gets longer a new reach probably results, at least for descriptive purposes. A reach longer than that is unmanageable, besides.

A new reach is formed, Pfankuch says, whenever a tributary enters a stream, provided that the trib represents at least 10 percent of the water volume of the main stream. Good; I accept that definition as well.

Whenever "an abrupt change in gradient" takes place, "such as a falls, cascade, or chute," a new reach is formed. And if there are many short changes in the stream channel in a ten to 50-foot stretch, the changes are all considered to be part of one reach.

However, in a short stretch measuring 50-150 feet of gradient change, no change of reach will be prescribed, not unless "it changes the way the stream channel reacts to the water passing through it: i.e., excessive erosion, bank cutting, or heavy deposition of sediments."

Now we are getting near to the heart of the problem, which is finding the trouble spot in a length of channel and identifying its nature. Later Pfankuch establishes standards for these and we shall look at them closely.

The final criterion of a reach is "where an anadromous fish passage barrier exists," either natural or man-made. The man in the field studying and recording the stream will mark the place where such a barrier exists on his map. He will carry with him a host of forms on which to record his observations, plus tools with which to measure what he finds.

A new word has been introduced, one we are ordinarily familiar with and use daily. It is "stretch." My dictionary defines this as a fixed length of something. It is a vague definition of something that is short in length, which is exactly what a stretch is. It is a word we river people use all the time to describe something less than a reach. Pfankuch says indirectly that it is 50 to 150 feet for a "short" stretch, and I find that acceptable. Thus, an ordinary stretch is about 150 to 500 feet.

Further, no reach will exceed half a mile in length. (Not on the Skagit, not on the Snake? Well, okay. I’m still with you.) The right and the left stream banks are what one sees when looking downstream. This is what fishers ordinarily describe as left bank and right bank. We are on the same wave length.

Anybody who has seen a Forest Service map has marveled at its clarity and accuracy. It is only on close examination of known territory that many errors can be found, some of them substantial. Probably nobody knows this better than Forest Service employees sent out in the field to survey and study a stream. Streams will be found to have moved hundreds of yards from where they are said to be and to have changed their configurations considerably.

Rivers are measured in river miles, as are their tribs, right down to the intermittent ones, which are inclined to disappear without a trace during the summer work season. Streams are further broken down into fractions of river miles. Thus a reading of 5.2 indicates a measure upstream from where it enters its source, a distance of five and two-tenths miles. This is close enough for working purposes--provided the stream hasn't moved too far off course or changed its basic reach length, or pool/riffle configuration, in which case a real problem results. We will need to redraw the map.

This is fairly easily done with a pencil, but getting the change onto a new map may take a decade. Or the change may get lost in the shuffle. In the meantime, researchers work with their hand-drawn maps in little notebooks which they carry into the field. These can be Xeroxed and copies exchanged with other workers.

Looking at rivers from the side, as a fisher does, we see them only in the sense we normally do. We are not used to thinking of them in three dimensions. To learn how to do this we must grow new eyes. We must look at them as though we are submerged in mid-channel, our eyes first pointed upstream and then aimed downward. This view forms a cross-section of the channel "along a line perpendicular to the stream flow direction," Pfankuch tells us. In other words, we are looking downstream, the opposite way from how a salmonid faces, which is only natural for us, since we are not fish. Looking downstream is how people look, at least some people. Wet-fly fishers.

The cross-section of a channel is limited by its banks, the water's height, and the material or substrate lining the channel bottom. We have been used to seeing our river rising and falling along a measurable bank, generally the one on its bar or bankside. Steep enough, such a bank forms a practical river gauge; shallow, it forms a wading bar and gradually creeps up to where the stones end and the vegetation begins. The cross-section forms a U usually.

A bank can quickly be read by the observer and a numerical rating given it according to height as a measure of what the river is doing. Pfankuch indicates where "the extreme high water line" is and how to find it; it is the uppermost level the river has reached in winter or spring floodstage and reveals itself by signs of the water's recent invasion, such as fresh sand or a line of scum and leaves. Good.

Next is "normal high water line," followed by unnamed stages that are better defined in a different manner by Pfankuch. These are given numerical ratings, with the highest reserved for full flood, which is five, when "the flood plain is normally covered." Four is high, or "channel full to the normal high water line." Three is moderate and when the "bottom and half of lower bank wet." Two is low, when "the bottom is covered but very little of the lower bank is wet." And finally there is one, or "dry," when there is "essentially no flow. Water may stand in bottom depressions." Low and dry is when a stream becomes eutrophic, loses its dissolved oxygen content, and fish die.

Pfankuch cautions his field workers to "avoid keying in on a single indicator or a small group of indicators in making ratings. Since the indicators are interrelated, don't dwell on any one item for long. If all are used without bias, the maximum diagnostic value can be observed. Do the best you can. Experience has shown that over and underratings tend to balance out. Total rating scores made by inexperienced persons are often numerically close to the scores of those with more experience."

Got it? Just go do it, Gang, and don't worry. The mistakes will even out. These are words (at least in the field) to live by.

Pfankuch poses three basic questions of an elemental nature that remind us there are great forces operating on stream channels:

"1. What are the magnitudes of the hydraulic forces at work to detach and transport the various organic and inorganic bank and channel components?

"2. How resistant are these components to the recent stream flow forces exerted on them?

"3. What is the capacity of the stream to adjust and recover from potential changes in the flow volume and/or increases in sediment production?"

He points out that all of these factors "are subjectively rated, item by item, following an on-the-ground inspection." He adds that if actual conditions seem to fall between field-classification numbers "cross out the number given and below it write in an intermediate value which better expresses the situation as you see it."

I will now omit the great number of complex forms Pfankuch provides his workers, when he sends them out in the field daily to record data that can be tabulated later. But I will list some of the criteria he uses for other stream-survey evaluations because it is what we can use, either formally on streams we care about or to file away in our heads as rough measurements by which to read our favorite streams and rate in something approaching an objective fashion how much they have deteriorated.

"1. Excellent--side slopes to the channel are generally less than 30 percent on both banks.

"4. Poor--steep slopes, over 60 percent, provide larger volumes of soil for downstream sedimentation for each increment of lateral bank cutting."

And then he provides a scale to be taken out into the field and held up against the slope of the land from which percentages can be read.

Another important evaluation of bank stability is the mass-wasting hazard. Mass-wasting is another term for slides, ones often occurring on a huge scale. Pfankuch tells his field workers how to use their eyes to determine the potential "event." He defines the hazard as the "existing or potential detachment from the soil mantle and downslope movement into waterways of relatively large pieces of ground. Mass movement of banks by slumping or sliding introduces large volumes of soil and debris into the channel suddenly, causing constrictions or complete damming followed by increased stream flow velocities, cutting power, and sedimentation rates. Conditions deteriorate in this element with proximity, frequency and size of the mass-wasting areas, and with progressively poorer internal drainage and steeper terrain."

What he is saying is basically this: Use your eyes. If you see evidence of the earth sliding, you can presume there will be more to follow, especially if there is planned activity, such as road-building, any type of construction, the preparation of landings, or the prospect for clearcut logging--the only type performed in the past and still the dominant form today.

Report what you observe already happening. And he gives some basic rules-of-thumb for ratings to his field workers:

"1. Excellent: There is no evidence of mass wasting that has or could reach the stream channel.

"2. Good: There is evidence of infrequent and/or very small slumps. Those that exist may occasionally be "raw" but predominately the areas are revegetated and relatively stable.

"3. Fair: Frequency and/or magnitude of the mass-wasting situation increases to the point where normal high water aggravates the problem of channel changes and subsequent undercutting of unstable areas with increased sedimentation.

"4. Poor: Mass wasting is not difficult to detect because of the frequency and/or size of existing problem areas or the proximity of banks are so close to potential slides that any increases in the flow would cut the toe and may trigger slides of significant size to cause downstream water-quality problems for a number of years."

Whew. Let us take a break here and think back to what it was we saw, last time we ventured out to our favorite river in search of wet-fly steelhead or salmon fishing.

We saw slumped banks at many locations, at least I did. Sometimes it is hard to apply what we learn from a textbook to a real-life situation, that is, to observe what meets our eyes when we go fishing and see something we may have seen before in front of us. Is this slumping bank opposite us a mass-wasting event? Or is it just a tiny slump or slide?

Probably the former--a mass-wasting event in the making, depending on its steepness, size, and soils. To know precisely, we must apply Pfankuch's criteria, as explained patiently to his field workers, who were largely untrained. They are no smarter than you and I.

About fifteen years ago, just after DeForest Creek slumped famously into Deer Creek, blocking it briefly and blowing a zillion tons of sediment into the creek, North Fork, the mainstem of the Stillaguamish River, and eventually Port Susan on Puget Sound, the Tulalip Tribes got a contract from the state to survey Deer Creek, using precisely these criteria (and others, which we will examine later). So their fish biologists duplicated many of Pfankuch's Forest Service forms and gave them to unemployed Indians, along with pencils with which to fill out the forms and marked wading staffs with which to measure the depth of pools and rapids, and then sent them out into largely unroaded country up in the upper Deer Creek watershed.

They covered about a third of the watershed, which was a big task, for the country is wild and rambling, the distances between access points considerable. They avoided much of the lower canyon and also the rugged upper Forest Service holdings, which are nearly inaccessible. Later they tabulated the results. They found a greatly disturbed river, with frequent small slides (or mass-wasting events, as they are called) and many humongous slides. They found a river that had become a shallow channel, with neither pools nor riffles, but turned into a long even run of gray water about ten or fifteen inches deep. And they found silt, silt everywhere.

It would have been useful, five or six years later, to repeat the survey and to compare notes on what was found, but no funding was available for it and I think tribal management lost its enthusiasm for the project.

Nor did the Forest Service have the staff to do the work; they were all off on projects planned two or three years previously and site-specifically funded with K-V funds. There was no additional money. So the tribes hired a helicopter flew up the river valley, videotaping the scene from above. Each year since they have done the same thing. Though not so scientific nor quantifiable, it was a useful expenditure and provides a visual history of changes in the stream channel. The tapes can be gone back to for review and comparison. To do so is informative and revealing. The eye soon grows used to familiar features and begins to look for them. When viewed from about the same altitude, and at the same time of the year, a good idea can be obtained of how much a given bank has slumped since last time viewed, that is, a year ago. And the year before that.

This is a quick, visual measurement of mass-wasting events that can be adjudged by Pfankuch's criteria and rated good to poor. (Nothing in the watershed rates excellent.) Generally the ratings are fair to poor, but as the sediment washes out and away, something becomes viewable that might loosely be called good, and we rejoice. Remember, all of these are subjective. They depend for accuracy on who is doing the viewing and how much experience that person has at this kind of thing--how many healthy and wasted watersheds he or she has seen.

With Pfankuch’s manual in mind, and a recent overflight of Deer Creek to guide us, let us visit a very different watershed—that of the Skykomish, but it might as easily be one of many other fine streams that begin in the Cascade Mountains and empty after some distance into Puget Sound.

The Sky heads near Stevens Pass, and its source can be identified from there as a tiny waterfall dropping over a crest just to the North. Just over the summit and flowing to the East, the headwaters of the Wenatchee soon appear. Larry Brown, area biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Department in Chelan County, says steelhead redds have been found up so high as the Great Northern Tunnel. Skykomish fish trucked over Sunset Falls on the South Fork, travel high into the Cascades on the West side. This locates the two distinct races of fish only a few miles apart, but separated by our local version of the Great Divide.

With two main forks, each draining considerable forest land, the Sky is the State's first wild and scenic river, identified as deserving of special protection. But logging on Forest Service land in the Skykomish Ranger District has followed the pattern on all federally managed lands in the past. It has been extensively clearcut and is now showing massive erosion.

All over the West, damage to watersheds accelerated in the 1970s, when the rich low-level forests had been cut and the second growth was not yet marketable. Since the Forest Service controls mostly high-altitude forests of old growth, the cutting was done on their steep slopes, many of them unstable, and the original trees had grown slowly. Whereas Douglas firs generate to marketable size in sixty years, plus or minus a few, at low altitudes, at higher they may take more than twice as long because of the lower temperatures and shorter growing seasons. For example mid-level forests of old-growth silver fir will take more than 125 years to grow back, once they are cut, and the Forest Service has had many failures at regeneration that they have kept to themselves. So once these trees were cut, it was not guaranteed that they would grow back in the predicted recycling span.

Also, steep rocky slopes not designed for growing trees as a crop were subject to slides and mass-wasting events on a large scale. Once started unraveling, they continued and grew. And different parts of the Pacific Northwest were troubled by indigenous soils. The Sauk and the Stillaguamish drainages contained much blue clay deposits from the retreating glaciers of the Ice Age that once were frigid, barren lakes.

Not so the Sky--at least not so much. This drainage was comprised mostly of granite and coarse gravels. This helped protect the river from slides that would not heal in time, or at least reduce the amount of sediment put into the river system when they had become stabilized.

The South Fork of the Sky is barred from the ascent of anadromous fish by Sunset Falls, which is impassable. So much upstream habitat unavailable to salmon and steelhead bothered fish biologists. First the Department of Fisheries lifted trapped coho salmon over the falls with a crane and huge bucket. Wildlife Department biologist were quick to follow with a similar plan for summer hatchery steelhead. Both species are now present and spawning and rearing above the fish passage barrier. They are considered successes in natural production, though what is natural about trapping and transporting fish is never explained.

By using the habitat for rearing salmon and steelhead juveniles, the habitat for producing wild trout has been virtually eliminated. Many people would think this was a good tradeoff. I'm not so sure.

The Snoqualmie River joins the Sky near Monroe, forming the Snohomish. The Snoqualmie contains salmon and both winter run and summer-run steelhead up to its impassable falls; above the falls is good trout water, somewhat limited in its food supply, and trout have to live to be quite old before they are of a size to interest most anglers. There is enough hard-to-reach water to give the trout sanctuary enough to grow, at least on the middle fork, which is now protected by regulations to provide a quality fishery.

When the Snohomish floods--which it does every winter, seriously and often disastrously; always expensively--the cause is almost always the Snoqualmie, but since the Sky floods dramatically, too, floods are often followed by talk of damming the Sky to reduce the damage to homes and farms built cozy to the river. By the state declaring the Sky a wild and scenic river a dam or dams are prohibited.

The South Fork of the Sky is fed by a complex network of creeks and small rivers, some of which can be seen from Highway 2, including the confluence of the Beckler, Foss, and Tyee rivers. Miller River and Money Creek, both small, join the South Fork a few miles downstream. Heading East on the federal highway, it is the Foss river that runs along side.

I describe this network because the rivers are all on Forest Service land and the area has been logged extensively, though much of the activity is screened from the highway (unlike the clearcut detestation that can be seen from Snoqualmie Pass, a parallel route to the South). When it rains hard in fall and winter or, worse, when wet snow falls and is followed by warm rain, these multiple denuded river valleys rise and overflow their floodplains. Sunset Falls roars and is awesome. Similarly the North Fork fills its banks and joins the swollen South at Index. Crossing the bridge there at the confluence can be a frightening experience, with the brown water rushing beneath and joining the other fork in a explosive plume.

Downstream the river rises to fill its floodplain, which is considerable. The plain of the Sky is so wide and vast that in the vicinity of Startup it is a long walk across dry sloughs and old cobbled bars to reach the river, once it has shrunk back into its banks. I'd judge the distance to be between half and three-quarters of a mile.

Coho salmon that are known to pursue a trickle to its source and spawn there can be often found dead this far from the main channel of the river, high and dry now, filling the air with their stench.

So wide a floodplain protects a river and the people who crowd its banks unwisely, but the demand for waterfront property and its high cost have motivated people to build closer and closer, ignoring the evidence of recent flooding. In the past decade there has been a body of regulations put in place to stop people from doing this, but the sight of a river in summer is so attractive that they cheat on the regs and suffer the consequences. They build without insurance, then ask for financial assistance after the floods or demand that river banks be riprapped for their protection in areas that have historically flooded. Often this flooding provides an escape valve for farms and developments downstream, and the new riprap causes the flooding to take place lower down.

Somewhere the river has to be allowed to overflow its banks to take the pressure off, but this is denied it and the floods become worse. Also the runoff from clearcut lands is much more than it was before the land was opened up to the elements from the sky. Logging debris washes down with the flood, chokes channels, forms temporary dams, and "blows out," causing extensive damage and multiplying the harm caused by the flooding.

Regularly in winter the town of Sultan (where the Sultan River joins the mainstem Sky) goes under water. Regularly the people are evacuated. Regularly the damage is assessed and low-cost or forgivable federal loans are applied for to rebuild homes and businesses that never should have been built where they were in the first place.

The fact that the Sky has such wide floodplains is not seen as a benefit but as a reason to build ever closer, in order to see the river. People love a river view and will pay a lot to have one. It is why cabins are built on stilts. I know a man on the North Fork of the Stilly who has jacked up his home several times, each time adding to its foundation and in effect telling the river to swirl around the cement but, please, not come inside.

I bring up the example of the Sky above and go into its general background to point out a river that is undergoing damage but whose basic configuration is tolerant to abuse. It is showing finer sediments in what is deposited on the river bottom in the aftermath of a big flood. Some long pools are choked with sand. Yet the river maintains its broad cobbled bottom, the stones polished and of varying sizes. The arrival of silt and peagravel so far is at an acceptable level (at least to me, the last time I visited it) and does not threaten to inundate its riffles and pools.

Forest Service timber harvest has been curtailed in the past decade, and unless it is resumed at its former rate prior to then, the Sky might be able to shrug off its sediment problems and recover nicely. If so, it would not be result of any intelligent planning so much as just plain luck.

