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| Bar Bulletin |
June,
2003 |
| MSBA News |
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Matching The Hatch
By Patrick Tandy
“People
have misperceptions of fly-fishing, particularly from A
River Runs Through It,” says Tim Staley, a Bethesda-based procurement
law attorney who has been fly-fishing for a half-dozen years. “Remember
that movie? There was a huge spike in new fly-fishing products. A lot of
new lines of fly-fishing rods came out after that movie, which was great,
but it really clogged the streams for a while.”
And as Conservation
Chair for the National Capital Chapter of Trout Unlimited (TU), a national
organization whose mission according to its website (www.tu.org)
is to “conserve, protect and restore North America’s
trout and salmon fisheries and their watersheds,” Staley is all about
unclogging the streams.
“I first got
involved with Trout Unlimited about six years ago, when I started trout
fishing, thinking that instead of me reinventing the wheel I should get
involved with somebody who does this all the time,” Staley explains. “And
there are a lot of people who do it.”
And indeed there
are; TU boasts 125,000 members that comprise its 500 local chapters.
Despite its broad reach, however, the organization favors low-key
approaches to meeting its goals.
“Trout Unlimited
usually doesn’t post signs saying ‘TU was here,’” Staley explains.
“They’re fishermen that don’t want the recognition but do want to be able
to go to that river, pull out a fish, enjoy the afternoon and come home.”
But everything has
its price, and enjoyable afternoons don’t come cheaply. “Putting in rock
beds, planting trees, ensuring a pollution-free environment for these
fish,” Staley says, citing a few of TU’s duties. “But on top of that, if
you have a beautiful river, people are going to come into the area and go
hiking. They’re going to put in a picnic area. They’re going to go
canoeing. It’s a win-win situation.”
Through TU, Staley
has provided his litigation skills to aid in negotiations between various
organizations and government agencies, from the Federation of
Fly-Fishermen (FFF) to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, in
addition to landowners whose properties are affected. In addition to the
FFF-led clean-up efforts in Beaver Creek in Maryland’s Washington County,
Staley and TU have recently effected the construction of a fly-fishing
access point for the handicapped in Nemacolin in western Maryland.
The latter, according to Staley, draws fishermen from Maryland,
West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, Virginia, Ohio and New York.
“If you drew a circle of the states [with Nemacolin as the center], it’s
right there,” he says. “But you know, three, three-and-a-half hours –
that’s not crazy for fishermen to drive in the morning, get there and fish
and then come home.”
“It takes a long
time, maybe five or 10 years, but Trout Unlimited does it,” Staley says.
“It’s almost like hitting your head against the wall – eventually you’ll
knock through the wall, but it’s going to take a while.”
*****
“It’s kind of a
family tradition on some level, which is really nice to see,” Staley says
of his angling heritage. “My grandparents originally had a lake house in
Illinois, and they would do the traditional Midwest catfish fishing, gar
fishing, carp, blue gill, you name it. Every vacation would always have
some kind of fishing put into it.”
“I was actually
born at the
Naval Academy
here at Annapolis,” he continues. “My father was in the service during
Vietnam, and we moved around. My parents are both professors, so we were
in St. Louis for about 20 years, but we’d always go back to Ocean City
for vacation in the summer. I’m definitely a Marylander.”
And so when Staley
returned east to study law, so followed his inherent love of fishing, as
did the need to try something new.
“Fly-fishermen kind
of define people as worm-users and non-worm-users,” says Staley. “It’s
kind of a joke, but it’s true.”
“Number 1, you
don’t use bait [in fly-fishing],” he elaborates. “Number 2, you do have to
like and have a basic understanding of bugs because what you want to do is
match what’s actually in the air, what’s swimming in the water that moment
you’re fishing. A lot of biologists are fly-fishermen, which makes sense
because they get into the insects.”
“Originally, this
stuff goes back to England and Ireland, where they were fishing in the 16th century
with flies bamboo rods and silk lines,” Staley explains of the sport’s
origins. “It’s almost like organic food where people now want to get back
to the roots, the origin of things.”
And as with
anything else, fly-fishing is not without its purists and their relentless
homage to tradition.
“The people at that
far end refuse to fish with anything unless it’s actually hatching at the
time,” Staley explains. “They call it ‘match the hatch,’ hatch meaning the
bug, so you want to match what’s hatching at the time. So you have really
far eccentric people with a bamboo rod, with silk line and the exact bug
that’s flying in your face at the same time. So you can imagine it’s very
difficult to figure out what bug that is, and each species of bug has 10
hybrids.”
Not that the fish
are any less choosy themselves. “They will only bite on what’s going on,”
Staley explains. Special lures, or “flies,” draw on materials such as duck
feathers, foam, plastic and cork and the ingenuity of the fly-fisherman to
effectively simulate the insects that catch the eye of the sportsman’s
mark.
“It’s all
impression,” says Staley. “It’s not really realistic. Whatever you think a
fish eye is going to look at and think is a bug. I have ‘threatened’ to
pick up the odd roadkill, but I never have; it’s unacceptable. But people
do that.”
 Though
the basic methods of attracting the fish have changed little, the endgame
has changed somewhat over time; catch-and-release is frequently the order
of the day. Some parks, according to Staley, forbid the use of barbed
hooks, though some take it yet a step further. “Some guys now actually
clip off the hooks,” he says. “For whatever reason, they just get pleasure
out of matching the bug and watching the fish come up, which is a little
bit further than I think I’ll ever get. It’s almost like a Zen thing.”
“Each bug is
designed not to compete with other bugs, so each bug has its time it’s
going to hatch,” Staley says. “Coincidentally, mayflies and other bugs
will usually hatch within five days, every year, same stream, which makes
you wonder how nature works. Some of these older guys have journals that
they fish. They’ll say, ‘Large mayfly hatch, April 2.’ They’ll go back 30
years, assuming there’s no pollution: ‘Large mayfly hatch, April 2.’
That’s the kind of stuff where it’s not just fishing. It’s really cool.
The whole Zen thing, depending on how far you want to take it.”
*****
Staley’s devotion
to his sport is not without cost or irony. “The Trout Unlimited stuff has
really taken time away from fishing because it’s now [up to] about three
nights a month, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but that’s almost every
week,” he says, “which on top of trying to practice law, on top of a
10-month-old baby…”
“Being a lawyer,
you realize that you do have specialties,” Staley says of his motivation.
“You have the ability to change things. It’s this and working with people.
Not so much saving the world, but it’s being able to sit down with people
and talk to them.”
“You really have to
be an honest fisherman,” he adds. “People say you make all these fish
stories up, but it’s not like you’re going to fudge your way into catching
fish, particularly with fly-fishing because you have certain flies you’re
trying to get. You’ve got to do 10 steps to get in that river and 10 steps
to catch the fish.
“I’ve seen a trend
[among] a lot of the younger attorneys that are fly-fishermen, too,”
Staley notes. “They practice law, but they handle it with more compassion
because they’re environmentally conscious. It may be a stretch, but they
realize there are other things outside of practicing law that affect
peoples’ lives, and that really helps.
“I’ve done a lot of
pro bono work before, but now I’ve kind of shifted to apply pro bono work
toward things that really interest me, and that can make a big bang for
the buck. Restoring a stream is a big bang for the buck. It does a lot for
everybody.”
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