Looking Back Toward Today

Thoughts from Silvio Calabi—

A mere 30 years ago, we sat down to map out this magazine. What the hell, it beat getting a job. Kit Parker and John Merwin and Buzz Eichel were veterans of Fly Fisherman—the magazine was in Vermont then—and I had served in the rod shop at Mother Orvis. Acid rain was still to come, climate disruption and the Internet would have been laughed away as sci-fi, waders leaked, graphite was brand-new and Lee Wulff was a heretic. Me, I was just with child to get to Alaska.

Spates, freshets and tsunamis of water have passed under the bridge since. On the promise of a movie, fly-fishing rose and then fell back. Just like real estate. Waders still leak. Lee wulff was right: Let that fish go! I got to Alaska, and a few other places, and now—thanks to the Internet—I’m working at home again. I’m stringing up a Tom Dorsey cane rod that I haven’t touched in 20 years with the intent of showing tiny dries to dumb brookies in a cold and rocky stream nearby. Everything is different and nothing has changed. —Silvio Calabi is an editor-at-large, and former editor-in-chief and gear editor of Fly Rod & Reel

In The Name of Industry

Fly Rod & Reel’s commitment to the fly-fishing industry began with its first issue and built considerably 10 years later when, in 1987, it produced the first Fly Tackle Dealer Show. That show took place August 27 through 29, at the Hershey Lodge & Convention Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was touted as the “First Annual” Fly-Tackle Dealer Show, a serious faux pas in Associated Press Stylebook or death journalism circles,  mainly because something can’t be an annual until it’s held for two consecutive years. We made up for that blunder by building the most successful industry/trade show in fly fishing.

Worm Love, Worm Hate

In the May/June 1984 issue, the late Gary LaFontaine contributed a feature article titled, simply, “Worms,” and introduced his favorite worm pattern, the Marabou Worm.

LaFontaine wrote, “When a steady rain saturates the ground, the land-living earthworms escape to the surface and crawl blindly about. This begins an amazing carnage, evident from the dried carcasses on the sidewalks and roads the next day. The same natural phenomenon dumps incredible numbers of worms into streams and rivers…During the 1980 season I met only three occasions when trout fed heavily on worms. Each time, the Marabou Worm performed admirably for me. The success of this pattern even converted some of my most skeptical friends.”

While LaFontaine declared the merit of worms and welcomed their presence on the western rivers near his home in Deer Lodge, Montana, it was only 12 years later when the worm came under attack for its obliteration of rainbow trout on Montana’s Madison River, as reported in our July/August 1997 issue. At that time biologists reported that whirling disease had eaten 90 percent of that famous river’s rainbow trout. To this day, whirling disease heavily influences that fishery and the waters feeding it (Grayling Creek, Duck Creek, the South Fork Madison, Hebgen Lake, etc.). Despite an anti-worm attitude in southwest Montana it would be the rare angler who wouldn’t carry a six-pack of San Juan Worms in their fly box. Unlike LaFontaine’s Marabou Worm, which you won’t find in many, if any, Western fly shops, the San Juan Worm is ubiquitous and accounts for some great tallies on western streams. Love them or hate them, the worm is here to stay.

Carpaholics: You were warned

We helped encourage a lippy-fish craze when, in the May/June 1984 edition, we ran Ron Walker’s story, “Carp You Say?”

Walker introduced the carp with a warning: “There is going to be some hard-hitting truth penned here and, if you are not ready for it—not confident in your chosen role as a fly fisher in pursuit of the finest gamefish on the globe—then I recommend you give a wide berth to the words that follow. Heaven forbid that your image of yourself should be tarnished.” He followed with, “… I recently found myself bonefishing on the flats of the Florida Keys. Couldn’t get over how much those bonefish reminded me of carp. (I warned you this might not be easy to take.)”

Judging by a nationwide interest in carp—pronounced by the fact that Angling Trade’s Kirk Deeter hosted a carp panel presentation at this years International Sportsman’s Exposition in Denver, Colorado—the big-lip fascination is here to stay. Further evidence rests with the front-page article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year on what the fly-fishing fringe calls “brown-lining” or fishing in scummy, dirty, roily carp water.

We Tried

It wasn’t the first time we penned our pronouncements against rampant development, but our piece in the November/December 1994 issue, titled, “The View Through the Picture Window” seems remarkably relevant today.

In that article, which carried the subtitle, “Residential Development Threatens to Spoil the Rocky Mountain West,” Allen Olsen said that Montana’s Yellowstone and Madison rivers were ground zero for bad examples of streamside development. Unfortunately, Olsen just as easily could have cited Idaho’s Henry’s Fork, Silver Creek and Big Wood rivers, Wyoming’s Snake River, and Montana’s Bitterroot, Blackfoot and Clark Fork rivers with similar tomes.

Olsen warned, “Between the drift boats and the summer homes, the opportunity for solitude has become increasingly rare… the nature and extent of river development is not widely known, admitted or publicized, even among locals. And the outdoor press has been conspicuously silent.”

He continued, “So what’s wrong with just another nice, new, big, rustic custom home staring out at you from the riverbank? Simply this: It’s built in the wrong place. And not just from the standpoint of aesthetics; it’s a threat to the very environment its owner is trying to get close to. And the houses continue to spread. Where there used to be trees, open fields and deer, we now look at buildings, satellite dishes, dirt bikes, picnic tables, lounge chairs and barking dogs.”

Olsen just as easily could have added private, stocked trout ponds, fly-fishing lodges and fly shops, castles and five-bedroom “cabins” to the list. And remember, his concern was voiced in 1994, prior to the western real-estate boom that ended, thankfully, last fall.

Sadly, even today, local municipalities and state governments are fighting stream setbacks with stiff-upper lips and lawsuits. Local real estate groups have their backs arched and their six-shooters at the ready, prepared to fight for every last valuable inch of the West as if casting a fly from the back porch was the hinge between all home sales or the lack thereof.

The Wulff Legacy

For this magazine’s first 13 years, Lee Wulff wrote the back-page column, called Wulff’s Run. His last column ran after his death, in the January/February 1992 issue. Lee had sent it to the magazine months before he died at the controls of his airplane in 1991. “The blessing has been the writing of a regular column in which I have the choice and the problem of selecting subjects that will interest or please you,” Lee wrote in his final column. “And the pleasure of covering things that are, or have been, part of my life from the long-ago till now.” By that time, Joan Wulff had joined her husband as a columnist for the magazine, writing the Fly Casting column. The challenge of that column? “Getting good illustrations showing arm and rod movement,” Joan told us recently. Joan is still an editor-at-large of FR&R and continues to teach casting at the Wulff School of Fly Fishing in the Catskills.