The likelihood of a river being filled to the gunwales with logging debris and damming up, then blowing out, causing a "debris torrent" and great damage, is what frightens scientists working for forest-management organizations, such as the Forest Service. No wonder. It is timber harvest (and associated road-building activity) that increases the chances of such a disaster. Because of its channel configuration and its wide floodplains providing good gravel recruitment, there is little chance of this happening in the Skykomish. But other rivers emptying into Puget Sound are not so fortunate. Recently some have flooded badly.

Pfankuch and his associates evaluate the potential for a debris jam as an important part of their stream-channel assessment. He defines this as: "floatable objects are deposited on stream banks by man and a natural process of forest ecology. By far, the bulk of this debris is natural in origin. Tree trunks, limbs, twigs, and leaves reaching the channel form the bulk of the obstructions, flow deflections, and sediment traps to be rated below. This inventory item assess the potential for increasing these impediments to the natural direction and force of flow where they now lay. It also includes the possibility of creating new debris jams under certain flow conditions.

"1. Excellent: Debris may be present on the banks, but is so situated or is of such a size, that the stream is not able to push or float it into the channel and, therefore, for all intents and purposes, it is absent. In truth, there maybe none physically present. Both situations may be rated the same.

"2. Good: The debris present offers some bank protection for a while but is small enough to be floated away in time. Only small jams could be formed with this material alone.

"3. Fair: There is a noticeable accumulation of all sizes and the stream is large enough to float it away, at certain times, thus decreasing the bank protection and aiding to the debris jam potential downstream.

"4. Poor: Moderate to heavy accumulations are present due to fires, insect attack, disease mortality, windthrow, or logging slash. High flows will float some debris away and the reminder will cause channel changes."

In the aftermath of clearcut logging, a massive amount of woody debris remains on the ground, which is loosened and subject to being washed away unless it is burned. (Burning presents other problems, such as potential forest fires and air pollution.) When a logging road is built, a hillside is cut into on its steep side and the excess soil is side-cast to the fall-away side. The slide potential depends on the stability of the soils where the road is cut into the hillside, the nature of those soils (clay is guaranteed to start slipping as soon as it is bit into), and the steepness of the grade. Loose earth from the heavy equipment is thrown over the side of the hill, unless there is a reason to load and truck it elsewhere. Though the road is often graveled with coarse rock afterwards, it is for the sake of driving solely and the soils underneath the rocks will wash away.

Pfankuch lists the sources of debris that may cause jams or dams. Fires are presumed to be from natural causes, I take it, and not caused by man, as most of them turn out to be, except during electrical storms. Insect attack and disease mortality are genuine factors and abound in old-growth forests; they produce dead trees and as they decompose they form snags. Snags are one way to identify ancient forests and environmentalists think of them as natural recycling, whereas loggers view them as a hazard and consider them "degenerate." Snags are one reason why timber managers want to cut old trees and plant new healthy ones. They ignore the insects life snags further and the birds that feed on the insects and all the other wildlife that is dependent on the decomposition process. Here lies a fundamental disagreement.

When Pfankuch talks about windthrow, he is making allusion to the fact that forests will blow down along their exposed edges, but he doesn't tell us that clearcut logging creates such edges where they didn't exist before, not in a contiguous forest. And windthrow to loggers is wasted timber that will soon go to rot. They want to see windthrow timber harvested, that is, taken to market and sold. To them it is prudent and economical. They hate waste. Though windthrow occurs naturally, as a result of severe storms, it is not considered natural. And they argue that wide clearcuts are necessary to prevent more windthrow (or blowdown, as it is sometimes called). Small clearcuts encourage windthrow by exposing more edges to the elements, namely wind.

Lastly and mainly in passing Pfankuch mentions logging slash. Now you can leave slash or you can burn it. A burned former forest, like a burned grass field, regenerates more quickly. But burns often get out of control, or flare up afterwards and burn good timber, that is, healthy trees. Burns darken the sky and smell bad, enraging the public. And at high altitude, burns are not always successful in helping a new forest start.

Often, on steep slopes, at high altitude, in certain types of forests, slash is left behind. It is high flammable; it is in effect firewood. Left in place, or where the logging activity ceased, it is the material perfectly created for debris jams and dams. Pfankuch talks about stuff that will float, stuff that won't. If the logging debris is heavy, it will take an awful lot of water flowing at great velocity to move it away, gather it together, and produce a jam.

"Don't sweat the small stuff," he in effect tells his team, and it is sound advice. The limbs, twigs, leaves, and soil will wash harmlessly away and quickly compost--unless there is a great deal of it.

The other debris must be evaluated according to its potential to float downstream and join with other material to form a jam. Jams can trap dirt and smaller debris, along with the bigger stuff. When there is a blow out, it is the great volume of trapped small stuff that overcomes a drainage system and causes most of the damage through clogging.

Pfankuch and his team also evaluate the vegetative bank protection. This is the amount of growing matter rooted in the bank or flat. It helps hold in the loose stuff or debris. Here is how he describes it:

"The soil in banks is held in place largely by plant roots. Riparian plants have almost unlimited water for both crown and root development. Their root mats generally increase in density with proximity to the open channel. Trees and shrubs generally have deeper root systems than grasses and forbs. Roots seldom extend far into the water table, however, and near the shores of lakes and streams they may be comparatively shallow rooted. Some species are, therefore, subject to windthrow.

"In addition to the benefits of the root mat in stabilizing the banks, the streams help to reduce the velocity of flood flows. Turbulence is generated by stems in what may have been laminar flow. The seriousness of this energy release depends on the density of both overstory and understory vegetation. The greater the density of both, the more resistance displayed. Damage from turbulence is greatest at the bank edge and diminishes with distance from the normal channel. Other factors to consider, in addition to the density of

stems, are the varieties of vegetation, the vigor of growth, and the reproductive processes. Vegetal variety is more desirable than a monotype plant community. Young plants, growing and reproducing vigorously, are better than old, decadent stands.

Giving his field workers another scale with which to judge how well a bank is protected, Pfankuch says that 90 percent of the ground covered is excellent, 70-90 percent is good, if there are more shrubs than trees and "openings in the tree canopy are larger than the space resulting from the loss of a single mature individual." The bigger the opening in the canopy, the greater need for shrubs with deep root mats. He underlines deep, interestingly.

Fifty to 70 percent shrub coverage is fair, if there are some deep-rooted plants available. Under 50 percent is judged poor, with no trees, shrubs growing only in "scattered clumps," and root mats "discontinuous and shallow." "Growth and reproduction vigor" is estimated to be poor.

If I read this correctly, all recently logged areas will be evaluated as poor, and their potential for debris jams is high, if the volume of heavy slash that can be floated by heavy rains or snowmelt is correspondingly high. It always is. Only the stumps won't float away. And if there is a mass-wasting event of large order, everything may be moved into the stream channel, including stumps.

All comes down in a big enough flood.

Pfankuch continues his stream-channel evaluation systematically and relentlessly. He judges the lower-channel banks by how much they have been eroded by the water in time of flood and by how much the channel width has changed from year to year. He calls this "encroachment of the water environment into the land environment," which is an interesting way of looking at the process of flooding. He tells his troops to measure the channel width, depth, gradient, and "roughness" to determine the volume of water that can be transported over time. These are all elements which we have viewed in regard to reading water, but they also have technical measurements, some of which are subjective and others that are tentatively objective and reduced to numeric values.

Width-to-depth ratio is found by dividing the channel width, say, 36 feet, by the depth of the channel, say, 6 feet. This gives a ratio of 6. To Pfankuch, anything less than 7 is excellent. Eight to 15 is good. Fifteen to 25 is fair. Over 25 is poor.

He also tells his team to be on the outlook for undercut banks, always a bad sign. (And I would add sweepers, which are trees undercut and toppled in place into the stream; often these are cottonwoods, which have shallow root wads.) He says that when a channel increases its flow, "the banks may weaken and both cutting (bank encroachment) and deposition (bank extension) begin, usually at bends and points of constriction. Cutting is evidenced by steepening of the lower banks. Eventually the banks are undercut, followed by cracking and slumping. Deposition behind banks or bank protrusions increase[s] in length and depth."

How does Pfankuch know all this? Why, I suspect he is out in the field a lot and keeps his eyes open, teaching himself how to read water and its "encroachment on the land environment," as he calls it. He is practicing what we do, when we read water while out on a fishing trip, but he is a trained scientist who looks at what is going on in a different manner from what we are used to doing. He sees more because he wants to and has been trained to. But the methodology he applies is for the most part common sense. His system combines objective measurement with subjective evaluation. The first is easy to do, and if your scale is all wrong, your measurements soon will appear absurd.

The second way of thinking, looking, is dependent on a long time spent in the dripping woods, standing by a whispering river, wondering to oneself what natural forces are at work and how they interrelate. We, who fish, have lots of time to do this, waiting for a strike. In steelhead wet-fly fishing, there is usually plenty of time for reflection and rumination.

Next (and we are getting to the end of the categories of measurement and evaluation) Pfankuch looks at the bank rock content. This is the start of channel evaluation in and of itself. Very much as we did when we first walked down to the river, we judged what lay on the bottom (or substrate) by what we saw above water, that is, on the bank opposite where we decided to start fishing. He says most banks that are rocky will not grow plants, or not grow them well. It is only above these rocks that vegetation starts to become abundant.

Don't bother digging a hole in the bank to determine soil composition, he says; what you see protruding comes close enough and should be entered on your form.

Sixty-five percent rock or more is excellent. Forty to 65 percent, good. Twenty to 40 percent, fair. Below 20 percent, and mostly comprised of gravel 1-3 inches in diameter, poor.

He tells his team to be on the outlook for obstructions in the channel or protruding from the bank that will change the direction of the flow and its velocity. They may produce "adverse stability effects" and strike and undercut a bank, or else disturb the bottom of the channel. But if they decrease the velocity and turbulence and form pools, this is considered favorable.

I might disagree here and say the faster the water and fewer the pools the better.

Obstructions in the channel create sediment traps and lower the channel gradient. If you reduce sediment transport, there is a loss of energy that allows the sediment to settle out or leave in suspension, and the cleansing power of the river is reduced. Instead of carrying the sediment far downstream, perhaps to the sea, the sediment begins to drop out, the larger particles first. They are dropped at the head of pools, while the finer stuff moves farther along.

The obstructions that slow the current, such as embedded logs and piles of debris, are subject to increased leverage when the stream velocity increases. When they break up, they are apt to tear up the bank downstream, or abrade the channel bottom. They function much like debris dams or beaver dams, and are highly unstable. What they will do in high water is not predictable.

If sediment traps are frequent and unstable on a river or creek, they will fill up immediately and contribute to the widening of the channel and cause it, in Pfankuch's term, to "migrate." In the wake of logging, intermittent and year-round small streams immediate become clogged with sediment, widen and shallow their courses, and wander. (Wander and migrate mean the same thing. This is not good. And of course such clogged streams have sediment bottoms and cannot support much fish life.)

Pfankuch discusses the characteristic of a stream to deposit materials below obstructions, natural or man-made. For them this is a bad tendency, especially if the material is "predominately fresh, fine sands, some silts, and small gravels." Such streams build up their bar areas rapidly and the storage capacity of the substrate is quickly exhausted, as the area among the stones fills up with silt. This is commonly called "silting in," or "cementing." The net effect is that this happens where fish spawn and the silt does not permit the transfer of oxygen from the river to the redds and the eggs die. It is a most serious matter, and most of our streams in the West suffer from this problem. (The female salmon or steelhead's effort in overturning the stones while building the nest washes away the present accumulation of silt, but does nothing for eliminating all the silt to come, of course. How clean a fresh redd appears--and is.)

Pfankuch offers some excellent subjective criteria for evaluating the bottom of the channel and determining its composition. The more angular the edges of the rocks, the better, he says. Funny, but I never find sharp-edged rocks in the rivers that I fish. All are to some degree rounded, well polished. He also uses brightness as a criterion and says "rocks in motion gather no moss." The more the river tumbles them, the more they gleam and "their chroma values" increase. This is not beneficial to the river, pretty as it is. He likes stained stones, ones that are dark and covered with algal growths, although this may indicate too high temperatures and nutrient levels approaching eutrophic.

A stream with all of its stones bright and polished rates low, for they are in frequent motion. Similarly, the ability of stones to pack together and remain stable is positive. Odd-sized stones should come together and wedge tightly, with much overlapping. They should be difficult to kick apart with the toe of your wading shoe. Tight and irregular is what I think he means. Few of my streams have this composition. Perhaps more of his do because they are higher up in the watershed.

Stability is important to a stream's healthiness. Pfankuch measures stability by the size of the stream's rocks and boulders. Change or shifts in the basic composition of the substrate is one criterion; another is the relative size of the rocks on the stream bottom. "Bedrock, large boulders, and cobble stones ranging in size from one to three feet or more in diameter are considered stable elements in the average situation." Because Forest Service streams are generally at a higher altitude than where we fish, a stable stream might have rocks of a smaller size, and the amount of bedrock comprising the bottom vary according to other topographical features. In Eastern Washington and in streams flowing through major canyons, bedrock will dominate. But rain-fed streams draining into Puget Sound do not usually flow over bedrock or through bedrock canyons. Consequently, the size factor for stability will have to be adjusted lower. There will be a high percentage of rocks in the six-inch to two-foot size deemed suitable.

Finally, Pfankuch examines how much scouring of the stream bottom is taking place, which is another way to measure stability. If less than five percent moves regularly, the stream is considered in excellent health; also excellent if less than five percent of its sediments are deposited out. The scale slides downward, until a 50 percent measure of scouring or depositing takes place, which rates a stream as poor.

high slopes in the early 1970s, and the Forest Service saw its mission was to push in new roads and sell off the timber, fast, the damage accelerated. These high gradients and unstable soils hurried up the process and worsened it; this is precisely when--in the early 1970s--the wild steelhead and coho salmon, plus the Dolly Vardens and bull trout, lost their critical spawning and rearing habitat, and their numbers began their sudden and perhaps irreversible decline.

Intelligent, thoughtful persons like Dale Pfankuch (and Jim Doyle, of the Supervisor's Office in Snoqualmie National Forest) saw the damage occurring and, risking their careers, spoke forcefully as concerned professionals. They began to explain through statistics and scientific measurements (with an admittedly subjective base) the nature of the problem the agency had caused through its extensive timber harvest.

"Go out into the field and come back with more data, if you want to convince us." This bore a striking resemblance to the make-work projects of the past. Dutifully they did as their supervisors told them. They came back with more meaningful figures. The damage was worse than they had first estimated, they said. We are in danger of losing whole runs of wild fish--salmon and steelhead. They had trouble driving home the import of their findings and had to resort to economic justification.

In the case of salmon this was easy to do, for it had a commercial value. They could estimate the number of dollars lost to the commercial fishing fleet from reduced runs of salmon spawning on Forest Service land. And they could guess at the damage downstream on other people's lands (state and private) caused by sedimentation, debris dams breaking free, flash flooding, etc. This had a corresponding loss of revenue that could be added in, for chum, humpbacks, chinook, and in a few cases sockeye salmon spawned in the lower watershed, while some coho and winter steelhead did, too.

It was much more difficult to put numeric values on steelhead--a sports fish. (Oddly, when the Boldt Decision was reviewed and sustained, the dollar value of steelhead to the Indians could be determined, but I'm not aware of anybody other than tribal biologists ever doing this, for the steelhead was still thought of and treated as a sportsfish of no economic value. Many of us tried to correct this through estimating the dollar value of a steelhead caught in relation to a day or two spent traveling to and staying at a lodge and hiring a guide and catching a fish, but the cost was so high, nobody believed us. We thought it too low.) The Forest Service usually left steelhead and trout out of their value equations, preferring instead to lump fishing with other forms of outdoor recreation. This had a certain validity, since all of the other figures were (shall we say?) equally fanciful.

Sent out in the wilds again and told to come back with some fish figures, teams of Forest Service technicians had to do something other than read water for signs of channel and streamside degradation, while not naming logging as the chief culprit. (The cause was never to be spoken out loud.) They had to come back with hard figures having to do with fish populations. This was not so difficult, for they were subjectively doing this work all along, while they measured and critically read channels.

And at the end of the day, far off in the woods, they often fished for their dinner. They had a pretty good first-hand idea of what swam in the streams. They were generally trout, though some of them wore the parr marks of steelhead in their first or second year of life. Fried up in a skillet, they tasted just like the rainbow trout they were known to be.

There are more precise ways of getting to know the size of a stream's salmonid population and the Forest Service had biologists ready to perform them.

They had already produced tabular data rating the health of their streams and determined the nature of their largest problems, that is, stream-channel degradation resulting mostly from logging. Following Pfankuch's general method, fish biologists from the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest devised a family of forms to take out into the field to measure a stream's ability to raise fish. Some were directly threatened, they knew. Since there were hundreds of small streams and creeks in their Forest, it was necessary to move over the ground fast and identify with a quick-and-dirty method the ones that were relatively healthy and those that were not.

They came up with four stages of assessment. Stages one and two could be hastily performed, and several streams could be covered in a day by existing personnel over the course of a single summer. For stages three and four they took vehicles onto Forest Service roads, stepped out at a strategic location, glimpsed the stream, made some notes on a special form, and drove on to the next trickle. They recorded the "fisheries values, riparian values, and other aquatic values of the. . . lakes and streams." The form "provides a means for storing original, but often unpublished data," they stated. "Essentially it is a vertical file of information about the body of water."

The jargon is wonderful, isn't it? Thank goodness it is a vertical file, not a horizontal one, or else the data might prove dead on arrival.

Level one surveys, however, "are strictly an office exercise. No field work is involved due to time and financial constraints." Oh.

