Oh! Roland Holmberg, the famous Swede who guided in Norway on the Gaula and Alta, I fished with him on the Dean. He was a phenomenal fisherman. The European guides who fish on their own can’t fish the beats they guide on because it is too expensive. They fish the public water. And if you can catch fish on the public water in Europe you have to be a hell of a fisherman because there is not a lot of it. And the competition is huge. Roland was a master.
It was 1991 when Steelhead Fly Fishing came out. So I am wondering what you see that has changed since then?
I think so many of the flies we use today were not even in existence back then-- the Squidros, and the infinite number of intruders out there, and flies like the tandem hook flies. People weren’t even tying on shanks back then. A few people saw that 3/0 and 4/0 hooks would kill steelhead easily so a lot of years ago people started tying a running loop of line off the big hook with a small bait hook trailer and cutting off the larger hook so the heavy shank would sink the fly. That was a huge improvement over the huge old Partridge hooks. We went through the same thing with saltwater flies. The early Mustad hooks were just godawful.
So in the last 15-20 years there has been a revolution in how flies are tied but also how they are presented.
When I first fished the Deschutes we always cast out in the currently and were constantly back mending
trying to hold our fly out in the current. So we were effectively Hot-Shotting. Now, more and more, especially in soft water, I lead the fly to give the fish a broadside view,which is a grease-line approach.
That was the most misunderstood thing in the world with greased-line fishing, where guys thought that they could actually fish a wet fly free of any drag. What the English meant is you throw your line across the river and the heavy current in the middle drags the fly downstream. That was frustrating them. So Jock Scott, author of Greased Line Fishing, and his disciples started mending.
their silk lines otherwise it would be a slow sinking line. So they would grease it and mend it.That was Greased Line fishing. But some people got a hold of the book and thought it meant drag free; but it defies the laws of physics to swing a fly drag free.