Fly-Fishing in Utah
By Kerry Soper
(Published in Utah Life Magazine, July 2021)
I saw warning signs that I wouldn’t excel at this complicated Utah sport (that can be challenging for uncoordinated beta males like me), when I first interacted with a 30-something sales guy back in 1999. Wearing a baseball cap and soul patch, he gave barking advice like a football coach, rattling off advice with an opaque, insider’s lingo – “You’ll need a nymphing rig with a 4-weighted, 10-foot, 3-piece beryllium rod and a quadruple-X, 12-foot tapering leader followed by 5X monogamous tippet …”
It stung, too, that he didn’t even give a courtesy chuckle to my mumbled jokes about the vaguely inappropriate names of some of the artificial flies on display: “I’m not sure my wife would be happy about me buying these ‘Yellow Humpies’ or ‘Bead-headed Wooly Buggers,’ ha ha.”
My early encounters on the river were similarly intimidating. Other anglers were either hyper-competitive gear guys (who protected their choice of fly like it was the nuclear code), or introverted misanthropes who went fishing precisely to get away from talkative weirdos like me. I did once run into a friendly angler in his 70s on the Weber River. He offered generous advice, gave me some flies and seemed to enjoy talking shop in a beautiful setting. I was so off balance from his unexpected kindness that I might have accidentally called him “dad” at one point.
One of the most confounding aspects of the sport was how unpredictable it could be. On a good day, it seemed like anyone with a piece of fuzz tied on a string could catch a fish. Then, mysteriously, on the next outing, it was like an unsolvable math story problem: “If the barometer is reading 50 percent with overcast skies, and size 20 midge larvae are emerging from their third trimester, with the water flow at 500 cubic feet per second, how long will it take before your line gets tangled and you start cry-swearing?”
I tried to get better at the sport by learning how to tie my own flies. Predictably, this did not go well since I lack fine motor skills and an attention to detail. (According to my wife, I struggle at simply loading cups properly into a dishwasher.) The flies I produced were only semi-effectual. Chubby and demented, they looked like craft projects done by a second grader hopping on one foot because he waited too long to go to the bathroom.
Last spring, I decided to get serious about the sport by taking a workshop. The instructor epitomized the hyper-competent man’s man that I struggle to be: macho, confident and effortlessly good at dealing with complicated gear. I immediately fell into a slightly dysfunctional sensei/padawan dynamic with him, nodding too vigorously at his instructions, apologizing profusely for missteps, and then lying awake at night, cringing at dumb comments I made in class.
After several weeks of underperforming in excursions, I tried to prove myself during our capstone trip to the Green River. On the last day of the outing, I finally hooked a giant brown trout on a cicada pattern. My over-eagerness was my downfall, however; after only a minute of battle, I yanked too hard, snapped my line, and the fish was gone. Seeing how devastated I was, my guru gave me a psychological lifeline: a challenge to hook and land a 20-plus-inch trout on a local river in the coming months and then send him the photo.
Determined, I worked at this goal for several months, catching lots of fish but nothing even close to that 20-inch target. Then one day in late November along the Provo River, I coaxed a monster fish to take one of my nymphs. Desperate to avoid losing it this time, I carefully fought for 10 minutes, chasing him downstream for fifty yards. Ultimately, I had to lunge into some deep and swift water and net the anchor-heavy fish before it could escape into some angry rapids. This triumphant moment was cut short, though, as I then stumbled backwards over a submerged boulder and plunged into scream-inducing, neck-deep, freezing water.
As I struggled to my feet, I somehow kept hold of both my rod and the fish. My elation turned to laughing despair though when I looked into the net and didn’t see a giant trout. Instead, it was a massive whitefish – a kind of low-brow “trash fish” that some anglers are disappointed to catch. It was almost as if the universe wanted me to see that I’d caught a chubby bottom feeder so that I couldn’t have delusions about a trophy that got away.
Though sopping wet and chilled to the bone, I felt like I was too deep into this dumb sport to stop fishing now; and so I made a bold (but maybe foolish) decision: I stripped down out of all my clothes and gear and tried to dry out in the weak, early afternoon sun.
This brings us back to my midlife crisis last November: As I stood there shivering, mulling over my life choices, I felt a small bit of gratitude towards the fishing gods that no other anglers came upon me in that moment. I wasn’t in the mood to answer awkward questions about why I was on a sandbar in the middle of a river, in early winter, in only my underwear.
Comments
Post a Comment