Level two takes "indoor" data from level one and adds to it "a comprehensive literature search, and contacts are made with other agencies, individuals, or institutions. Measurements, calculations and/or estimates are made to display habitat quality, or quantity, stream stability, and other resource features. Field verification or collection of new data is minimal and usually is confined to a road trip through the assessment area."

There it is, the man in the vehicle, stepping out briefly alongside the road and exercising his eyes. If earlier stream-channel evaluation studies had been made by a team and were available, this data would be used to establish "a quality rating, quantity rating, and recommendations to maintain and increase these ratings." Based on the stream-channel conditions reported to management, a decision would be made whether or not to proceed further and would form the basis for "a Forest EA" (environmental analysis).

Any application for a small hydro power development will have a level two survey performed, but most would be done at level three, they say.

Level three is a field survey. (At last!) "It is designed to provide adequate baseline and summary information for management of stream corridors, riparian areas, and designated wetland areas. It provides both measured and estimated information on individual parameters, as well as judgmental summaries on certain aspects of the stream environment. The emphasis is on efficiency and time so that this Forest's streams and wetland areas can be surveyed in a timely manner, in many instances surveyed for the first time."

Reading between the lines, we infer that the Forest doesn't know much about the streams it manages and will, for the first time, take a glance at them. It will do this on the three level "in areas proposed for manipulation by major land use activities," or "where time factors and priorities do not allow more intensive surveys. The survey is designed to be accomplished quickly and efficiently with a minimum of equipment and field time yet still provide baseline information about the aquatic habitat (fisheries values, riparian values, and wetland values), also will show existing or potential high risk areas to disturbance, and identification of possible habitat improvement sites."

Aerial photos and maps are to be studied in the office first, and the literature gathered earlier reviewed. The field trip is taken, followed by more work in the office. Things to be looked at in the field include: "stream stability and vulnerability to disturbance"; identification and documentation of potential fish and wildlife habitat improvement locations"; a general assessment in regard to "competing water uses in that system (i.e., hydro power, mining, irrigation, etc.)"

My God. It would seem that the Forest Service bothers to look at the streams under its management only when some large-scale activity is planned around them, such as clearcut logging, a low-head dam, mining, or irrigation. Otherwise all remains in a state of benign neglect and ignorance.

A level four survey is performed only after the level one or two cursory study is made, but not necessarily a level three. It is triggered to a "specific management problem or concern," or the stream "is experiencing a major land use activity." In other words, something big must be about to happen, or be happening, something problematic, or else life goes on as before, unexamined.

The manager points out that "this is the most intensive level of stream survey. This survey is not designed to be accomplished quickly with a minimum of equipment and field time. It will require as much time and equipment as necessary to collect the data needed to analyze and evaluate the problem or concern so that a management recommendation can be made."

"A minimum of estimated, subjective data" will be used and "a maximum of measured data" will be involved. "Data presented will also have a stated statistical degree of reliability." In other words, the time for bull shit is past, Gang; from here on we must gather facts.

For a level four stream survey to be performed, certain criteria have to be met. Determining anadromous or resident fish-habitat capability is one. Answering specific questions about water quality is another. Again there is the small hydro application motivation. Toxicity is another. Road-crossing structures where water is involved, or a potential fish-passage problem looms, is another. And finally there is the need for a site for "potential fish-habitat improvement."

Once they get out of their offices and into their vehicles, Forest Service personnel seem to be quite active and diligent about assessing the streams under their care and performing evaluations. Here they extend Pfankuch's methodology to fish habitat, measuring the same channels in much the same way and using a similar scale to come up with numeric values to determine how much damage has been done, so far.

For extensive damage has been done, without a doubt, to most of them, for whole watersheds have been logged, mile after mile.

To see a Forest Service managed watershed from the Seventies--a high-altitude one that is slow to heal and regenerate--is an education. My first--upper Deer Creek--I could not believe. The clearcuts went on seemingly forever, without relief. Later I learned the Forest Service put no size limits on its sales and required minimum "leave strips" near streams; when these were exceeded (through haste or greed, or both) the contracted companies were not held responsible or made to pay damages. Forest Service enforcement was lax, perhaps because they saw the timber companies as benefactors. Or--they might argue--they were without adequate personnel for enforcement of contractual provisions.

I imagine their fisheries biologists saw themselves as rebels with a dim cause. I mean, they had a cause, but the cause was not directly demonstrable. They were to busy themselves and look aside as the logging continued. Remember, these were some of the best scientific minds from the nations finest universities. They were young, they were intelligent, they were well trained, they were idealistic. They were told to busy themselves out in the field and to make reports through channels. (Bureaucratic channels, not stream channels, mind you.) They were told they were now living in the real world, not academia, and the chief business of the Forest Service was to sell timber.

When timber was sold, roads were built and fisheries assessed. Good, paved roads with culverts that didn't blow out (cost in 1983, about $40,000 each) were a benefit to the public, and families could drive to scenic picnic sites and eat their basket lunches on newly installed tables and benches. This was the public good that resulted from opening up roadless areas that had been so densely clogged with old and dying trees as to be inaccessible to all but the hardiest hiker.

And money from the sales supported Forest Service jobs and helped bolster the local community, which was timber-dependent and also where most Forest Service employees lived.

In a way, the Forest Service was saviors to many small rural communities. They provided local jobs (many logger's wives found office work at the district ranger's offices) not directly related to logging. They integrated communities and became part of them. They put on programs for the public, most of which were somewhat self-promoting. But they furthered outdoor recreation, built and maintained trails, and often stocked remote lakes with fry dumped from low-flying aircraft. Rangers themselves fished and hunted, mixing in with the locals who did this, too, but appearing more knowledgeable and helpful because they were professionals.

If you wanted to know where the biggest trout was, or where to get your buck, ask your ranger.

Poaching was endemic in the far off hills, where logging was the sole activity. Often it was conducted behind the locked gates of a private landowner, practically guaranteeing no interference. Alongside many key streams could be found the aftermath of poaching--fish guts and heads, discarded bait (namely salmon eggs, either bought or cut up in clusters), shrimp containers, and worm cans. Sometimes dipnets were used; in other cases where there were spawning salmon gillnets. And dynamite was a favorite trick.

I used to hear these tremendous booms come echoing down Deer Creek in the mid-1960s, late in the day.

"Poachers dynamiting a pool, more likely," he said with a grin. The grin denoted approval.

The concussion underwater would stun or else kill outright any salmonid in the area, adult or juvenile. A man would stand downstream and rake in the carcasses. Often wild summer steelhead were the prize. The fact that this was permanently closed water, sanctuary water, didn't matter. Nor was there a case to be made for having some "private sport" with gear or bait. Concussion was the poaching method of choice. It was quick, it was inexpensive, and it brought in the largest number of dead fish.

Dynamite was usually available and used for logging or road building. A big boom was not unusual, coming from a source off in the hills. Fish biologist looked aside, since they were peaceful men and women; besides, they had no law-enforcement authority. Poachers were big and tough, and they did not take interference lightly. They might hurt or even kill you--with impunity, so far off in the woods--if you challenged them. This tended to discourage being contested by officers from Fisheries or Wildlife, who did have the authority, but often did not carry guns or, when they did, not care to use them in a showdown.

A fisheries biologist looked aside so much that, if asked about it, he would not be able to give a fair guesstimate as to the amount of salmonids lost to poaching in a given year. He'd shrug, indicating that it was not his business--not his proper business, at any rate.

His job was to assess the habitat of many small streams with a high gradient and short flow and trace them to where they joined larger streams and began the network of capillaries that became the arteries of a great river that bore thousands of steelhead and salmon. Some of the hardier species spawned and reared on Forest Service-managed lands--summer steelhead and coho. But all the rest downstream were impacted by what happened on Forest Service lands, far above.

If voluminous siltation occurred as a result of mass-wasting events in the mountains, the impact downstream was cumulative and disastrous. Nobody knew where the damage was coming from, certainly not the Forest Service, whose other duties occupied them daily. It was not until a disaster triggered a level four stream survey that they were motivated to get out of the office and take a closer look.

Deer Creek is a good example. When a huge slide took place on land that might be theirs, or might be the state's, they hadn't noticed. They missed the event because they had their eyes on their land clearly t heir own, which was in bad enough shape already.

And in defense of the Forest Service, at least in this one instance, it should be noted that the creek on their own lands ran dirty most of the year from slides caused by building roads into cutbanks that had failed. A little more dirty water appearing downstream was hardly noticed. Even a lot. When I pointed out to them that it contained much logging debris and the evidence was of a huge landslide and blow out, they looked again and agreed. Then they didn't exactly spring into action, but they moved forward in a sprightly manner to identify the source of the disturbance.

Relieved, they learned that it wasn't on their lands. But then they became nervous when they realized that the boundary was only a few hundred yards away and the event might have been triggered by root-mass failure from Douglas firs cut between 12 and 20 years earlier on their lands--the classical length of time known for the roots to lose their tensile hold on the unstable soils beneath.

On most streams in their Forest the damage was obscured and, in seasonal dry weather, benign. It was only after snow arrived, and warm rains from a Chinook storm fell on the wet snow and melted it, that the major damage resulted. By then it was deep winter and everybody was snug in his winter den. Roads were inaccessible unless plowed, and only their main highways received this treatment. Even four-wheel-drive vehicles will bog down and have to be rescued by tractors, if the grade and condition of the side roads were bad enough. So sensible employees didn't go out in the wild any more than they had to. And the wild was where the damage was occurring.

Meanwhile, downstream, rivers were jamming with debris and flooding. Sand, silt, and small stones in the form of peagravel was washed into all the rivers of the West from unknown, upstream sources. Fish biologists had detected the damage and source of potentially greater damage to come from visual examination of their vast watersheds over the previous years and knew in their hearts what the source was: vast clearcut logging and roads that had failed or, after logging, had not been "put to bed," that is, taken apart and had the terrain restored to the shape it had before road-building had violated its integrity.

The following summer they saw more evidence of stream-channel degradation in the form of wider and shallower floodplains. I remember driving my wife up into the headwaters of Deer Creek to show her what I had found. When we left the Finney Creek drainage (in pretty bad shape and frequently blowing out) and entered what fed Deer Creek, we were on a road new to me, for I had come a different route before.

"Look," I told her, "there's Deer Creek," pointing into a steep draw lined with tall conifers.

"True," I said, "and neither can I. But that's Deer Creek down there. I can tell by the size of the floodplain."

And, sure enough, there was a wide swath of sand and gravel where Deer Creek had expanded in flood and washed away bank and trees. Now it showed ravaged sand- and slash-choked channels, the water in its parched course invisible from the paved Forest Service road. But I recognized it at once. The swath could be nothing else.

Fisheries biologists throughout the West were anxious now to evaluate what they had responsibility for and were largely ignorant about. Public opinion was aroused and fishers like myself were asking a lot of hard questions. Also, federal legislation under the Clean Waters Act was raising questions about turbidity and water quality. Temperature, too, was an important consideration. National standards were being established for all lands with running water on them, and the standards were high.

Biologists knew the Forest Service lands did not stand up well according to the new standards, but they didn't know precisely how bad the situation was because they had no measurements to tell them. Their gut feeling was they were in for a siege, and some heads might fall. Ignorance was no longer bliss but competence. They were expected--all at once--to have the answers to questions asked only yesterday.

Remember what it took to trigger a level three stream survey? And a four, and how much more work was involved by a staff long deemed inadequate? Now data on stream temperatures, spawning areas, rearing areas, siltation rates, etc., were being asked for in a hurry. The Forest Service bought some recording thermographs and planted them in the channels of critical streams and awaited the results, in the fall, when the water had cooled. So did the Indian tribes, who worried about their diminishing returns of salmon.

The water in many headwater streams had warmed so much as to reach lethal temperatures. Juveniles could tolerate such warmth only briefly, but nobody knew for how long. Fortunately streams cooled at night, especially at high altitudes, and also as fall approached. And there were known feeder springs where the young fish congregated in pockets that ran much cooler.

Biologists began a quick survey of spawning and rearing areas for various salmonids under their care using a system much like Pfankuch's and probably derived from it. Certainly the new system was compatible with it. Field workers were told to "consider a three square foot area as a minimum spawning area for salmon, a one-foot one for trout." Again a rating scale from one to four was used, the higher number corresponding with superior habit. Of course some of the stream channel now out of water was usable during the high-water period when trout and salmon spawn, so it should be estimated in the survey and also evaluated according to its cobble size, suitability, etc.

The top two to three inches of substrate was to be evaluated, mainly from the standpoint of stone size. It should be larger than 1/4 inch, or else it was silt and deadly. Less than 10 percent silt was rated high and given a rating of four. Seventy-five to 100 percent of the reach should contain this larger size.

If 10 to 25 percent of the reach contained such small sediments, it was rated good and given a three; it had "moderate egg survival and fry emergence." Fifty to 74 percent of the reach should contain this sized gravel. For a fair or two-point rating, 25 to 49 percent of the reach should be comprised of spawning gravels. Similarly, if less than 25 percent of the reach contained spawning gravels, but half of it was heavily compacted (or cemented in) and comprised of stuff under a quarter-inch in diameter, the site would be rated poor and given a one.

All numbers would be tallied back in the office and the ones with the lowest numbers considered critical and in need of remedial action. Of course there was no manpower or K-V funds with which to do this. There had never been enough. It was the reason why the Forest Service could claim ignorance. Much of the work was done back in the office. Spawning habitat was rated separately for anadromous and resident fish, and totalled in different columns. Also, barriers to the ascent of anadromous fish were to be taken into consideration, but since they might be bereft of fish, accordingly, they were to be rated nonetheless and listed as "a potential with a fish habitat rehab/enhancement" and submitted on a separate form. Or else such blocked channel could be recorded "as resident fish spawning habitat."

Similarly, rearing fish habitat could be surveyed and rated. "Rearing area data" was to be measured, preferably in the field, not the office. Eight kinds of pool types were defined for purposes of the survey, though the planner admitted not all eight would fit the "classic" definition of what a pool was. By having eight, he argued, there was no need to identify reaches "by the standard pool/riffle configuration."

In other words, you didn't have to be able to tell a riffle from a pool, just measure the depth of its bottom.

This is not as foolish as it sounds, for earlier we discussed how a riffle shrinks in summer and begins to resemble a pool. Likewise, if the gradient is steep enough, most of a creek's channel is riffle, broken only here and there with a series of pockets that might be called tiny pools. So it is indeed hard to tell the one from the other, especially at high altitude.

The survey asked for pool depth and also its rate of speed. The dual measurement, both done at once, was similar to what Pfankuch had told his researchers to do in the field. Additionally, fisheries workers were instructed to look for bank cover, or "overhanging organic matter less than six feet above the high water mark," undercut banks, and instream materials such as "submerged logs, root wads, old gabions, cement pieces, algae layer, etc."

Further, channel types were divided in two. There were main channels and there were side channels. Each was measured slightly differently. Mains were "DF (Deep-Fast), DS (Deep-Slow), DM (Deep-Moderate), SF (Shallow-Fast), SS (Shallow-Slow), and S-M (Shallow-Moderate)." Side channels mercifully were rated only Shallow-Fast and Shallow-Slow. Slow was less than a foot a second, moderate one-two a second, and fast over three. You had to guess, but soon you got good at it.

Pool depth could be measured by eye, but better yet was to mark off a wading staff and read at a downward angle off of it. This is what the Indians did on Deer Creek. I don't know what the Forest Service did. (Fish biologists I met in the field were more concerned with temperatures, and would lay their steelcased thermometers in the shallows and go off and do something, to return five or ten minutes later for a reading. Often the sun beat down. I, a fisher, sunk my thermometer elbow deep in the swiftest water I could find and after a slow count to fifteen took a single, final reading. Each time I measured a reach I did it exactly the same way, so that if my method contains an error, the error is exactly replicated, every time, and becomes intrinsic to the measurement and incorporated within it. This produces a sustained accuracy, or "an accuracy of inaccuracy.")

The survey instructions conclude: "Based on most studies and research, water depths of 20 inches or greater and water velocities of 1 to 3 feet/sec are the best for rearing for most salmon and trout age classes. There is limited use also in shallower depths and slower velocities. Each reach or each stream has a potential to become a high or a 4 with management activities such as rehabilitation and/or improvement."

Of course. The faster and the deeper the better, so long as the water doesn't run too swiftly, that is, over three feet-per-second. But I don't think that is too fast, not if there is slower water nearby, and there always is, unless you are measuring in a cataract. Then move off to the side.

The supervisor adds: "If one of the rearing area features is limiting, state in the comment section [of your form] why the reach received the quality rating [that it did]. Total the Rearing Area Data in office or field."

Finally, the field workers are asked to "record the presence of the following insect groups by checking the appropriate relative abundance column." Listed are "May flies, stone flies, caddis flies, diptera, and others. Note what life stage observed. Use as a guide to assess relative abundance. " And then there are scales given, as there always are, to measure dense, medium, and sparse clouds of bugs.

I'd write more, but the mosquitoes are driving me nuts. To be continued in the office.

We come now to fishes, probably little ones. We start, as always, in the office. We are told to "record in the office before going to the field the following information:

"Available information--quote source of species information and month and year of data.

"Comments--Use this area to record other related data (eg., local knowledge or experience)."

No, I am not making this up, nor am I having more fun at Forest Service expense. I report only the facts here. But under "local knowledge" I am tempted to have some sport, making up tall tales of fish hooked and landed or gotten away, fanciful tales, tales full of misrepresentations and downright lies, tales made up on the spot to purposely mislead a Forest Service fish biologist and lead him to the wrong conclusion. But, no. This man is my brother, and though our vocabulary is a little different, I know what he means and what he is after. I agree with his goals.

