As well as being a fly fishing guide,traveler and writer, I currently have a book proposal with several publishing houses via my literary agent in N.Y.
Nominally called “Reflections on the water” it is part memoir,part cultural observation and of course about a third is sports writing about the sport of salt water fly fishing.
HERE IS A EXCERPT:
When business is slow, such as at the beginning of the season, it’s difficult to imagine how your fishing calendar is going to fill. Some of my clients contact me through my website, others are referred to me by satisfied fisherman, or I meet people socially who share the same passion.
I first met Roger Waters – one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, whose music helped to form the soundtrack of my life, from late childhood onwards – at a dinner party thrown by my friend Jay McInerney, the writer, and his wife Anne Hearst, a descendent of the great media baron William Randolph Hearst. The party was thrown at their palatial and very tasteful house on the gentle hills overlooking Bridgehampton.
I find that when confronted with one of these people who’ve had a major impact on my life (I’d spent hours, days, listening to this guy’s music and attending his groups concerts, usually whilst tripping), I tend to avoid talking too much about his or her career, not wanting to appear intrusive or a bore by pestering him with the same questions he has faced for years. “What was such and such like?” “How was Jimi Hendrix?” I quite consciously choose to talk about something else—in this case, fishing.
It turned out that Roger is an avid fly fisherman and golfer. He keeps a skiff for fishing bonefish, permit, and tarpon in the Bahamas, and he owns property on the River Test in England, which provides some of the best fly-fishing for trout in the world. He told me that he’s played golf and fished seriously since the sixties, which surprised me, as I would have imagined him to be doing something rather more, I don’t know, psychedelic.
We arranged to go fishing a few days after the dinner and he called the day before to ask if he could bring a couple of princesses. I told him he could bring whoever he liked.
The two princesses were English sisters, Beatrice and Eugenie, daughters of Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York. They were raven-haired and pretty, strong and buxom in that vigorously healthy and sexy English way. They looked ready for anything and easily made up for any lack in fishing skills with enthusiasm and strength.
I asked the eldest how she’d like to be addressed, as I am English myself. I usually call people by their first names, and when I forget, “Oi, you at the front.” Beatrice laughed and said that funnily enough she’d just come of age and officially I should call her Princess Beatrice of York, but their shortened first names would be fine.
Roger wore jeans and a T-shirt, Converse shoes, and a weather-beaten, faded wading jacket, one of the marks of a serious top-water fisherman. He asked if we could treat this day as fun fishing for the girls; we could have a serious day of fly-fishing at a later date. This was good news: for the past week, schools of adult bunker, or menhaden, had been making their way from the streams and back bays across Gardiners Bay for the open water of the Atlantic.
These “big bunker” are a type of herring, a foot long, silver, with spots on their backs and sides, the most noticeable being a big black dot just behind the top of their gill plates. They’re balls of pure protein for many predatory fish, especially striped bass and big bluefish, who go crazy over them. And they provide exciting, relatively easy fishing with a spinning rod.
As the small schools of bunker, twenty or thirty feet across, move through the bay, you have to look hard to spot them. The texture of the water changes as the fish move just under the surface, occasionally making a small splash, the water looking like a shimmering and rust-colored patch. Few gulls pursue them, as the bunker are too big for them to eat at this stage, although one or two will hover around, hoping to pick up a scrap of bunker left after it’s been torn apart by the bluefish. When the bass and blues are feeding on the younger smaller bunker we call “peanuts,” they’ll blitz, thrashing the water into white foam, sounding like a distant waterfall and producing a fishy smell as the oil from the mangled bait forms a slick on the surface. This occurs mainly in the fall, when the run of fish off Montauk bring fisherman from around the world.
With bunker this size, the big predators will cruise underneath the school and prowl the edges like sharks, looking for a fish to pick off. Sometimes you don’t see the prey you’re after at all, apart from an occasional tail slap. After locating a school, the boat needs to be positioned within casting range according to the drift, current, and wind, taking into account the hand with which the sport fishes, if he or she is fly fishing.
You want to cast to the far edge of the school of bait, with a big fly to “match the hatch” or a large surface lure like a popper. No delicate presentations are needed, as a splash will indicate to a predator the presence of a wounded or disabled fish, an easy meal. As the lure or fly is worked back over the bait, huge bluefish will explode through the tightly packed school of bunker, sometimes clearing the surface to land with a great splash before taking off, pulling yards of line from the reel, which screams from the resistance of the drag. Striped bass require a little more finesse and luck under these conditions. You need to work the edge of the school of bait or fish deep and down tide to try to reach the stripers beneath and behind the blues as the scraps drift down and move with the current.
The princesses were using the very light spinning gear I carry. Even though the drag of the reel will ease the strain, the drag cannot be too light, as you’ll never get the fish to the boat. However, with a light drag, the fish may well strip off all the line, which can break as it reaches the final knot on the spool.
Some of the blues feeding on these adult bunkers can be fifteen pounds or more of pure muscle; these fish are oceangoing and built for speed and endurance. I’ve seen many male teenagers give up the fight, eventually handing me the rod to get the fish in. British girls of this class are very hardy and sporty, and the two princesses proved to be true to type: they did a great job of playing these fish to the boat, eventually catching and releasing a dozen or so.