Photograph by Mark Gilliland
To the uninitiated—like me—it’s one of those activities where nothing much seems to be happening. Guys (mostly) wearing waders and multi-pocketed vests stand for hours in a stream, waiting for fish to bite. The best thing about it, I thought, was that at least they weren’t using worms.
But ask someone hooked on the sport, and it’s as if you’ve fallen into another culture, or maybe cult. Fly-fishing has its own language, its own artifacts—I’ll get to Woolly Buggers and Crackleback Brown Spiders later—and even literature. Check out Sex, Death and Fly-Fishing, by outdoors writer John Gierach. His description of the perfect, and totally variable, weather conditions needed for ideal trout fishing is a hilarious metaphor for the uncertainty that conditions will ever be right for romance.
“It’s the kind of puzzle where the challenge isn’t to put the pieces together, but just to locate all the damned pieces in the first place,” he writes.
I decided to learn more about fly-fishing, which is why I found myself trolling for information on a mile-long strip of Manchester Road between Rock Hill and Brentwood, home to two St. Louis fly-fishing institutions.
The first, Feather-Craft Fly Fishing (8307 Manchester, 314-963-7884, www.feather-craft.com), is the more visible, especially when the free Saturday morning fly-casting lessons (by appointment) are going on outside. Feather-Craft is the third largest fly-fishing mail order business in the country, with both a catalog and an extensive Web site.
The store, which offers the advantage of hands-on advice, is brightly lit, all the better to explore the bins of what looks like lint. These are the flies—the Elk Hair Caddis Olive, the Crackleback, the Loop Wing Emerger and on and on and on—that mimic the bugs fish eat. Neon-colored flies on another table resemble the leftovers from a Mardi Gras party. Feather-Craft is the Michael’s of fly-tying, with aisles of threads, little packets of plastic eyes, plenty of tools, free Saturday morning lessons and a video library.
Tying your own flies is the logical extension of fly-fishing, according to Feather-Craft manager Ted Lammert: “You see the fish. You throw to the fish. You make the fish eat something you made.”
Like any hobby, fly-fishing can be expensive. But Feather-Craft sells a basic outfit by Temple Fork Outfitters—rod, reel, line and something to put on the line—for $184.95. All Feather-Craft equipment comes with a lifetime warranty.
Now to the be-all and end-all of fly-fishing hangouts, T. Hargrove Fly-Fishing (9024 Manchester, 314-968-4223, www.thargrove.com). If you can’t go fishing, go to Hargrove’s. Saturday mornings here—the woodstove burning, chili simmering, Ed “The Woolly Bugger King” Kraushaar tying flies at the old oak table and regulars helping themselves to coffee—is as close to a fish camp as you can get without a stream nearby. Tom Hargrove, with his salt-and-pepper beard, ready laugh and worn denim apron, presides.
The murmur of fishing talk eddies through the room in a gentle current.
“I got a two-tipped six-weight Battenkill, I got it from this guy Marty … maybe you can clean it up when you get back from Argentina,” says one man to Hargrove. “You got to redo it for me. It needs some work, it needs some work …”
“Eight foot’s not bad for a cane rod,” says someone else.
“This may be an eight-six,” says another, in the lingo that refers to the length of the rod and the weight of the line. A high-quality line, Hargrove tells me, is more important than a high-quality rod.
You don’t have to be an expert or a regular to hang at Hargrove’s. Craig Stephens, Jeff McClain and Hargrove will fill you in on the basics of equipment and technique in a quick survey of the store. You can drop $3,000 for a handmade bamboo rod, but Hargrove says a $100 rod by St. Croix is an all-round practical beginning. Casting lessons are $40 an hour for one or two people.
Hargrove began fly-fishing when he was 13, twentysome-odd years ago, and started tying flies two years later. Now it’s a way of life, with trips from Alaska to Argentina and everywhere in between. A six-inch stack of fishing photos—his own and his customers’—attests to the sport’s addictive nature.
“I don’t know exactly what fly-fishing teaches us,” writes Gierach in one of his many books on fly-fishing, “but I think it’s something we need to know.”
I can’t quite tell yet, but I think I may be hooked.