My favorite Forest Service fish biologist is Jim Doyle, who served in Viet Nam and still carries the experience with him. He is married, with children, and after spending his week off in the wet woods, measuring habitat and the amount of woody debris left behind in the stream channel by the last loggers, on the weekend he and his family backpack, often into the same area, and enjoy together the manifold blessings of nature.

Monday again, he is back at work, refreshed. Fish species are to be sampled. And this is the part I like best.

Field workers are told: "In the field sample for fish species present (minimum requirement is positive species identification on each stream surveyed.)

Well, all right. At last we go afishing. The idea is to catch at least one of every different kind of critter in the crick. When do we know when to stop? When the sky grows dark and we can't see any more to tie a fly on a leader.

"For each species sampled record the size range, number of each species sampled, the amount of area or stream distance sampled. Also record the method of sampling (electroshocking, dip net, hook-and-line, or other)." How about dynamite, the local choice? Note "the time spent sampling. Use comment section to note any other information." Then we are given a list of habitat-limiting factors such as "waterfall, cascade, logjam, chute, mining tailings, and sewage." We are given a list of corrective actions for most of these, but in the case we run into sedimentation, we are told correction is "unfeasible."

The list of fish types or species that follows includes five salmon (for the steelhead was not a salmon yet), three trouts, the steelhead, the whitefish, and cottids. My new unabridged dictionary doesn't recognize a cottid as anything.

I would fly fish to identify my species, stream by stream, and pick my time--August. Black gnat, Mosquito (not the live bait), McGinty, Para Belle, Professor, and old Strawberries and Cream, or Royal Coachman, will do. I am convinced I can catch one or most of everything that swims in the brook on these. If not resident, they will be steelhead or coho salmon parr, generally well-marked with vertical rows of bands looking like paprika stripes. They will probably be five to nine inches in length and I will quickly tire of the sport, so many are suckers for a fly. They will be two to four years old. I will guess their age by their size, and if the fish are very small I will gather them to be this year's hatch, or big fry.

If resident, that is, from a reach blocked to passage by an anadromous barrier, the fish might well be the same size, but there is always the hope for some bigger. I might have to release five or six fish up to nine inches to get one ten or over. Most will be rainbows, but there will be pretty green cutthroats in some creeks and in a few small brookies, with their colorful ringed spots. And if the stream is healthy (which is increasingly rare) I might find Dolly Vardens and bull trout, which are pretty much the same fish but have a slightly different look. (The bull trout is a charr that looks not like a bull but like a small alligator.)

In the early 1970s, Jim DeShazo, a Wildlife biologist now promoted into fish management, studied the Deer Creek watershed and wrote a report that is slightly famous. He said the watershed was the richest one he had ever seen, with little fish schooled everywhere in dense clots. (I saw it too and would agree, though I had seen others almost as dense--in the North Fork itself and the Kalama.) I won't dispute him. The wild summer-steelhead nursery was producing good catches of adults downstream, though the watershed was being logged ruthlessly, vastly, thoughtlessly. This soon took its toll and the catch downstream dropped off frighteningly. I wrote about this in Steelhead Water and so has Steve Raymond in several of his fine books. So there is no need to describe the rape here, only refer to it obliquely.

When a team of biologists from Wildlife and Fisheries began their annual electroshocking studies, they had little to go on except severe habitat deterioration. DeShazo had tried each fall to count adult steelhead from fixed locations (mostly bridges) at various upper-river reaches, but had been thwarted by dirty water and had managed only one or two good annual counts. So this method was ruled out as a management tool because, among other things, it was unreliable. Electroshocking works. It is also a method used by the Forest Service. Anyway, the number of young fish counted each year began to drop off by half each year, late in the 1980s and into the 1990s. This portended disaster.

The decline can be expressed in another crude graph as a downward line at about a forty-five degree angle. Only in the past year has the descent been halted and the line tipped up to indicate a recovery that may be a blip or an aberration. One year's measurement a trend does not make. Time will tell. But the habitat has improved over the past several years. I know this by eye, not by data collection or measurement. People who have been out in the field more than I first noticed it. It has continued. I wish there was current temperature data to indicate cooler temperatures, but there isn't any; there has been no money for the tribes or the Forest Service to continue taking thermographic measurements. But my guess is that temperatures might be a little cooler, on the average, though annual variations could have produced this swing, not increased vegetative canopy.

"Vegetative canopy?" My God, I'm beginning to talk like a Forest Service employee. I mean overhanging trees and brush, by God.

The same Forest Service manual tells us how to conduct an electroshocking exercise. Since everybody has heard about it, but few wet-fly fishers have done this, it might be fun to run through the exercise as though we had all the equipment and knew what we were doing. In the process we might learn something that would aid us in reading water and understanding the inhabitants, namely fish.

Of course it is more fun to catch them on flies, but let's assume we or our Forest Service friends can't or won't be bothered doing this. Then electricity comes to our aid.

We are first to conduct a level three stream survey. Okay, we have, heh, heh. Doing an electroshock of a reach makes the survey a four automatically, for it is field work and not easy. We need a team and equipment, some of it heavy.

We are told to: "Within the project area section off the streams with two 20 foot blocking series. [?] Stretch one seine upstream and one downstream on the project area or site. This will isolate the area to prevent fish from moving into or out of the area. Using a Smith-Root VII Electro Shocker, make two separate sweeps through the sectioned-off area. Because of poor water conductivity of the stream, a salt block may have to be added to the water (above the sectioned-off area.)"

This is to improve the ability of the water to conduct electricity and shock fish, you understand. The salt passing briefly into solution as the experiment is about to begin temporarily raises the conductivity and increases the shocking effectiveness. Otherwise, the effort is wasted.

The salt washes away into lower reaches and dissolves, dilutes, doing no real harm. Meanwhile the fish are stunned by the voltage generated.

"The same person shall do the electroshocking for both sweeps, while another person nets the fish and transfers them in[to] a bucket. The fish shall be transferred to an instream live tank if the need arises. Make sure there is equal fishing intensity and shocking times for both sweeps. Upon the completion of each sweep, the species and total length of the fish should be calculated and recorded. To avoid immigration back into the study section, the sampled recorded fish are to be transported to favorable holding waters above or below the study section.

"Record the information on the Level 4--Stream Survey; Fish Habitat Capability & Sampling Form." Wouldn't think of doing otherwise.

A couple of comments are in order. First, this is hard work. The shocker is not light weight and has to be powered by a battery or generator. All this and more has to be packed out into the field and lowered to the stream channel over what is usually a steep bank. It is definitely a team job. Two broad (30-foot wide) nets block fish escapement while the shocking is done to prevent fish straying and an inaccurate count of the reach. The reason why the same person makes both shocks is for consistence from reach to reach. This is your basic science. The idea is to standardize everything and reduce the extent of human error. The same person generally does the same thing the same way, especially if he tries.

Nets are manned up and down, the shocker is used to sweep the pool by one trained man, and another follows along gathering up the stunned fish and putting them gently into a bucket. The juveniles are counted and identified by species, length in centimeters or inches, and year class--whether they are this year's hatch or last. This is often measured as 0-year or 1+year fish, at least by Wildlife. With steelhead we are more concerned with fish in their second year, ones that have successfully wintered over once, for they more accurately predict survival and how many smolts there will be, for smolts represent the future of the run.

These fish are held while the second pass is made in a manner as nearly like the first one as the same man is able to do. The idea is to get all the fish, or a similar high number, from each section shocked. The second pass will get most of the fish missed in the first pass. And from reach to reach, the same man's percentage of success ought to be nearly the same.

Fish from the second pass are then counted, measured, etc., the same as from the first. The results are written down on forms devised and carried afield for just this purpose. Then the stunned fish (which will soon recover) are moved either upstream or down from where the next experiment is to be conducted, so they won't mix in with local populations and be counted twice.

What follows is best done in the office but is often performed in one's head, especially if target numbers are being sought, or populations from a previous year are to be compared. Fish biologists are concerned, hard-working individuals who are keen to know results of their activities. It is good to learn that, at least in a certain reach, fish populations are not plummeting but recovering slightly.

The electroshocking team moves from reach to reach, blasting fish with electricity and recording the results until they are done with their mission or dark descends. Then the equipment and filled-out forms are lugged back to the office and the work of data-reduction begins.

The manual gives the formula used by the Forest Service as described by Seber and Le Cren in 1967. Measurements of river areas in square feet are used. Generally now these are done in square meters. It is square, not cubic, because the depth of the river varies so much it is treated as a constant, though it may effect the numbers of fish present and accountable, or simply "countable."

Fish by age class per square meter is the scale I'm most familiar with and it is what Wildlife uses.

The manual continues: "After electroshocking, population estimates for each sectioned off area are to be calculated by using the following formula:

"Then by using this population estimate for the given stream reach, or stream system, the habitat capability (productivity) is calculated by:

R.Q.R.=Rearing Quality Rating (R.Q.R=Habitat Quality and Habitat Quantity)(from Stream Survey--Level 3)

It is October, raining, with a fringe of snow crowning the low peaks, and you are off in the woods on one of the last assignments of the year in the field, reading the water and measuring fish-spawning and -rearing habitat as determined by what you have learned to date about stream-channel behavior. Your vehicle is parked on the shoulder of a Forest Service road a quarter-mile away. You wear a billed cap and rain parka with its hood drawn up. Your Levis are cut off at the tops of your boots, which are made by Danner and have Gor-tex liners held in place with Velcro. In your pocket is a compass and inside your coat a waterproof pouch in which you carry a sheath of forms to be completed before dark, and that is what is approaching fast. It is about an hour away.

Your chief worry this afternoon is getting back to your vehicle and not spending a night wandering around in the woods. You'd survive, but it would be humiliating, and you'd probably catch a bad cold, for you are the type.

The stream you are surveying has no name. It is one of the many anonymous tribs of a creek that itself is a fork to a bigger one that does have a name, though it doesn't show up on most maps, including the one in your pocket produced by the Forest. You have measured the gravels and found them coarse, with few fines, and the trickle has a pronounced pool/riffle configuration, but it exists on such a tiny scale as to represent a microcosm of what a stream ought to be. It is too high up in the watershed to be home to anadromous fish, you suspect, and many of the debris jams downstream look sufficient to all but block ascent.

You tell yourself, "Coho perhaps, but surely not steelhead or Dolly Varden, unless the last named are resident."

You use a long-handled dipnet, as much as you'd like to dabble a fly for them, but you know that the chances of catching any your favorite way is slim, for the water is cold and clouded. The creeklet and all the creeks around are rising fast from the rain that is now descending hard, pocking the smooth ground where the logging ended two years ago and has only started to regenerate.

You see silt from the logging effort starting to make its journey into your creeklet. Class one, you'd call it, probably intermittent, which means only lately has it begun to flow again. Dry all summer, if it has any fish in it now it is only because they will have migrated into it recently and plan to spend the winter under its gravels. The silt is arriving in streamy clouds by the bucketful.

You make one pass with your dipnet. Nothing. You move upstream a few yards and do it again. Nothing again. Of course. You feel foolish in the field and are glad you are alone. What on earth are you bothering to do this for? All the other field workers are snoozing in their vehicles. The rain is a torrent. You thrill, because really bad weather is exciting to you, and far off you can hear lightning crack and flash brilliantly across the sky, which is leaden.

The clouds are low and you think it is probably lightly snowing fifteen hundred feet above you, where the cloud canopy has lopped off visibility and seemingly presses down like the parachute on a skydiver. But you can still see well enough to view the devastation opposite you on the far ridge, which has been clearcut to the quick. Not a single tree has been left standing for, say, a mile. It looks (but is not) as though you are above timberline. It looks like Verdun.

You see the ragged, diagonal scars of abandoned logging roads inching up the bare slope and the feathered breaks that indicate slumps or sidecasting--you are not sure which. And you can make out the postage-stamp shaped landings, where the logs were yarded out and loaded on trucks.

You wish timber companies would stop paying for ads telling the public how many trees they planted last year. If they didn't cut so many, few would be needed to be raised to seedling size and stuck in the ground to replace them. The ancient forest would go on and on, as it had before you were born. Or your father. Or your father's father. Hemlocks would succeed Douglas firs in the climax forest, and trees would die a natural death and break down through organic processes that make a wealth of life possible, from the largest right on down to the microscopic.

You know enough from biology courses in graduate school to name these species and describe their interactions, but do not do so, not in your own company alone. Instead you peer at the disappearing clearcut forest that is being overcome with cloud that behaves like fog. Going, going, gone.

You make a third and a fourth pass with your stupid net and lift out a clot of fir needles, some algae, a wad of silt in suspension, and a tiny fish. What? Yes, a fish. You raise its wriggling shape to your eyes, trying hard not to crush it in your hand, which wants to form a fist. "Lie still," you tell it, for you only want a peek and then will gently slide the living creature back in its watery world. "A peek," you repeat, only this time aloud. You startle yourself with the spoken word, for you have not heard a single human sound all day, except the crunch of soils and rock under your feet.

Obediently the creature lies still for a second, which is all you need. The fish is about three inches long, heavily parr marked, with a forked tail, but one that is not too pointed. You see no orange tint to any of its fins. The bars on the fish's side look like they were airbrushed there with an ill-fitting template. They are pretty.

Steelhead, you decide, and slip the fish back into its long shallow pool. Only eight inches deep, soon you will not be able to make out the substrate, the rain is coloring and swelling it so fast.

All your life you have asked yourself only the hard questions. To do otherwise might provide some easy answers, but it would be cheating, you know, and stop far short of the truth.

Come on, now. Steelhead and rainbows look exactly alike at this stage. At this age. Both have parr marks and the same trouty configuration. Both love life and wiggle hard against the threat of it ending.

Look, I know a coho could make it. I can tell from looking at the habitat. And I don't want to believe a coho can ascend something a steelhead can't. Is that any better?

No reason to apologize. We're all field workers in the same agency. Semper fi. Rain makes us wet brothers, additionally. A wet brother doesn't dish out crap or take it. He tries to play it straight, especially when his brother is himself.

Off in the wet woods, as night draws down, it is perfectly normal to talk to yourself, even out loud. Or if you are bored with your own company, you can talk to a tree--if any have been left standing.

He hums to himself wetly as he ascends the slope. Long ago the water from his lopped-off Levis has run into his waterproof boots, as it always eventually does, so they are wet, but from the inside. Inside is just as wet as outside, he knows. Also, around his neck, the rain has leaked in around the circumference of his parka, and he is about as wet as if he had been exercising heavily, which he has done, too. So he is both wet and cold, even though he is sweated from exertion. This is a daily occurrence--life in the woods. Nonetheless he feels great.

The young fish was an anomaly. Perhaps there is only one in this entire trib, and only, say, a dozen in the fork it flows into, and let us say another hundred in the fork itself. And in the mainstem of the nameless creek that you are free to name after yourself (though nobody will recognize it) there might be four or five hundred fry, a few dozen of which will make it through the winter. And in the second winter perhaps 10 will make it to the large fingerling size and become smolts. And of the ten that goes to sea for a year and comes back, maybe there will be one adult.

Will this fish find another and successfully spawn? Tune in tomorrow. Statistically, there must be three fish to spawn, to guard against the chance that if there are but two, they may be of the same sex.

I know, it is the way some people spawn, though some people of the same sex today are not concerned with reproduction, only with the act of sex. They are biologically dysfunctional.

It is different in the world of creatures. They do not have the same constraints or identity problems. But if people were like salmon, they would die after spawning.

Not an entirely bad idea. There would be, for instance, more room on the planet.

An interest in non-human biology is why he has chosen this career and is now standing in the closing woods. He opens his pouch and writes down some numbers on the form designed by some dry idiot. A few of the numbers are God's truth; others are the work of a fiction writer, namely, himself. Who is to know the difference? Well, he, for one.

The raindrops spot the top form and seep through to the pad below. The spots increase their diameter and darken. He watches, fascinated. With a grin he asks himself, "What percent of the form's surface area is presently covered with rain drops? Five, ten, twenty-five, fifty? If five, the form is relatively dry still; give it a rating of five. But if ten percent shows wet evidence, rate it as a four. Moderately wet is three. Very wet is two. Totally sodden is one.

"Now total up the ratings for all the forms in your pack. Enter this number on the master summary sheet, if you have one. If not, retain the rating until you get back to the office and ask your supervisor for a dry one. Complete the master summary sheet and make five copies. Give one to each of the four desks nearest you in the room. Retain one for your own files, of course.

"This data comprises a vertical file of information not previously collected or disseminated. Protect it accordingly." But not with your life.

Roaring with laughter, he picks his way up the steep hillside bursting with sword fern and salal. They are veritable green plumes, gleaming in the rain. Everything is awash. Around him descend trickled fingers of mud wending their way around tightly packed fir-needle clusters. All the fingers are headed for the creeklet, the creeklet for the creek fork, the creek fork for the creek itself, the creek for the river, the river for the sea.

Organically the foot bone is connected to the leg bone, etc. In a like manner he is connected to the GS-13, the GS-13 to the GS-15, the District Ranger. The Ranger is connected to the upper echelons of Forest Service administration by a thread that grows more tenuous daily.

Today he has a job, tomorrow he may not. But tomorrow is Saturday, his day off. He doesn't have to do anything for anybody but himself.

Why, I can't speak for the others, but this one is going fly fishing. The hope is for a steelhead or a big dolly varden.

I love and respect steelhead and all the salmonids. If they are big, so much the better. For one thing, they make a fisher humble. They sure do me. I have lots to be humble about lately, for I'm coming off a terrible season, one of the worst. Just when I thought I knew something about steelhead, they became scarce in abundance. I (and other fly fishers around me) couldn't find one or buy one.

First it was extreme low water, when steelhead wouldn't run up out of the Columbia into the Wenatchee, which is one of my favorite rivers. Then there was a great abundance of water. The river raced through its channel and swept my fly and line directly below me to a position where no sensible fish would be lying or in a taking mood. I could wade no more than a few yards out into the torrent that was my favorite hole and the bank behind me grabbed at my backcast. A Spey cast was the only way, but I had brought only a one-handed rod with me.

