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Date: July 13, 2004 at 14:19:13
From: ken, [pool-64-223-16-204.prov.east.verizon.net]
Subject: Re: The grifter effect on shop employees
That is a well thought out and well written essay.
Your question that I quoted below is one that has been waiting to be asked for a long time.
There is no one all encompassing answer to it but I remember the period when salt-water fly-fishing became
popular and thousands if not tens of thousands of people suddenly (in less than one year) became interested in it.
Why is it that the only place you can read about the methodology of fly fishing the surf with a floating line and the method of flatwing fly tying only on this board and only in a select few books. If it is so fundamental to saltwater ff you would think that it would still be around and stand the test of time. Or were people back then so protective of the knowledge that they had that it was kept out of the mainstream and never had a chance to take hold? What are your thoughts about this? SVM
First of all the people who fished were not protective of the knowledge. They were generous men and there were not very many of them and they were not the type of men that pushed themselves forward to receive recognition. They did not all fish with floating lines all the time nor did they fish with sinking lines all the time. They never felt that they knew everything because they did not. Most if not all of them had roots in trout fishing and had used fly rods all their lives. They knew there were no shortcuts and did not pretend that there were. They knew that their knowledge was limited and most of them were not the type of people who felt comfortable at a microphone or hawking their expertise. They were fishermen first and felt uncomfortable in the limelight.
The surge in numbers created a market that had never existed and there was a lot of money looking to be spent and no marketing plan that was cohesive to sell products existed. There was a tradition but it was not full of product sizzle and was based on experience and the complexity of the fishing.
There were no shops, no guides, no magazines, and two salt-water clubs that had been around since the sixties. The Atlantic fly-fishers in New Jersey and the Rhody fly-fishers in Rhode Island.
I was a part of the Rhody fly fishers and had been struggling to increase the membership from seven members in the eighties to about 80 by the late eighties.
I was able to do this by a simple move. I started to do a Tuesday night fishing gathering and it was a big success. The membership increased to 140 members in one year. It continued to grow. This was in 1989 before there were any books published. We had a newsletter and we kept it focused on fishing and the members wrote the articles. We sent it around the country to the people who were well known and to editors in the hopes that fly fishing in the salt would get some interest. The club was low key and non-political and the only thing we really did was fish together and meet and share fly tying and stories about striper fishing. A great deal of Striper moon was written and shared with the membership in the newsletters. I was encouraged by the membership to put the articles together and write a book. I did.
Before the book was published in the spring of 94 another book was published. It came out early in the year and was very different then the book I had written. Its methodology was the one that was used by the industry to organize the development of product line for the emerging modern salt-water fly-fishing industry. It was the template that was used to define salt-water fly-fishing methods and tackle in the Northeast. The tradition that had evolved over many years was simply by-passed and ignored and ridiculed as old fashioned and useless. The men who had lived it and knew it were discarded as being a fringe group.
I am going to quote a grass roots essay from January that contains a recollection of what happened at the Rhody fly rodders meetings just when the rocket of the modern salt-water industry took off. It is not smooth and it is a bit testy but it is factual and subjective.
This is called an answer to Miker’s question
Once upon a time; in a world that did not exist but that often appeared to exist there was a brother of a brother who believed that each was born to rule that world. They were both correct.
ADDED Note* July 2004 (That is in reference to the industry)
Monomoy.
It was a long time ago and I did not fish there every day but I remember what it looked like and what the fishing was like. It was strong. It was very good and it held up well in those days.
The first year I agreed to go was the second or third year after I had been urged to go by Dave Reed and Al Brewster from the cape who were coming to the Rhody Fly Rodder meetings in Newport R.I. every month during that ancient pre-1994 time and bringing all the Cape Cod T.U. Guys and
over the years lots of baby future guides down with them to listen to Ray Bonderow and Armand Courchaine and a few other experienced fellows including myself, talk about salt water fly fishing.
Brewster was a part of the old guard along with Harold Gibbs and others including my father and myself. He had moved from West Barrington where I lived to Centerville on the cape years earlier.
He came down to the Rhody Fly Rodder’s to see me give a talk because he thought I was my dad.
After the talk he came up to me and said, “You’re not him but you’ll do.” We’ve been friends ever since.
Al tied all the art flick classic dry flies for Orvis. (He is in his eighties)
No one had heard of Monomoy back then except the regulars who ran the beaches in buggies and they seldom if ever used fly rods. Monomoy had a reputation but it was not related to fly-fishing.
At that time, pre-1994 there were no fly fishing schools, no fly fishing magazines, no fly fishing shops or fly fishing striper guides or faux fly fishing experts.
There were very few fly fishermen in northeast salt-water period. Damn few!
There were just a couple of us who were and most of us had been fly fishing down here in R.I. and had been fly fishing right along since we were kids and we had been doing it all of our lives with no thoughts about the “marketing insanity,” that was about to descend on us and our beloved pastime.
Soon the fly-fishing world was full of “conversations,” about every “Fishery,”
(a marketing term that describes the exploitation of catching fish for the money the “Fishery,” generates) and endorsed guide programs.
I always wondered who endorsed and gave authority to the endorsers authority and was amazed at the arrogance of the endorsers (Marketing again) or gave the nod to stripping baskets and all that product that was touted as necessary -and - the real meaning behind the artificial mystique of certified and thoroughly marketed and endorsed casting class instructors?
Their expertise that was endorsed in the salt was endorsed by who?
I always wondered where the need for stocking foot waders in surf fishing came from as I had never seen a single pair used there before they said they were necessary.
