Mentors and epiphanies

[Al Agnew]

Last week when Missouri Tom, Montana Tom, and I were fishing all week and spending the evenings drinking wine or beer and eating good food--and shooting the bull--one night we got to talking about mentors and learning.  Missouri Tom said that he'd learned a heck of a lot from Montana Tom.  I said I had, too.  Then Montana Tom, who was our first and almost only guide in all the years we came to Montana before I got the place out here, said that he had to figure out early on, like the first day he ever had us out, that he had to treat me completely differently from Missouri Tom.  "All I had to do with Tom was to tell him to do it my way, but with Al, I learned I should just let him alone, because although he was usually unconventional, he always figured out how to catch fish."  I said, "Well, I watched and learned, but you're right, I never liked people actually telling me how to do it."

This was an important epiphany for me, though--I learned fly fishing much like I learned a whole lot of things--not by taking classes or instructions, but by reading on my own, watching on my own, and doing it on my own.

My dad was a fly fisherman before I was old enough to fish with him, but by the time I was four or five years old he was reservoir bass fishing every Sunday, and the fly rod was relegated to a corner of the garage.  When I was in my early teens, I saw it and asked him about it, and he said he'd always fished for smallmouth on Big River with the fly rod, usually with something like a black gnat fly and spinner.  By that time I was avidly fishing Big River by myself often, and I decided to try it.  I took the old 7.5 ft. glass rod and automatic reel, with the old, rotten fly line on it, for about three trips, caught one smallmouth on it as I remember, and gave it up.  That was in the late 1960s.

I didn't pick up a fly rod again until sometime in the late 1980s.  Mary and I were at an art show in Michigan, and some of the other artists told us they were going fly fishing for king salmon on the Pere Marquette River after the show for a couple days.  They had a big clubhouse at a lodge on the river rented, and said they had room for us.  I said I didn't have any equipment, but one of our artist friends said he had two extra rods and sets of waders.  So we did it.  It wasn't exactly classic fly fishing, basically standing 20 feet away from a salmon redd and drifting egg flies across it.  In reality it was flossing the fish--egg fly separated by about 12 inches from the weight, drift it so that either the fly went right into the fish's mouth, or the line between the fly and the weight went across its mouth and dragged the fly into it.  Kings migrating up the rivers don't feed, but supposedly they will instinctively grab something that drifts close enough to their mouths...but I know you hook a lot more because of the flossing.

So my first mentors were those other artists who had done it before, and they taught Mary and me how to drag flies across a redd with a chuck and duck type of short cast.

We planned on doing it the next year, so I went to Bass Pro and bought a couple of 7-8 weight fly rods, BPS brand, cheap reels, and figured we were set for salmon fishing.  But the next year the show was a month later and the run was about done, while the steelhead run was just beginning.  We didn't have any idea how to fish for steelhead, weren't even sure any were actually as far up the river as we were.

We took the rods to Alaska a year or so later, and had fun catching silver salmon on the Russian River.  But we also spent a couple days at a cabin on Lake Creek, where there were plenty of rainbow trout.  The rods and equipment didn't work so well with 12-16 inch rainbows.  So when we got back home I decided to buy a trout fly rod.  My first one was 4 weight, 2 piece Sage.  I'd like to say I still have it, but in reality I have the third replacement for that lifetime guarantee, a totally different model.  I tried it a few times here and there, but I didn't catch many trout.  I just wasn't into it enough, and didn't have any friends who fly fished much.

1996.  I'd met Missouri Tom a few months before, and he invited me to go with him and another friend to Montana.  We were to spend a week at Yellowstone Valley Ranch, in cabins overlooking the Yellowstone in Paradise Valley, the first week of July.  But that happened to be a year of record floods.  The Yellowstone was still blown out, so we spent the evenings sitting in front of our cabins, looking down at the river, and wishing it would clear up just a bit.  That was where we met Montana Tom.  We told the lodge people that we were interesting in fishing, and the food and other amenities of the lodge were way down the list of what was important, so we wanted a guide who understood that.  They assigned us Montana Tom, along with Dennis, another guide who also became a good friend as the years went by.

Missouri Tom had tied me up a bunch of flies for the trip, and loaned me another rod to go with my Sage.  He's a Winston guy, and it was a sweet rod.  He also gave me pointers before the trip on a shakedown cruise to the Meramec.  So he was my first real trout fly fishing mentor.  

The first day, though, I learned how good Montana Tom was.  We went to Sixteenmile Creek, a small stream a couple hours away from the lodge that was on private land and held browns, rainbows, and brook trout.  I watched Montana Tom give Missouri Tom a lot of instruction, picked up a lot of it myself, and we caught a pile of fish.  And Montana Tom learned how serious we were; at noon he asked if we were ready for lunch.  We said, heck no, we're catching fish.  At 2 PM he asked again.  Nope, still busy catching fish.  At 4 PM we finally agreed to eat lunch.  At 6 PM he said we had to leave then if we wanted to make it back to the lodge for dinner.  We said we'd rather fish.  We finally quit about a half hour before dark, and got back to the lodge at 11 PM!

The next year, we went again, this time the second week of July.  We hired Montana Tom again, but stayed at the historic Murray Hotel in Livingston.  And it was the second year of record floods and the river was again still blown, though we did finally fish it late in the week.  Over the years, we almost never missed a trip per year, often switching to April before the snowmelt started.  The three of us always fished together, but at different times we had other friends along.  Montana Tom and Dennis kept guiding us, and the two of them, and Missouri Tom, continued to be my mentors.  Finally, about 12 years ago, Montana Tom told us he was no longer going to guide us, which actually meant he was still going to fish with us but we'd take turns rowing the boat so that he could fish as much as we did...and without the guiding fees.

Over the years, I'd accumulated a half dozen rods and reels, upgraded my waders and other equipment several times, and became almost as avid a fly fisherman as I am a river smallmouth angler.  Mary and I bought a cabin in Paradise Valley ten years ago, and three years later we sold it and bought our house on the Yellowstone.

Mentors.  I haven't really had many.  I learned a lot of it on my own, and some of it turned out to be wrong.  I'm still not the greatest fly caster, nor do I match the Toms in pure expertise, but I learned, I experimented, and I watched and listened to those two great fly fishermen.

[fshndoug]

great story al.