I started thinking. There was plenty of time to puzzle out what this art and science of fly fishing was all about. There was plenty of opportunity while I waited in my lodge for the river to drop and clear. Steelhead were not as predictable as I'd like them to be. And the variable conditions of river and weather made the situation even worse. For weren't steelhead in the river when they wanted to be, not when I wanted them there? They did not necessarily take flies the way I wanted them to. Why not? This lead to more deliberation.

I had written a book, Steelhead Water, in which I traced back more than thirty years of fishing for these elusive fish. When I was done, I was left feeling empty-headed. I knew next to nothing about them. What business had I writing a book, when I knew so little? Why, the more I fished, the less I understood about what was going on. I was performing senseless casting, largely by rote.

Also, I had left out a lot of people and experiences from my book. Maybe that was why I felt so incomplete. So--trying to understand better the nature of my problem, that is, flyfishing--I started writing another book, this one a kind of meditation on the uses of the dry line for steelhead. As soon as I finished the first draft I knew I had written a better book, and it made me feel a little less traumatized by admitting in public how little I knew. So there was hope, mild hope.

Immediately this book overcame me with a demand to be written, for if the use of a floating line could be likened to an "art," then the sunk line was more like a science, and looking at things analytically was much to my liking. If not science in itself, such a book could utilize a method that behaved more like science, if only on the surface. I decided to start with what we do after we have reached the river and given it a long, hard look.

It seemed so obvious, so elemental, that I knew I had to be wrong. Many books had been written on fishing with a wet line and all of them (except Lee Wulff) had seemed wrong-headed. It was like watching Tom Skerrett teaching his sons how to cast in A River Runs Through It. I kept wanting to shout, "No, no! It's not like that at all! You're doing it wrong."

Then how do you do it? To find the answer, I had to look at everything fresh, as though just arriving on this planet, suitcase in hand, my jaw cracked open in wondrous disbelief. Or else--having lived here all my life--I had suddenly been gifted with sight. And insight.

The cast (or as I'd like to think of it, the throw) is how you get the fly to where you want it to start fishing. If you are out on a river frequently, as I am, you no longer think much about casting but only where you want the fly to land so that it will begin to do its dirty work. You look out, you spot the place you want it to be targeted, and you put it there. The concept of the throw is nowhere in your mind. You are full of the idea of . . . execution. You perform it thoughtlessly, instinctively, practically. And if you fail to hit the target, you hurry up and repeat the throw, but do it slightly differently, so that you will be more successful. And if you aren't, you try again, again.

All this is done on a gut level. You no more think about it than you do about what is involved, say, when you hop in your car and drive to the store. Your eyes are busily negotiating the driveway, the turnaround, the run to the corner, the potential drivers who will be entering your street from the right and from the left. You come to the first stop sign and brake until you stop moving. You don't think about how you press on the pedal until you come to the invisible line where the car must halt or else protrude into the intersection where other cars have the right of way or perhaps the green light.

When fishing you do not think about casting, not unless you are a beginner. Or not until you encounter a special problem that you are not physically of mentally able to solve. Then you must think about what you do.

Likewise if you are a writer stopping to figure out for the first time what you are doing when you thoughtlessly, instinctively, do it. Then you break it down into parts--much as that old Sixth Grade Teacher used to parse a sentence, so annoyingly and difficult to follow. I tried to look at what I was doing with new eyes and break down the components of fishing out a cast and a drift.

2. The correction. (Sometimes called the mend, but not here, because much more is involved, and a lot of misleading stuff has been written over the century.)

3. Forming the bag. (The bag is the curve caused by the belly of the line behaving differently from the fly and leader ahead of it, or the thin running line and thick mending line behind it; the current effects them differently, according to their weight, diameter, and sinking rate.

Generally the bag is to be avoided, but it never can be, so it has to be accommodated or adapted to. This brings us to,

5. The swing. (This is the part where the fly drifts across the section of the river downstream and does the most effective part of its fishing. And it is where you will most likely get your strike of the day, either early or late in the swing. Usually it's late.)

6. The hang down, or end of the swing. (If the fish doesn't strike during the swing, it may at the end of it, or during the hang period. Hang periods vary, depending on the type of water, its height, and type of bottom or substrate, which lies directly downstream from where you have waded.)

7. The retrieve. (The retrieve is either the final opportunity of hooking a fish on this throw, or simply the mechanical part of the cycle that brings the line back to your hands before making the next throw, in which case it should be performed just as rapidly as possible and has no fishing-hooking function.)

8. The throw repeats, etc. You fling the fly out again, repeated, either exactly the same way as before (if you have reason to believe a fish will take this way), slightly differently, or very differently, either from the same position or from a new position, generally one about six or eight feet downstream from where you made the first throw.

This is called "step fishing," and is an excellent, systematic way of fishing through a piece of steelhead holding water in which fish may be lying in random locations, nearly anywhere, and are not restricted to a few choice pockets. If case they are, "spot fishing" is called for. Both of these methods will be addressed at length in the sections that follow.)

I pity guides (but not very much), for when they take a client fishing they often are expected to give casting lessons, when what they really want to do (or I do) is teach as much as the client can absorb about the act of fishing in one day. Generally this is with a wet fly, but not always so.

So instead of sharing hard-earned knowledge about where steelhead lie and how to get them to take, the whole day is spent watching the laboriously fling the line back and forth through the air and looking over their shoulder for signs of approval from me.

I guide rarely, and always so far for free. Once I took out an executive who had won me at an auction. He was a tall, slim Texan, a very nice guy, a man already with a set of problems that might be typical. At the least they are not unusual. He had been fishing in Alaska with a series of professional guides; accordingly, all of his flies were gaudy specimens, ones containing materials that flashed and twinkled like Las Vegas.

Fish in Alaska like these, especially salmon, who only want to get on with their spawning.

Also, this man had bought a stripping basket. Now a stripping basket has been likened to a portable casting platform, which is a good comparison. I've always believed that a fisher ought to learn from day one how to handle coils of line, and being told to clasp only the second coil is a great starter and will result in fewer tight coils and less tangling.

If he is able to stand deep enough in a riffle so that the bottom coils drag on the surface of the water--running water, that is--this will help his case even more, for the surface tension will keep the coils from flipping over and catching on themselves. But you needn't always wade deep and, in fact, much of the time to do so is a mistake. If you do so, however, your line-tangling problem will diminish by several degrees of magnitude.

Already, without setting out to do it, I have given you two great clues about fly casting. None of them have anything to do with waving the line back and forth through the air. But neither of these suggestions has anything to do with the use of that abomination, the stripping basket. (I use the abomination, from time to time, under special conditions, but not always, as some people do. I don't want to name names. I dislike what I have to do, but do it.)

I watched my dude casting at the top of the Deer Creek Riffle, waded out a medium distance. He was aware of being watched by his "guide" and was straining to do everything right. My heart sagged in my waders with empathy. After each quick drift through the water, he tucked the rod under his arm and began to whip line back into the basket with both hands. I thought of how Don Ives once showed Joe Bates a stripping basket in Canada and Bates went ga-ga over it. Soon it was listed in the Orvis Catalog, by God.

So it is useful and has its place, and even an Old Time Great like Bates can find its application enlightening.

It is especially Pacific Northwest and, in particular, North Fork Stillaguamish. Ken McLeod and Enos Bradner pioneered it, and these two skilled sportswriters each claim to have originated it. Would that they hadn't, for it retards new fly fishers in learning how to handle line and gives them sloppy habits from the start.

My dude that day was head of personnel for the Boeing Transport Division. He made his cast, as he had in Alaska, and let the line run across his fingers as it trailed out of the basket and after the fly. The fingers added to the friction always present in the release of line and his cast shot a maximum distance of forty-five feet.

"Try," I called over the roar of water, "letting the line run directly out of the basket when you release your forward cast. Don't touch it after you let it go."

Why hadn't the guide who told him to buy a stripping basket explained the problem? It should have been apparent.

For the rest of the morning, my dude thrilled to the distance he was obtaining. He had entered a heady new world, the one of casting far off. Every time his fly hit the water he was filled with accomplishment. He looked at me with respect and wonder. I knew so much, that look said.

I could have ridden through the day on that one tip and offered nothing more. What I wanted to talk to him about is what happens after the fly hits the water--does it sink, how does it swim, what slots in the river is it being presented to? But my dude would have none of it. A fly thrown so far, so often, would surely pass in front of the snout of a steelhead and be taken.

It wasn't, and I was surprised, for there were fish around that day in the Riffle, I knew, and I had caught one there yesterday and lost another. And as we all know and are reluctant to admit, a fly thrown out into good water any old way should eventually draw a steelhead strike in season, if you do it often enough.

A man I had known for years as a good trout fisher once joined me and some friends on the North Fork, which is not the most casual of rivers. One was a friend of Don Ives. Our mutual friend John was a tackle dealer and responsible for me having acquired most of my Hardy rods and reels at great discount, so I was anxious to return the favor by getting him a fish. But he was so hyper-aware of casting and not always getting the maximum throw that as soon as his line hit the water he stripped it back in, in hopes of getting more distance on the next throw. And on the next.

Of course a lot of eyes were on him, including Don's and mine. I tried to look aside but couldn't.

It reminded me of the few times I went out with my father to drive golfballs at a range. I was keenly aware of all the people around me driving balls crisply and cleanly hundreds of yards. Many of my drives from the range--where we were all queued up, parallel fashion--went out at crazy angles to the side. A few went straight up in the air and rebounded insanely through among the innocent drivers. Now I'm sure I could have done better, but I didn't.

Who had driven that wild ball that everybody was ducking? Surely not me. My glance was as perturbed and as angry as the next guy's.

I'm sure my father thought I was doing it on purpose. "Stick to trout," he probably thought, though he was too kind to say it. But I saw how he was distancing himself from me-- my own father!

The point was, I was trying. Nobody in the world more than me wanted my drive to go out a thousand feet, straight ahead. The more I tried, the worse I did. I gripped my club tighter, I swung harder, I kept my head down even more than before. The ball did even worse things, things I'm deadly ashamed to relate.

So I understand how it is to want to cast better and to try, to try harder. And to do worse and worse.

I did not know what to do to correct my golf swing or to correct John's casting. But I know a few adverse things that happen on a river, and one of them is wind.

Wind bothers everybody. Regular fly fishers have come to grips with wind, all except for the strongest gales. To cast in a wind that is blowing your line and fly at you is troublesome and dangerous. Trying to correct for it, you can hurt your arm seriously.

You can hurt your rotor cuff in your shoulder, like Dick Tetske did. And he is a big, strong man. Or you can hurt another part of your shoulder like Trey Combs did, trying to make one-handed line corrections with a Spey rod, which is heavy and always requires the use of both hands and the attached arms. Both men had to resort to cortisone shots before a prolonged fishing trip. So--beware. If you find the wind making you cast harder (and a shorter distance), consider quitting. Quit until you have found a pool on the other side of the river, at least, and have the wind working more or less for you.

But any kind of wind in problematic. There is the wind that blows your fly and line right back into your face, not from the side. It pulls your backcast into your face. It also deadens your forward cast and causes it to eke out half its normal distance. The wind from behind you is bad, though seemingly not so, for it muffles your back cast and does not load up the rod, which is paramount to making a successful forward cast. And the wind that blows the line and fly away from your head seems greatly to be desired, until it arrives and proves to throw your timing off and reduce your casting distance by, say, fifteen percent.

Ah, but on a windless night, how well you can cast. You wait for the line to straighten out behind you--and wait and wait. You can hesitate nearly as long as you want, then "catch" it and bring it floating back, to uncoil gracefully and smoothly forward, straightening out the leader and letting the fly drop with a satisfying little plop.

If any issue is to be ducked by a writer, it is the one of trying to describe the basic fly cast and what is involved in it. Instead of offering my own version, and walking into the trap, I'm going to skirt the issue and talk all around it. My hope is that the indirect method may bring some new elements to light and the light be illuminating.

Nick Lyons--the writer, editor, and publisher--sent me a copy of a new book of his, an illustrated paperback written by Lefty Kreh. The subject is Longer Fly Casting, and it is subtitled, "The Compact, Practical Handbook That Will Add Ten Feet--Or More--To Your Cast!" (If you are a woman, the book will probably add another inch or two to your bust line, as well, for it urges vigorous overhead exercise.) In his foreword, Nick points out that all of us would like to extend our distance by that amount, and I agree. I am always casting to my maximum, which is never the full width of the river except in late summer.

Kreh is an excellent fisher, photographer, and writer--his skills listed probably in what is descending order. But he has fallen into the age-old trap--writing about how to flycast. I really don't think it can be done but, having decided to circle it, I turned to some primary sources. Kreh is one of them. I'm sorry, but I think most people will become hopelessly confused, all within the first dozen pages. Fly casting is so complicated because the people who write about it see it as complex and difficult, and pass on their attitude, which is somewhat justified. But it is counterproductive to good teaching and learning. It probably will make a beginner feel quickly lost and sufficiently discouraged that he might well quit what is a pleasant recreation, when he needn't. What we want is some simple approach.

Kreh tries. He takes the novice out on the grass and breaks the casting cycle in half, for purposes of discussion. The forward cast is first made and the line allowed to come to rest on the grass behind the caster. Then the forward cast is made--off of the grass.

I'm sorry again, but this is all wrong. Since the motion is continuous, it can't be broken up, not even for purposes of discussion. And grass is terrible stuff to practice casting on, for it has no surface tension as water does (both still and moving), and the surface tension is what allows us to "load" the rod and make it throw a line its distance. If the beginner lays his line, first on the grass in front of him, then on the grass in back of him, he will be participating in an artificial environment which will not transfer usefully to water. And he will not know from the start that the motion is continuous and can't be interrupted. In fact, the change-over from backcast to forward cast is the critical point in fly casting and must be come to grips with, right from the start.

Otherwise (and mostly for the intermediate fly caster) Kreh's book is useful. It will add ten feet or more to your cast, and show you a number of ways to do it, under a range of conditions, including our old enemy, wind. And his advice on the double-haul method, which he uses extensively in his saltwater fishing, is first-rate.

Yet I became quickly confused. Yes, I know; I become confused easily and it doesn't take much. I remember watching Gary Borger demonstrating casting on grass at a regional conclave of the Federation of Fly Fishers in Olympia, years ago, and Gary was so good at what he did that I immediately became convinced that I didn't know anything about it. The distance he laid out his dry line I couldn't guess at, but it seemed pretty far. Of course, grass is grass, and he was standing less than ankle-deep in it. There was not a ghost of a breeze. If the conditions were river-tough, I'm sure Gary would have cast just as smoothly and well. He is very good, an excellent teacher. But the conditions were ideal.

Meanwhile, over in the corner of the vast lawn, two men were demonstrating the double haul. They worked in tandem, like draft horses. Each man shot line backwards, caught it, jerked line from his free hand downward, shot line forward, hauled on it again, and so forth. Their lines fairly whistled through the morning air. Together, they stripped line back in and began again. It was grim. Whisk, whisk. Whisk, whisk. More like pumping iron, I thought.

Here were two different styles for our purview and discussion. They were polar opposites. Gary's was smooth and delicate, the other laborious and clumsy. Each had a purpose. Neither style was quite what I was after. I went away from the conclave eager to find a river and try a couple of new tricks I learned from watching Gary. One was the upstream flip at the end of the forward cast and shoot; designed for trout presentation, I found it was just the thing with which to end a steelhead cast and tack onto it the first upstream mend.

Thank you, Gary. Also, I found I could still cast my usual indeterminate distance, wind or no wind. I hadn't dislearned how. That was reassuring.

The point being, whatever works is good. I went back to Lee Wulff--that source of most good things--and found two old essays from the Master. Both have something to say, at least to me. Let me pass them on.

published in Outdoors in 1953. In it he makes the case for short rods, full-arm casting, and high line speed. The line speed part probably goes back to Charlie Ritz, but everybody knew each other then and it is hard to tell where one man's ideas left off and another's began. In my book Steelhead Water I said that in presenting arguments for the short rod, Wulff unintentionally advances the cause of the long ones and the difficulties Wulff overcomes in using a short rod are precisely the ones I want to avoid, in the first place.

But I've used midge rods for steelhead in my own time and appreciate them greatly. I think that in dry-fly season I could probably go out and fish one for the entire season and have a lot of fun, and cast far enough and not sting myself too many times (surely not with barbless hooks), but I would be unable to switch back and forth between long and short rods successfully, and would prefer to stay with my long rod for both wet- and dry-fly fishing over the course of a long season.

In this article, Wulff makes passing reference to "the elongated oval in the horizontal plane" [italics his]. It isn't until August 1957, in a more generalized article for Outdoor Life, that he talks more extensively about the oval, and afterwards it becomes part of his and many other people's descriptions of how to fly cast. You might say the oval has passed into the vernacular.

For instance in Kreh's section, "Picturing The Principles, Lefty's Method--A Side View," he describes the path of the backcast straightening out and starting froward, he exclaims, "It travels in an oval." [Italics his.]

Later, in discussing the double-haul, he tells the beginner to string up only the tip section of his rod, in order to understand how the tugs on the line hand should be executed in a short, sharp manner. This is pure Wulff, of course, and Wulff carried it to his furthermost point by first using the tip section alone, then putting the rod aside entirely and casting the line directly from his hands "like a rope," he tells us. Not only did he manage to cast a fishable distance of 25-30 feet, but he caught a salmon.

Kreh gives this an interesting twist on page 32. He tells us to use only the tip section of "a four-piece travel rod, if you have one." (I suppose if you don't, you could go out and buy one.)

I don't think Kreh consciously lifted ideas and images out of Wulff's articles from decades earlier. I think they were "in the air" for all of us. We unconsciously absorbed many of Wulff's methods and, in time, began to think of them as our own. Their source vanished on us. [I think if anybody had pointed this out to Lee, rather than get angry, he would have just smiled. He was already at the zenith and benign, able to relax a bit after his multitudinous achievements.]

Similarly, when Nick sent me Kreh's good book, I scanned it and put it aside. I was interested in fishing, not learning how to cast anew, or reaching for ten feet more distance (which I could use), but I'm sure I unconsciously assimilated much of it and absorbed it into my own casting. And when I came across a section towards the back called, "The Single Water Haul," I said to myself, "Why, that's exactly what I do, if only from the right bank." And when I got to the part about the "Distance Roll Cast," where he says, "European anglers have been using spey casts and two-handed rods for many years to roll their lines back out for the next drift," I nodded knowingly, for I do that, too. And a moment later, on the same page [58], he added; "A number of years ago, West Coast steelheaders adapted the spey cast for use with their single-handed rod." Exactly, I noted; and looking at the two illustrations that follow: "This is what I do, but from the left bank."

But the influence of Wulff persists in all of us. For instance, Kreh talks about "The Baseball Throw"--a real zinger. The line sails quickly back in a horizonal plane, only to be caught and thrown back immediately in the same plane. Kreh, in 1991, adds, "I chose that name because you make this cast close to the way you throw a baseball. On a very short ball toss, the throwing hand doesn't go back very far. But when you want to make a long throw, you pull your hand well in back of your body. . . ."

In 1953, Wulff wrote: "My casting motion resembles that of a pitcher throwing a ball. I start the backcast with my arm stretched forward, bring it back in a slightly underhanded swing until the line is stretched out full length behind me."

Both men use the image of the throw, Wulff first. "Throw it out there," he says, and it is the title of his article. And I admit it is where I got it, for purposes of analysis of what is involved in casting techniques. "Throw" is a better word for the action than "cast," in spite of how long cast has been used and how ambiguously. I acknowledge my source and my debt, which is considerable.

I want to look at the Master's words closer, because I think they contain the best that has yet been thought and said about casting--along with much else. He has taken us about as far as we can go.

In "Casting Made Easy" Wulff first tells us of his need to come up with a quick, successful method (where many have failed) of teaching fly casting for salmon. He was at Portland Creek, guiding, and many of his clients were experienced fishers and casters, ones with decades of problems built into their styles that were hard to overcome. Rather than fight with them--affluent businessmen, barons--he spent time with guests who had fished little or not at all. Girls and women, too. [Wulff has never, never, thought of fishing as a man's sport, right Joan?] He gave a ten-year-old girl named Alice a lesson that she never forgot. He "read her right." She wanted badly to catch a salmon "all by myself," as she put it. And she did.

He gave her some practical wisdom that was old as the hills, advice substantially the same as E. R. Hewitt gave his grandchildren about "one quick jerk" to set the hook, then playing the fish with a vertical rod, cranking in line only when there was enough slack for the rod tip to be lowered. He left her in a boat with a rod and instruction on how to cast thirty feet. She came back with a twelve-pound salmon.

Wulff that day devised his "constant-pressure casting" technique, though I'm sure he had been thinking about it for a while, with that ceaselessly analytical mind of his. He was, after all, a trained engineer and a Stanford graduate. He said--or in words to this effect--to stop thinking about casting having a backcast and a forward cast. [Thus, laying the two halves out on the grass to dry, so that they can be examined separately, is a mistake that produces skewed casting from the start, for the two parts will never come together successfully to join again.]

He continues, saying that if you think of the cast as not being continuous but having two halves, you will never "time the pause" correctly as to when to tell the line to change directions. "The grief is in the timing," he adds. He says, "I know many fly casters who have worked for years without mastering it." Then he mentions the "tug" of the line when it has straightened out as being the indicator of it being time to start the line moving forward. More specifically, it is when the line "tugs back on the rod tip."

Ah, yes. It is all coming back, as in a dream sequence. The line tells you when it is time to change directions. If it doesn't, something is wrong. You have probably started the forward cast too early. It takes, Wulff tells us, a long trial and error. If you start too soon, that is, before the telltale tug, you'll snap off the fly; if too late, your line will have lost its tension and speed and "collapse behind you or tangle into an unholy mess as it wobbles forward over your head."

Left Kreh comforts us astutely, "God rarely lets us make a perfect backcast." [Page 96]

Wulff continues: "Constant-pressure casting doesn't require split-second timing because line is always stretched out behind the rod under pressure. When the final cast is made, it's bound to be properly timed." Then he tells us about waving a school pennant around in the air. If you keep the staff moving, the pennant stays unfurled. When you stop, it collapses and droops lifelessly.

It was at this point Wulff devised a stick with a short length of rope behind it; later he marketed it as an indoor fly rod. You can stand in your living room and watch television while practicing your casting and getting deft at it.

"Imagine," he tell us, "that you are standing at the center of a clock face painted on the floor. Swing your pennant clockwise--in the direction the hands of your imaginary clock would move." The motion will seem awkward and slow, but that's okay. It will force the student into making an even swing.

"Keep on swinging your pennant clockwise until that direction of movement has become habitual with you." Notice that he doesn't say "natural," for it isn't. He says he wants you to develop "muscle memory." Once you think you've got it down cold, move outdoors and string up a flyrod. You will need about forty feet of working space, preferably [ugh] grass. [Never caught a fish on grass yet.] The rod should be about eight feet long, but length isn't too important here. You can use any kind of flyline, but Wulff recommends a torpedo taper. All weight-forward lines today are versions of the torpedo. Wulff says if you don't have one, go buy one, a floater, for it is what you will be using, most of the time.

If you want to tie a leader on the end and a fly with the point broken off, okay, but it isn't really necessary. But if you do, it will make it seem more like fishing. If the broken fly is light-colored, you will be able to see it against a variety of backgounds and know where your line is landing.

"Again imagine that you're standing on the center of a clock so you're facing twelve o'clock. Six o'clock is directly behind you; three o'clock to your right; nine o'clock left." He "tells us to mark these hours with small stones," but I see no need, not if you can tell time. But if you mark them, the stones ought to be placed about 15 feet out from where you stand, he says.

"Pull enough line off the reel to stretch about twenty feet of it on the ground in front of you. Both rod and line should be extended toward the twelve o'clock marker. Now raise your arm above your head and, with the rod held parallel or almost parallel with the ground, start swinging it around in clockwise circles, the rod moving from twelve to three, and so on." [Italics mine, this time.]

"Keeping the rod parallel with the ground while you swing it in circles above your head may sound difficult, but you'll find that your shoulder socket, elbow, wrist, and fingers are all highly flexible joints. The line will follow the rod tip in a clockwise circle which will widen as you gradually apply more power. Try to swing the rod very steadily and smoothly. As long as you swing at even speed, the line will stream out behind the rod tip like a waved pennant. Practice until you're able to keep the line constantly in the air, and the rod continually bent under its "load" of line.

"Now, with your rod loaded by the constant pressure of the line it's pulling behind it, you can make a forward cast at any instant you choose. Simply face in the direction you want to cast and then, while the line is curving behind you, sweep the rod forward and down. The line will stretch out and fall in the direction you point the rod during this final sweep. Try several of these casts."

The important point here (and there are several but one is more so than the others) is that there is no need to worry about feeling the tug on the line or learning when to release line for the forward cast. It can be done at any time. Timing is no longer critical.

You are of course not yet prescribing an oval, but you will be in a moment. Already you have made your first cast, and it didn't hurt at all.

"Next step is to change the circle to an oval. To do that, while keeping constant pressure on the line, you must vary the intensity of that pressure by moving the rod swiftly along the almost straight sides of the oval, and less around its curved ends." Wulff likens this to driving a car on a track--an oval track, where you can speed up on the straightaway--but must slow accordingly on the two curves. Likewise, the cast.

The line drags behind the rod tip, slightly bending it. You will feel the constant pressure of the line on the rod and maintain it. The line must pull all the time. If you have trouble doing this, he says, slow down your swing and form a wider oval. You can return to the narrow oval as soon as you get the rhythm back.

The narrow oval is, of course, a narrow bend or loop that is referred to in other people's manuals. Keeping it narrow from the start is important and being able to correct its width when it widens. Similarly to control the line while out on the stream, probably in the wind.

"The change from circle to oval will give improved direction to your casts," Wulff promises. "To lengthen them out [more], pull about ten feet more line off the reel and [let them go out] through the guides and put more power into your forward and backward drives. You are now approaching the form of conventional fly casting--but with revolutionary departures."

You are casting primarily with your arm--your forearm--and not your wrist. Use of the wrist only causes trouble. Kreh tells us that flexing the wrist opens up the loop and causes the backcast to droop. He is right. The two men agree, or rather Kreh follows Wulff, as he does on many things. Anybody who can cast well today has learned his lessons from the Lee Wulff Songbook.

A bit late, I think, Wulff only now tells us to change the modified oval from the horizontal plane to the vertical. Kreh and I would have urged you to do it long before now. In fact, I don't see how you can execute all the Wulffian stuff while the rod and line are in a horizontal plane. If you have been able to do this, congratulations. You will feel cosmic relief, now working comfortably in the vertical mode. It is no longer, in Wulff's phrase, "an elongated halo."

If you are right-handed, you should tilt the oval slightly out from your shoulder. The oval is being performed at once in a three-dimensional plane. Also, the oval should be tipped slightly in the direction of the water in front of you, so the line is going up behind you and down in front of you. If it touches the water ahead, don't worry, he says, for it won't scare the fish. But dipped too badly in back, I would add, and you will break off hooks on the stones behind you.

But broken hooks is only your welcome to the world of sunk-fly fishing. They don't matter much, because you will be soon tying your own flies. It's fun and it brings down the cost some.

At this point Wulff simply stops talking, as if bored with what might follow. It could be because he has described his method fully and further discourse does not interest him. His fine mind has gone elsewhere. Perhaps he is off fishing, or at the least, fishing in his mind.

Wulff doesn't say much about handling coils of line, either, but other writers do, including Kreh. We have to look elsewhere for hints and clues in Wulff. For instance, with dry lines he says he likes a torpedo-head with fairly thick running line behind the back taper. "F," he tells us, which probably equates to L-3, for those of us who splice up our own lines. It was written before the AFTM line standards were established and made universally recognizable.

Once, when I asked Lee what strength tippet he used to land a nine-pound steelhead on a size 10 Surface Stone Fly, to which he had attached a size 28 hook, he stalled, saying the hook will break at one pound of pressure. But, still curious, I persisted. "Five-X," he replied, by mail, and I had to go look it up. It varied from one manufacturer to another, but was probably about five pounds, or .006.

We have different scales of measurements today, and they are not all consistent, as was hoped.

Wulff said he disliked "going down to G" in his line diameters because the shooting line tended to tangle, it was so fine. But I know fine lines shoot a great distance because they reduce the element of friction. And this takes me back.

One season in the early Sixties, I used a line bought from, I think, Bill Stinson that was Gladding H. Oh, it was fine, and had a nice brown enamel finish over its thin nylon core. I whipped on a loop and fastened it to the loop that came on the new commercial Wet-Cel II, the first pronounced sinking line of its kind. (It was followed in a few years with III, or Hi-Density, which went down about twice as fast; this in turn was superseded by lines two or three times higher in densities.)

Anyway, I liked the slenderness of the line and the longer distances it would shoot out of a basket. I was using a basket then, like everybody else. And I caught about a dozen mostly little Deer Creek natives. (One went 11 pounds.) At the end of the season I showed somebody my line, for I believe it to have been the source of my success and didn't mind sharing it, now that the summer was over. The person I showed it to was either Don Ives or Ken McLeod. Or perhaps it was Jerry Wintle.

And he proceeded to break apart my line with gentle tugs of both hands. I'd say it snapped at about 5-X pressure, or maybe six pounds.

I didn't believe what I saw and broke some off myself. Had the stuff rotted in one season's use?

"This is kite string," my friend told me. "You've been really lucky. What do you do, play your fish to exhaustion?"

I used a nefarious stripping basket, too, partly because of the additional distance it gave me--an excellent justification, by the way. And then I saw that all my friends disdained them and viewed them as crutches. So I secretly taught myself how to handle coils of line. The first thing I discovered was, the thinner they are the more easily they tangle. So I went up from G to H, as Wulff recommended. That is L-1 to L-2 or even L-3. And the higher up I went, the fewer tangles I had. But the less distance I got on a shoot.

It is a tradeoff. What do you want, distance and tangles, or shorter casts and a line that behaves? I don't know what the right answer is. It may be different from day to day, river to river, season to season.

Lefty Kreh has some good advice about handling coils when fishing a long line and wading deep, which is what we steelheaders find ourselves doing, nearly all the time. He says his suggestions are especially useful when fishing for bonefish on the saltwater flats. It involves holding line in ten-foot coils, a different one locked behind the first joints of two fingers, starting with the thumb and forefinger. Then you proceed with similar size loops, moving toward the pinky and stopping, I guess, when you run out of fingers. This should give you about fifty feet of shooting line in coils.

It is enough to cause special problems and require a novel method such as his. It is designed to discourage tangling and permit single coils to be shot at vastly accelerated line speed. Coil by coil, the line is released on each false cast, lengthening it out.

Kreh has more to say that is useful. He cautions against wrist casting--the old metronome style taught by Tom Skerritt to his sons--and the ten o'clock-to-two o'clock arc, with the thumb clamped on top of the cork. He says on page 19, "If the thumb remains on top of the rod handle on the backcast, the hand can travel only this [stet] far before the body blocks further movement. This limits the distance you can move the rod in a straight line." And he gives us a blocked-up illustration.

Worse, the thumb locks the wrist. It is a double-hinged effect, and the power dissipates, the line drops, and there is no energy left for the forward cast. To eliminate both faults, the wrist is not flexed at all in either the forward or back casts but remains in its normal position. In fact, it is the wrist that turns slightly outward, enabling the forearm to come into play.

The forearm is very strong--at least mine is. So is Kreh's. It is strong partly because of so much casting. It is also strong because it is what drives a hammer and an ax that splits firewood. So the forearm and the shoulder, rotating, are what give the rod its power.

The rod itself is very powerful--at least a graphite rod is. The rod loads energy quickly and transfers it to the line; when the line changes direction, the line speed hardly decreases at all. In fact, it may accelerate. The cuff of the shoulder rotates and moves away from the body slightly. The line is moving so quickly that it doesn't matters if the rod drifts back to the three o'clock position or, briefly, even farther.

For this to happen, though, the thumb on the grip has to be to the side. The wrist cocks outward slightly; this can't happen if the thumb is rigid along the top of the cork.

Kreh says, "Unless you tilt your thumb outward, your rod cannot travel 180 degrees from the target to get your rod hand straight behind you for the extra-long cast." (Page 9.) To do this, he says, "You must grip the rod in a normal manner and then rotate your thumb about forty-five degrees away from your body." (Page 8.)

This is important. So far as I know, nobody has said this before, not quite, though people have been talking all around the matter for years. Try it, and you will at once see how its works and demonstrates where all your sudden strength comes from. This is the full-arm casting that Wulff emphasized was imperative to any degree of success with the short rod. It is important for success with the long one, too.

If you use your wrist, Kreh adds, you will throw wide open loops. What you want generally is tight ones. You will never be able to form them with a limp wrist. But I would say there are times when you may want to vary the width of your looping back cast, and the skilled angler will unconsciously open or close his back loops, depending on what he wants his fly to do when it comes forward. Kreh correctly states that if the elbow is raised higher than the shoulder, a "trailing loop" will be formed; this is bad because it causes the energy in the forward cast to dissipate suddenly, and the leader and fly all land in a ball.

Also, as the wrist and thumb turn outward, the plane of the throw tilts outward more and more until the angler is casting nearly sidearm. In a contrary wind, he will find himself doing this even more. Rather than to be avoided, Kreh says, it is to be encouraged. But the forward cast, in a windy situation, should be made directly overhead, he says, allowing the plane to come back more nearly to vertical.

I urge caution here. He says (page 79), "Don't tilt the rod slightly, as we usually do on a forward cast. Instead, during the very last stages of the cast make sure the rod travels perfectly vertically. The breeze will cause the line to blow down wind of you and it will pass harmlessly by." [Italics his.] If I do this, I will assuredly lose my hat. I may even impale the fly in my right ear. I would recommend that the rod tip continue to be tipped away from your body on the forward stroke, even though you lose some power. Even if you are using barbless hooks, which you can purportedly extract from our anatomy easily.

While I take occasional small exception with Lefty, I am in general agreement. He is a power caster, a strong man used to accomplishing long distances regularly. He fishes saltwater for big, cruising fish that may be far off. His is not advice for the occasional trouter. But much of it is useful for the year-round steelheader, especially one who is fishing wet fly thrown a considerable distance.

Kreh's suggestions on performing the double-haul are excellent. Many casters trying to learn the technique make early critical mistakes that they never overcome and, thus, do not perform it even rudimentarily correctly. The haul is really only a tug, a tug conducted over a short distance--one of about four inches. By describing it as the line hand "following the reel," Kreh gives a good description of what happens.

The line hand is allowed to follow the rod (or--as he will have it--the reel) on the backcast and at the critical changeover it gives a short downward tug, not nearly so far as it could go. Most people haul more line downward than they should, which screws up their timing on the start of the forward cast. And then can never get it right.

` The purpose of the haul, done twice, is to accelerate the speed of the line at two cardinal points; nothing more. The increased line speed does two things. It keeps higher in the air a line that would be sagging, dropping, without the acceleration. And it puts more power into the forward throw, which drives the line forward and achieves its distance. This is why it goes farther.

It is not pretty or graceful, though. It does not make for an easier day afield, with more energy left at the end of it. But it provides a cast that will travel up to twenty percent farther, and that is what we are after, much of the time.

There is also the "Single Water Haul," which I use extensively. I find I can make a single pickup and shoot line without any backcast, which saves me a great deal of energy, over the course of a day. I judge an angler by the results he gets with the minimum of energy expended. Conversely, the more energy spent beyond what (I think) is necessary is to me a sign of his inexperience. Often I find myself counting an angler's backcasts. If they go beyond one or two, I decide that he doesn't know what he is doing.

Of course dry-fly fishing is an exception, for false casts dry off the fly so it will continue floating, and we all know that it needs this. But the extra false casts aren't always required and may get executed solely out of habit. A good dry-fly fisher makes no more false casts than the occasion requires. And, even with a double-taper line, which works out through the guides slower than a torpedo, it isn't necessary to wave the rod around a lot in the air, only enough to work out enough line in a hurry to drive the final throw forward.

A high-floating dry fly probably gets dried out sufficiently with a single backcast, most of the time, and if it doesn't and won't float, it ought to be changed.

An angler who false casts three, four, five times before he lets his fly drop to the water is wasting his time and energy. As has been said countless times, you don't catch a fish while the line is in the air. So any casts beyond the bare minimum ones are probably false. Truly.

False cast? A good name for it, indeed. There is the true cast and all the rest are to be regarded as leading in the wrong direction. The true cast might be called the sincere one, but I won't saddle it with that burden.

A false cast is one that doesn't go anywhere. Like a fog-bound airliner, it keeps circling the airport, waiting for the opportunity to land. It is rather pretty to look at, if you know little or nothing about fishing. It is thought to be the epitome of what the fly fisher does. Ha. The sunlight falls on the bright circling flyline and makes it glisten. Back and forth it goes through the air, in among the bugs, the dapple of sunrays, the glint off the riffle. The fish laugh at it. I laugh, too.

If a fish gave a damn about a fly, then watching it whiz through the air, but never land, would be ludicrous, not very tempting. Here it is, here it isn't. Catch me if you can. Sorry, Charlie. (Remember the tuna that never got the prize?)

The throw that quickly reaches the desired distance and falls to the water, sinking the fly rapidly to the fish's depth, is the one we are after. It may not be pretty or graceful, but it is effective. "Throw it out there," Lee Wulff tells us. It matters not how we do it, so long as it gets there, time after time, coming close to hitting its mark, into the descending dark. Only night, not weariness, ends our day. We have become efficient machines.

Watch a knowledgeable fisher. The idea is to become so proficient a caster that the throw is executed thoughtlessly. You "think" a place on the river and the fly obediently goes there. It goes there effortlessly, or rather with relative effortlessness. You do not sprain your wrist (for the wrist does not move, remember?), or tear at your shoulder muscle, not if you are careful. What takes the most abuse is the forearm, which is toughened by hard use.

Charlie Ritz, the owner of the famous Ritz Hotel in Paris and international fly fisher, had a hand so deformed from casting that it was a case for a textbook on gross anatomy. He used to practice his throw before the season began by taking a wine bottle and emptying it first. That was half the fun. He recommended a slender, hock-type bottle, the kind that a fine Moselle came in, according to Ernie Schwiebert, who ought to know. Such a bottle had just the right-shaped neck, one like a fly rod. After each day's workout, he'd add a little more sand, until finally the bottle was full.

He'd swing the bottle by his side, back and forth, gently, getting the feel of it. He'd hold it by the neck--hold it hard, if the picture of his distorted thumb and forefinger were any indication. Muscles loosened up over time, he'd start with his arm fully extended and rotate the bottle in the plane of his shoulders, swinging it in two directions. Then he'd hold his elbow tight to his side and raise the bottle from his knee to his waist. Next, he'd raise the bottle from his waist to his shoulder. Then he'd start to swing it circularly in a clockwise direction, now counterclockwise, and raise the wrist and concentrate on its action. The wrist is what he wanted to strengthen. Finally he'd switch to the overhead motion that most resembles flycasting. I suspect he'd turn his thumb out, and lock his wrist, and start exercising his forearm, too, as he rebuilt the muscles that would enable him to accelerate his line speed.

Ritz recommended the use of an old tennis ball to strengthen the thumb. Old because it was getting soft. When the thumb toughened up, he'd get a new tennis ball because it was firmer. Grips varied from the thumb classically being put on top to the forefinger being placed there. In the "Free Wrist Grip" shown by Schwiebert, the thumb was allowed to slip over, but it was on the inside, not the outside; the benefit of this was that it allowed the reel and rod butt to be placed against the underside of the forearm. This locked the wrist and kept it from being flexed.

A tight loop was adjudged good by all. In the two-volume edition of Schwiebert's monumental Trout, the author devotes many pages to illustrations (his) of different kinds of casts (his, too), so many that they soon become confusing and bewildering. But the practical elements are evident. "Narrow casting loops are ideal suited to combating wind and reach out for distance," he tells us, "though wide loops are delivered with more delicacy of presentation." (Page 1222.)

This is the first time anybody has had anything positive to say about the wide loop. Schwiebert is perfectly right. There is a time for the wide loop and the accomplished angler ought to when and how to form one at will. He does this by undoing everything he learned in forming the tight loop--relaxing his wrist, slowing the line speed, and letting the rod tip reduce its movement. Quickly the loop opens up and the throw becomes softer; the line sails out and the fly drops gently to the water. The danger is that the leader will not straighten out or may fall in a heap. This is not quite the disaster it sounds, for--since we aren't fishing for selective trout that are easily disturbed--the cast can be corrected on the next throw. Generally this will be accomplished by tightening the loop somewhat.

There is so much in Schwiebert on casting that we face the problem of tactical overkill, but the book is after all an encyclopedia, and in encyclopedias the big danger is in leaving something out. He does not and brings together much delightful reading from other sources. For instance there is Sparse Gray Hackle (Alfred W. Miller) on distance casting. In his book, Fishless Days and Nights, old Sparse tells a story of one of the Catskill regulars taking a difficult brown trout on a Willowemoc flat. "It was a medium cast of sixty feet," said the man.

He is immediately interrupted by another angler who says he doubts that anybody can cast so far on this water. A competition promptly takes place on the Home Pool. The second man is right: Nobody can cast that far. For a trouter, that is a huge distance with a light rod and line.

For a steelheader, the basic minimum distance is about fifty-five feet. A sixty-foot cast would be ordinary. It is why we wield long rods and cast heavy lines, utilizing single-line hauls and often double ones.

Schwiebert correctly states, on page 1269: "The single haul is the foundation [for the double haul]. The long backcast is impossible to loft and float without considerable acceleration and velocity. That velocity must decelerate and die before a fresh acceleration can occur in the opposite direction. The accelerated pickup and power stroke and high backcast are critical, with the proper timing to fully extend the line and load the rod. Water friction builds sufficient rod stress on pickup to build backcast velocity, but with a long line working, it is difficult to build equal line speed for the forward casting stroke. Without a double haul the left hand can strip in a single pull of five to six feet. . . ." [Italics mine.] The single haul involves drawing in an arm's length of line with the backcast stroke, the maintenance of continuous tension throughout the extension of the backcast, and the release of that slack into the forward cast--followed by the remaining slack trailing in the water, once the forward stroke is delivered."

Wait a minute. There is something new here, or at least something different. Schwiebert's haul is a long one, not the four or five inch tug recommended by Kreh. Who is right? Well, they both are. The two men are fishing under different circumstances. My own experience comes closer to Schwiebert's. It does because my casting makes use of what Kreh calls "the Single Water Haul," but it is conducted as Schwiebert describes, with a long one-handed strip of line off the surface of the water utilizing the surface tension of the water to load the rod. It is a rather violent lift, but the violence soon reduces itself to an easy motion backwards as the line straightens out and provides a soft forward cast with a tight loop. If I want even more distance, I will make a single false cast forward, shooting line ahead while I do it, and then catching all this line on the backcast and giving it a short (four-to-five inch) tug as it changes direction and comes forward again to shoot fairly effortlessly. A throw like this one I can perform hour after hour. It lands nicely, too.

The pickup is, as I said, rather violent, but the energy is quickly dissipated. The rest of the throw is an easy flow, for the line has been rapidly accelerated by the pickup and its speed only maintained by the short tug at the end of the backward arc.

Like so many good things, it is easier to do than to describe. It looks like a very simple "throw," which is what it really is. I am conscious of nothing more than wanting it to go a certain good distance and delivering my fly to its destination. I came upon this style by spending a lot of time on a river and adapting to conditions. It turns out, after a bit of analysis, that I have brought Lefty Kreh and Ernie Schwiebert's techniques together. Perhaps there has not been much distance between them. Kreh is an accomplished saltwater distance caster, while Schwiebert is a skillful trout fisher who prefers delicacy and craft to achieving great distances. Yet their two territories overlap. On a trout stream there is often wind. Schwiebert fishing in a gale in Terra de Fuego is a good example. He and his partner find that all they have to do to make a backcast is throw the line straight up into the air; the wind carries it back and forms the perfect loop. Then they must drive the throw into the wind. This is easier than it sounds, if the backcast is correctly made.

Most people styles are amalgams, like mine is. You pick up what you need as you move through life and only in retrospect can you identify the elements and trace them back to a source. They exist in writing only because somebody before us stopped and thought and wrote down what he thought happened while he was fishing.

One principle that all distance casters have in common is high line speed, the faster the better. The new fly lines developed by Marvin Hedge soon led to throws of greater tournament distances that exceeded 150 feet. Schwiebert says that the double-line haul was "an American development," but traces it back to Charlie Ritz (again) and his famous high speed, high line technique.

Now I've always believed that a high backcast is impossible. I remember reading about the Steeplecast as a boy and trying to do it, for there were often trees behind me and I needed some greater forward throw to catch trout. The rollcast wouldn't do. "Throw the fly straight up in the air behind you," was my book's advice. Are you kidding? I couldn't do it and nobody could, I was sure. But Charlie Ritz did something pretty close. He did it by inhumanly accelerating his line speed.

His line pickup off the water was so powerful and so swift the line literally flew up in the air. (Remember the wine bottle, tennis ball, and all the backyard exercises conducted with a hand that had grown grotesque from trying?) It took a trained athlete. And in order to bring about more distance, Charlie Ritz had to discard one of the first principles of fly casting, namely, the ten-to-two arc that was textbook stuff. First he started practicing the haul--though it had no name yet. He accelerated his line speed and kept his backcast as high as he could. Then he lengthened out the permissible arc. He let his rod tip drop lower in back.

Schwiebert quotes him as exclaiming, "We've killed the clock and we've finally thrown away the book!"

By doing so, Ritz made the short midge rod capable of casting the full distance, one in excess of Sparse's sixty feet. The short rod became the equivalent of the long rod, the rod of nine feet or more. And Schwiebert ends his long chapter, "A Primer of Modern Fly Casting" on that note, not acknowledging that many other fishers were proceeding in the same direction at the same time, not the least of whom was Lee Wulff, even though Schwiebert seems loath to mention him here. Funny. I wonder why?

Not to worry, though, for nearly everybody else does, including Arnold Gingrich, who became a disciple.

I have mentioned Spey casting a couple of times earlier, generally in the context of casting far, when the water is wide or the river is big. The Spey rod is not new; in fact, it is about as old as flyrods come. They used to be heavy and were made out of greenheart wood; then bamboo. We fishers of today are fortunate in that lightness of fishing rods is one of the benefits of modern times. No matter how long one of these new rods is, it is fractionally as heavy as the Spey rods of yesteryear. Thus it is lighter and easier to wave in the air, and much less tiring.

Spey rod casting has been much written about recently and there are books and video tapes on the subject, but none of them is so useful as simply standing alongside someone who knows how to execute the basic Speycast and watching him for a few minutes. If you are like me (and this is not how I learned how to do it: as you might suspect, I learned the hard and laborious way), you would be tempted to say to the guy, friend or stranger: “Hey, let me try your rod for a moment. Watching you, I think I know how to do it.” And you’d be right, or half right, which is as near as you have to be in order to learn something meaningful.

On the subject of Spey casting I am not going to fall into the usual trap of trying to tell you how in a complex and confusing fashion. I only will say, the cast is pretty much only a flip, but it is a flip that goes a long, long way. You have to see somebody do it in order to understand how simple it is. After watching a very few minutes, you will be able to execute the basic cast, and everything else is but a modification in the field, or on a river, of what you have just learned. It is at that point that various complexities of the cast can be introduced into your experience without dismay or harm.

What precedes and follows in this book is directly applicable to Speyrod fishing as well as conventional fishing with the single-handed rod. The Spey cast generally is over fifty feet, the cast with the single-handed rod less or just over that distance. Once the line hits the water, everything else is about the same, with the possible exception that since there is so much thick, floating line on the surface of the water that the fly needs to be steered and guided to its fishing depth in a little different manner. The principle is still the same and the execution only requires a slight variation and, to those watching, will be unnoticeable.

Once the fly has struck the water, a little action on the part of the angler is necessary to enable it to fish properly. I call this the correction, because the word "mend" has been used and abused to the extent it is confusing. It is the rare throw that doesn't need to be adjusted before it will fish the way the angler wants it to, but I know of some pools that fish beautifully the way a fly normally lands, and they are a special treat.

Most of the time some correction must be made. This usually consists of moving back portions of the line from one position on the water to another, generally upstream, so that the fly will try to precede the belly of the line through the water. I say "try," because is so difficult to achieve that you could say it is impossible. Yet try we must, for our fishing efficiency is dependent line manipulations.

Fishers often argue whether or not it is important to avoid moving the fly when making a correction of the belly. Some say that if the correction takes place almost immediately, it makes no difference and will neither spook the fish or make the movement of the fly disturbing. I guess I believe this, but only to a degree. I try to avoid moving my fly after it has hit the water, but I think I frequently fail, and to fail is in effect to say that it must not matter all that much or else I wouldn't allow it to happen.

Try this. Fishing a dry line and a weight-forward line, try to make a mend and not move the fly at all. Try as you might, the fly darts a few inches at the least, which is enough to telegraph to the steelhead that something odd is afoot. Now wade ashore and change lines to a double-taper floater. Repeat the exercise. Notice how the energy of the correction is dissipated as it travels the length of the thicker line. A similar mend will move less back portion of the line but will cause the fly to move a shorter distance; with practice, the amount of mid-course correction can be controlled until the fly does not move at all.

But what difference does it make? You said it doesn't matter. Ah, but what if it turns out it does?

With a sinking flyline, the kind we use most often when fishing with the sunk fly, mends behave entirely differently, even if the portion of line behind the sinking line is designed to float. The bulk and weight of the line underwater stabilize the fly in its path and reduce the chances of it being unnaturally jerked around in the water. Also, if the back portions are floating, there is a different in line densities and weights that have a dampening effect on what happens to the forward sinking portions. The energy transfer of the correction is halted far short of the fly.

The bad news is that the sunken belly of the line is not much effected by corrections of rearward line. The belly is formed and drags the fly down through the water. The mends have an entirely different purpose. They permit the line and fly to continue sinking at about the same rate. They slow the belly's straightening out on a tight line. A tight line also will cause a line that has not sunk very far to rise to the surface to some degree. It will do this every time, unless the belly is heavy enough or the water slow enough to prevent this.

So here we have two very different conditions. In floating-line fishing, corrections are intended to reduce belly and whatever effect belly has (generally bad) on fly behavior and fly speed.

In wet-fly fishing, belly is what allows the line and fly to sink to the required depth and actually corrections effect belly very little. They extend the distance of the drift, or the fly's course, which theoretically at least increase the chances of getting a strike (if the fly is swimming correctly). And they produce slack, or reduce drag (if drag can be reduced), enabling the fly to fish more naturally at a speed that approximates that of the current.

Fishers like a wet fly to move with the current, while slowly sinking; most often a steelhead will take a fly behaving this way and ignore one that isn't. The line is almost slack, but not quite. The fly is almost out of control, but the fisher remains in contact with it. The fly fishes near the bottom, but does not catch on it. There is a nice naturalness about what is happening that is to the fisher's liking. Once his line has hit the water in the location he wanted it to, and he has made the fewest number of mid-course corrections deemed necessary, the experienced fisher becomes as still as a heron. He looks like he is asleep. But the fly is fishing just the way he wants it to. He has nothing to do in the meanwhile except look around and enjoy the scenery, which is usually wonderful on a steelhead river. Meanwhile the fly is doing its work.

Nonetheless he is keen, alert. What he is alert for is the strike. He is ready for it and his reaction--a coil or two of line is in his hand or trailing on the water, and his nerves will trigger an instant strike back. The reel handle is clear of extra line loops and the rod tip is lowered so that the arc of the strike back is not shortened, reducing its strength. But to one and all who are not fishers, he looks like he is asleep.

In all of Trey Combs's excellent books on steelhead (for he is to steelhead as Ernie Schwiebert is to trout, the species's chronicler and encyclopedist) there are countless drawings by my friend, Loren Smith and extended text, many on the subject of presentation.

There is next to nothing on casting. Many books devote their pages to the various casts and how to execute them. Combs wisely does not trouble himself. He leaves it to others. Presentation is what it is all about. He is right. Line corrections through what is widely called mending is how the fly is delivered. He illustrates this copiously. The drawings in his two later works seem to be based on the ones in Jock Scott's book, Greased Line Fishing. In this they repeat the past, without adding much that is new or useful.

But they are important in that they define to new readers the half-dozen basic ways of presenting a fly--wet and dry and in between; they share with Scott's dotted-line directions as to where the floating line is to be lifted over and moved to a new position on the water. In the course of a fly's drift the line is corrected about twice--sometimes once more at the bottom of the swing. This is a modest and appropriate number of moves.

The line is not mended repeatedly, constantly, endlessly. Not, that is, unless some special effect is desired, such as sinking a light-wire hook completely to the bottom on a floating line in water that is not very slow. This is an unusual situation and can be better achieved, I think, with a sinktip line, provided the angler has one. If not, then I guess he must resort to the overkill mending method.

I judge an angler's excellence by how little he mends and the gentleness with which he does it.

There are exceptions in how the corrections are to be managed and the results desired. The upstream cast, with frequent mends to allow the fly to sink and drift along relatively drag free, is a useful one. I dislike it and find it less than fun to do. But I occasionally resort to it and find it is highly successful under the right conditions. And it is a style that Jim Teeny has developed to an extraordinary degree, and no one can doubt his efficacy.

The old Blue Slough Pool on my North Fork was one such piece of suitable water, and I used for a while a style of fishing that called for an upstream cast with many mends of line. Others, on their own, came up with a similar method to achieve the same results. We wanted to get our fly down very deep in a slot with few obstructions in it. Steelhead lay all along the slot, which must have been six to nine feet deep, with a heavy gut running through it. The hole was not wide. Across from us were various obstructions that provided casting targets. And overhead was a voluminous bigleaf maple that made casting a challenge and often claimed flies caught just high enough that you could not lower the limb by pulling on your leader short of popping it and getting all your line back in you face, sans fly.

I fished it with 33 feet of ten-weight high-density weight-forward taper cut off from its running line and jam knotted onto thirty-pound blue monofilament nylon. I lobbed the head upstream at the start of the hole and mended endless coils of nylon after it; I lost complete control of the flyline and fly, and had only a vague notion of where they were in the drift at any given moment. The line landed and began to sink, followed by all the loose nylon. Since there were no snags on my side of the river, the whole mess soon reached bottom and began to drag through the hole, belly first. Somewhere in the jumbles of line was my bright fly, and more frequently than I deserved a steelhead picked it up along its flight path. Usually the fish took where the dragging line straightened out and its belly started to swing in toward the beach, hauling the fly (which had also uncoiled itself) behind it.

I sensed the pause in the line's drift and struck, hauling all that slack around in the current, the belly pulling it downstream further. It was the perfect kind of strike to hook a steelhead that had picked up the fly.

Usually the steelhead felt the dragging line first and panicked, however. It began moving up and away from the source of all that pressure; this allowed more belly to drag downstream, increasing the pull on the fish. The fly was drawn back in the fish's mouth and it proved, time after time, to be hooked in the hinge.

Perfect, only it wasn't much fun to keep doing, cast after cast. Nor did it call for any skill, only knowledge of a method that was effective here.

I mention such an exception to the rule of ordinary fishing to make a case for the way we fish most of the time--step-fishing our way down through a run, making casts quartering downstream and across. If we want the fly to sink a little deeper, we make the cast at right-angles to the bank, that is, straight out from where we are standing. And if the water is slow, and we want the line not to sink so much, we increase the downstream angle to perhaps thirty percent. In a few cases, but not often, we may find ourselves casting almost directly downstream from a location where we have waded deep above some rocks capable of housing a fish.

A mend is a flip, nothing more. It corrects the line's course by giving it pause. The rod tip performs the action and the flip is made by the whole arm, but the wrist comes into play. The wrist is what transfers the last bit of the energy to the line and extends it out to the water; it causes the line to move from cross-stream to upstream, giving the current another chance to grab the belly and move it (because of its greater surface area) faster than the line tip, the leader, and the fly.

Kreh describes the shape of the backcast at the time of straightening out at critical time for the forward cast as forming a J or a candycane. Similarly, the belly of wet-fly line moving down the run forms the same letter and a candycane whose shank is being extended by mends. The mends allow the curve to keep sinking and extending itself; this distance is theoretically infinite and limited only by the amount of line you have on your reel or in your stripping basket.

In a long smooth run like the Flat Water on the North Fork Ken McLeod use to extend his drift a hundred feet or more, surprising (and annoying) whoever stood below him a polite distance in the same run. This is called fishing under somebody, or fishing on top of him.

It is not considered friendly. But--boy--when there are fish scattered through a long even run, it sure is effective. In this case the number of fish that see your fly in a situation that is attractive to one of them is many times of that of somebody making a shorter cast and only a mend or two. For what Ken was doing was making one or two small mends to position the fly properly, then letting a huge quantity of line drag out of the basket in a single enormous mend.

Schwiebert remembers wet-fly trout anglers on the rivers of upper Michigan rolling out floating lines and letting them sink and prescribe narrow arcs as they moved down the river, step-fishing. He says they were deadly.

What the steelhead fisher does is similar. His cast is executed almost identically, time after time, to about the same distance, corrected in the same way, allowed to sink to about the same depth, and swung in a manner much the same. It looks monotonous (and is!), but the rhythm is pleasant and the method is effective for finding scattered fish in a long run of water with about the same rate of flow over a consistent bottom.

Each run of water determines the kind and number of mid-course corrections called for. Also, the kind of sinking material comprising the sinking line and its length will effect how it is handles, once it hits the water. If it quickly hangs up on the bottom (whether or not you lose your fly), you should correct less; conversely, if it doesn't at least touch bottom occasionally at the end of your drift, you will soon realize your are fishing too shallow and want to work out some more slack to permit it to sink deeper.

All of these corrective exercises are performed countless times, unthinkingly, during the course of a day on a river. Because they are done so often, the fisher usually doesn't think about what is involved, only the need to change something in how he is fishing to get better results. These adjustments are adaptive and subjectively determined. Each fisher calls them differently, based on his reading of the situation.

The bag is what Kreh calls the candycane, at least when it is the backcast. Others call it belly, but belly does not denote the way it behaves and its unescapable nature. Special flylines have been designed to minimize it. They have largely failed. The bag can't be defeated, I'm afraid.

One is Scientific Anglers’s line of uniform sinking rate. This simply means that all sections of the line, regardless of their

their diameter, will sink at the same rate. The belly will not sink faster than the thinner sections, at least not in still water. But when water is moving, the current effects the line according to its surface area. The belly is thicker and, therefore, it will be more greatly effected, as always. The pull of the current on it will be greater because of its larger surface area and will haul it around in the river faster than the rest of the line

Scientific Angler also has developed lines of near-uniform thickness throughout their length, with portions that sink at different rates. Since these lines have very rapid sinking forward portions, they are much more suitable for our purposes. They sink like bricks, though, and often we don't want them to. We want something, well, less severe, most of the time. These become specialty lines, lines to be brought out under adverse conditions, ones that are not frequently encountered. At the right times, they can deliver a fly in a fashion that is deadly.

They sink so fast to the fish's depth, in fact, that there is no time to make corrections. In some water, a single mend is enough to lodge them in the stones and lose the fly. So they are cast out (usually they are the devil to cast, too) and threaded through the pool, with a little attendant prayer not to hang up. Rarely do they obey.

Similarly, a line that floats all or nearly all of its length will present a fly nicely and allow it to sink at a slower rate, which is much more enjoyable to fish. It is possible with such a line to fish as one did in summer, all winter long. But since it is imperative to get the fly down deep, most of the time, a long leader is often used, with a fly that is either weighted or tied on a heavy hook. After the throw is made, many mid-course corrections are made until the fly reaches fishing depth. This is one case (especially in heavy winter water) where many ungainly corrections may result in a hooked fish. But there are more pleasant ways to fish such water. Forming the bag is at the heart of wet-fly fishing. It is done instinctively, but it requires some thought, or prior consideration. The bag is sinking belly that is manipulated for purposes of presenting the fly at the right angle, speed, and depth. It is also part of the line's weight-distribution system that permits casting in the first place, or else the fly would not be out there fishing where you want it to.

Belly is unavoidable and must be accommodated. But belly is essential in forming the bag, and without it there would be none. Then we would have to find some substitute. We'd have to add weight to make our cast go farther and weight again to sink our fly. If we got efficient enough about the method, we'd reinvent spinning with slender monofilament lines and lead weights. This is precisely what we are trying to get away from in fly fishing.

So belly and bag must be lived with. They are the hag who has us in her power, and all the good we want to do must be done in accordance with her wishes, for she is all-powerful. Without her, we are nothing.

Think of it this way. Belly is a piece of clothesline that sinks. Behind it is thin running line that lets us reach out our required distance, and it often floats; if it doesn't, it is of so little weight that its degree of sinkability is negligible. It can be used to correct the belly's course--to steer it through the water, like a ship's rudder. It can be slackened or tightened, which effects what the belly does, though transmitted over a long distance that diminishes communication. In other words, a small message sent out over a slender wire (our shooting or running line) results in little change in the belly. A large message produces a small change. In order to get a big change, we must resort to some other means of communication. Our thin running line will not deliver it.

So we retrieve and cast again, doing something different this time to affect a more desirable result.

On the other end of our clothesline is a forward taper of the same sinking density as in the belly, but being so much skinnier it has little pronounced effect, whether it floats or sinks. What it does is provide a transition from belly to leader and, thus, to fly. (It also causes the fly to land more delicately on the water at the end of the throw, but this is not of too much consequence in wet-fly fishing; if you don't believe me, tie your leader directly to some sinking belly material and see how differently it fishes. It will be slight.) The leader butt is knotted or spliced to the smallest end of the forward taper and then the leader tapers down to the tippet end. It may do this through knots of sections of stepdown diameters or the reduction may be seamlessly incorporated in the material of the leader itself. This kind is called "knotless."

And then there is the fly. The fly is the business end of the fisher's rod/line connection. If the fly does not do its job, all the rest is wasted effort and time. The fly is supposed to arrive on target, sink, and fish as though attached to nothing--at least nothing of consequence to the fish.

The fly effects how the line fishes. It influences the throw, the bag, the need for correction during the fly's swing, and how it comes across just off the bottom into the fish's line of vision. One might think that all flies will fish nearly the same on the same line and leader tippet. But they don't. This can be experienced by changing flies and hook weights several times in the same run without moving your feet.

The line feels different. You can't put your finger on it or explain it. The fly's weight, or its bulk, or its surface area to the current--something--has changed. What is happening on or near the bottom is not the same, and you don't know how--whether to the good or to the bad, you can't put your finger on it yet. You have to wait for the fish's reaction. If you get a strike, fishing this new way, you will remember (or try to remember: Haig-Brown called this the amnesia factor) how it happened--say, how you were holding your mouth when the fish hit. Thereafter you will hold your mouth foolishly just so, in hopes of being rewarded the same way again. If you don't get a strike after a variable length of time, depending on how the day is going, you will discard the special feel, reel in, tie on another kind of fly, and try for a different effect that will be more positive in its results. And you will change your expression.

My point is only that the fly and its hook effect how the line and bag fish. It is a subtle thing, but often success or disappointment in fishing is based on tiny matters, ones often ignored by the inexperienced, and we do not want to be among them any longer than is necessary. We want to accelerate the learning process by being as aware as we can to everything about us in the natural world which, of course, includes fishing.

Combs is wise in not getting into matters of how to cast and to treat presentation as being comprised of several classic methods, some for dry, some for damp or riffled, and two or three basic ones for wet. He is interested in flyline materials and how they effect floating and sinking rates in various types of water. He writes about them extensively. This is important information.

A short sinking portion of line of great density will "get down fast," as we say. Lines determine how "the bag" is formed and how it fishes. Commercial lines can now be bought with integral sinking sections of so short as five feet. They are designed to fish slots and pockets. For bigger water they are often problematic. They get down too fast and lodge in the stones and the fly is lost; if you aren't careful, the sinking portion of the line gets caught and you lose the important part of the line. When lines cost upwards of forty dollars, this can be a minor tragedy.

Sinking portions of five, ten, thirteen, sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, and thirty feet can be bought in densities that range from slow-sinking, fast-sinking, extra-fast sinking, super-fast sinking, and--watch out, you're already on the bottom. These last lines are called things like Ka-boom, leadcore, Deep Water Express, etc.

This is common knowledge and discussed in most fly-fishing catalogs and books, but is useful to us here only in that it effects the speed with which the bag forms and its shape, shape being dependent on the sinking-line's length. To put it another way, Kreh's candycane has a curve to its bend that widens or narrows, sometimes looking like a U tipped on its side, other times almost like the letter I.

The kind of water we are fishing will determine the kind of bag we want, its shape, and how well it does what we want it to. Generally speaking, the longer the sinking portion of the line the more slowly the bag forms and makes its candycane curl wider. This is either good or bad, depending on the speed of the water, its depth, its consistency of flow (or evenness of seam), and the amount of fishable water between the caster and the far bank.

Shooting heads come in 30-foot lengths, which happens to fit a template for weight to balance different rods. Thus, 30-feet of ten-weight line--it doesn't matter whether it is intended to sink or float--will weigh from 280-300 grains. This is considered ideal to load a theoretical rod and make it cast well. And the graphite rods in use today are amazingly tolerant in variations in line weights. Most will cast two or three different weights satisfactorily (though perhaps not all ideally).

My favorite rod, for instance, will cast practically anything, any weight. I have to adjust my casting style accordingly, which I find easy enough to do. I do it semi-consciously, the way one adjusts to a pool cue, a golf club, or a baseball bat. One "chokes" the rod, if necessary, or else tries to lengthen it out with an extension of the forearm. So the 30-foot length of line necessary to load a rod properly can consist of lines of several different densities, or only one. The early shooting heads were of uniform density throughout and behaved similarly. They formed wide bags, ones that tended to perform a broad sweep of the pools they fished. The candycane resembled a long curve and went through the water ahead of the fly. This was not good, but was pretty much unavoidable with such a line. So anglers shortened them up.

They shortened them enough to narrow the curve or the candycane bend. They wanted flies that led the line through the water. This wasn't possible, for it defied the basic laws of gravity. Belly is belly, and it will always come first. But it is possible to narrow the bend the belly forms and better manage how it fishes. This what shorter sinking portions of lines that float behind will do for you. More and more the demand is for these shorter sinking sections of line.

The chief trouble with them is that they cast miserably. Part of the problem is that they change diameters and densities, and while these may not produce a change in line weights, they behave exactly as though they do. Lines jerk forward in the air and tug like an enemy on your backcast. They come whizzing at your head and cause you to duck their flight path, or else be struck with line or fly or both. There are several commercial lines on the market today made by the two major manufacturers that are practically uncastable. And they are expensive. I'm sure many anglers have bought them, then carried them home from the river in dismay, believing they never knew how to cast.

A temporary changeover to a full floating line will restore the fisher's confidence. What a pleasure a long-tapered floater is. It sets the standard that most wet-fly lines cannot meet by a country mile. What you do is compensate for their difficulty of casting with little tricks you pick up, over the years, and keep on fishing. Pretty soon you forget that there is any other way.

The 30-foot shooting head, spliced to a running line that is not too thin, is about as pleasant as such a line can be. It also will cast a satisfying distance. Its problem is in the bag, I'm afraid. The compensatory trick most steelhead fishers have developed was to buy them in much greater density (and sometimes weight) than the water they planned to fish required, then cut them back to somewhere around 15 to 20 feet. These portions they spliced on to floating lines; some had thick portions that just happened, when added to the sinking forward portion, total 30 feet--the ideal casting length to keep in the air preparatory to making a shoot. But others became shorter. The shorter and heavier they were the better they fished. They weren't cast so much as flung. This was carrying the image of "throw it out there" to its furthermost extension. It required a baseball player, namely a pitcher.

Such a line was often lobbed, with a motion every soldier remembers from exercises with a hand grenade. Lead-core lines had to be flung like this, or otherwise they would decapitate you. Other short lines of great density were difficult, too. The Teeny nymph line, with its 24-foot head, was hard to cast but could be adjusted to by degrees--cursing all the while. When you got the timing down, you could draw it back and sort of fling it. It went a surprising distance and quickly got down to where the fish were.

You put up with its hazards because it caught fish. There were some conditions of high, dirty water when only a line like it would fish deep enough to find a steelhead. The bag it formed was narrow and closing fast. It dragged the fly through the water and through the rocks. If you used such a line and gave it course corrections enough to sink in anything but the fastest water, it lodged on the bottom straight out from you and had to be broken off. With a line like this, you could lose a fly every cast.

But if you came home with a fish, when nobody else did, you came to love such a line, even though it was a miserable thing to fish. Misery was the price of success.

Most of the time you could happily fish a compromise line, a line that sunk fairly fast but still went back and forth through the air like a flyline is supposed to. It didn't hit you on the back of the head or plant your fly in your shoulder. It sailed out over the water and landed in a flat plane and began fishing right away. Its bag was narrow enough to please you and the lob it demanded didn't threaten to rip your arm out of its socket. You developed a style of casting that wasn't a laughing matter to anybody on the beach watching and you sometimes caught winter fish.

In summer it was deadly, especially in spring and again late in fall, when the water had come up again.

Presentation was a matter of when and how to let the line form its bag. This again depended on the type of water you intended to fish. The idea was for the bag to form as quickly as possible and swing the narrowest, tight downstream arc. The wider the arc a narrow bag would fish on its broad swing, the better chance you had of interesting a fish.

The bag is suppose to swing. This is not the best word for what it does, but I can't think of a better one. If the fly can't be kept in front of the belly, or the bag, it ought to be as close to being ahead of it as is possible. This is determined by when the candycane straightens out and brings the fly and leader around to a point downstream from it. Then, and only then, is the fly ahead of the bag, and the bag no longer in a position to alarm the fish. Perhaps it explains why so many fish are hooked at the end of the drift, when the fly is hanging downstream, preparatory to being stripped in for the next cast.

Robert C. Arnold

INTRODUCTION

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