It was a another grafted on marketing event along with all the rest of that gauntlet of bull**it marketing of unnecessary and silly salt water fly fishing stuff that all you fellows who showed up later in the decade were initiated into as needed.
None of that “Necessary crap,” existed then and as time goes by it is disappearing rapidly back into the La La marketing land that it came from.
We old timers just plain didn’t know that we needed all that stuff the twenty something marketers said we needed and some of us still don’t know why we need it.
Monomoy was still to come and its rise to fame was also largely spawned by the business. Neither good nor bad but interesting either way.
The dastardly deed of promoting salt water striper fly fishing as a trendy designer sport was all grafted onto the real salt water fly fishing by promoting a faux (false) celebrity base for advertising “stuff,” and the new methodology from the book in the media.
Those celebrities did not exist until they were marketed as northeast fly fishing celebrities.
Fly-fishing didn’t have any pro athletes so they made em up!
The twenty something marketing hype types loved it I am sure.
They probably imagined themselves working in the Super Bowl arena of tippet material promotional splendor.
It must have felt just like the real sport pro promotions like the ones M. Jordan was involved in.
Michael actually could perform deeds of prowess in his sport. He was a real celebrity; He knew how to play basketball. He did not have to learn for photo shots.
Fly-fishing manufacturers created party line celebrities that promoted their products and I give these marketing fellows a lot of credit. They did a lot with nothing at all to work with and…………that is still the M.O.
If you think Monomoy is something great, think about this.
The marketing “Twenty Something’s,” totally initiated and developed (it did not exist independently in nature) the modern endorsed “Fly-Fishing Striper Guide,” phenomenon.
That was a feat as it rose with no roots in real time fly fishing experience.
The novel “Ninety two in the shade,” and the insular nature of Key West had nothing on the determination of the Monomoy Desperado’s who were “Hungry for the Romance,” of claiming to being a “Guide,” or a “fly tier,” or a “clerk,” in any fly shop or to appear know something,
anything,
about fly fishing that would give them the “Shine,” of valid credibility and potential celebrity in “other peoples” perception of them.
They were desperate for acceptance as worthy of celebrity.
They wanted to be a part of a wonderful world that encourages identity madness cleverly disguised as self worth in someone else’s eyes a form of false self-confidence with the always present dread of being found out as a phony poser.
Some became ”Endorsed,” i.e. big shot flats guides that were shot from booking agent guns and were terrified by the prospect of having living clients to take fishing.
Some of them even had as much as 1 or 2 months experience under their belts right in the beginning.
They began to fish and learn and were hired to teach the hoards that were lining up to pass through the “endorsed” schools that sprang up to support the flats “Fishery.”
The media had to cover the boom. It did a wonderful job.
Straight from the entry level editing desk stable of “Skateboard up side your head sideways,” inc. ( I made that up) and other holding companies for new magazines comes the new editor in chief of our new salt fly magazine created to serve the new sports.
The twenty three year old editor in chief genius, ” Yea, fishns cool I gess,” I fished before.
Salt flies new brilliant editor in chief that was told to make fly fishing the number one household word in Arizona.
It was cool to fill the magazine with “Insider Jargon,” hard tails, krill, cast to the next time zone and the “cool,” brandy new salt water fly fishing media sucked it up like the discerning post teen editing wonders that they were, big time.
Monomoy was still on the horizon however and none of this speculatorical fantasy had even been dreamed of yet in twenty something fly fishing tele-tubby lands.
A Manufacturer and media salt-water fly-fishing equipment “Hatch,” had begun.
Soon it became a proverbial “blizzard hatch,” and had all the innocent trusting gullible “Sports,” sipping in equipment like a Hatchery Brookie sips in both spinners and pellets that float down the creek. (It was a fly business blitz of sorts)
The government should have stepped in and put a daily bag limit on how much money or the sustainable daily yield of SWFF business could take from each sport per day to protected the immature sports from over harvest and rabid over exploitation.
(A fly business expression in the form of a slot limit or catch and release ethic)
Perhaps mandate a buyer beware training course for those who spend more than a thousand a day.
It was incredible to see it unfold in all of its magnificence for those of us who were simple naďve (stupid) striper fly fishermen when it started. The business of fly-fishing overwhelmed us like an avalanche in a void.
The business transformed the known world of salt water fly fishing overnight into some strange disjointed beast that was sort of recognizable from the look of the equipment but the language and the meaning of the words and the meaning of the fundamentals were completely revised and no longer functioned as a harmonic and balanced whole but were twisted into a cheap and expensive glitzy “Show and tell,” designer, fashionably overpriced, “Tec junk,” obscenity that ridiculed its origins and history and was cut off from its soul by twenty something marketing school graduates and their slightly older and more experienced crossing guard bosses, the “thirty-one-zee or thirty two-zee” something or others.
They loved Monomoy as a marketers dream and created a whole sweet world in never never land and went for it with all they had and nature broke it. (But that is another story that the destination grifters of the media will never acknowledge)
In the beginning there was a day the beaches were empty of fly fishermen and then suddenly they were filled with them. The dunes were loaded with newbee’s with fly toys and bright eyed, “tennis anyone,” fly casting folks and everybody was a RRTI (river runs through it) anti-hero who could and did look good all dolled up for fly casting on the Vineyard and the bucks flowed in.
Which gets me back to Monomoy and the way it was in 1994 or so.
Dave told me about this guy he knew who was fishing out on Monomoy and he was a fellow from the clothing business and had been in the retail end of department store marketing all of his life and he loved to fly fish and he was going to open a store in Harwich and he was trying to promote flats fishing for stripers out at Monomoy.
He was still figuring out how to do it when Dave asked me to go out there and fish with him.
He ended up opening the store and made some good deals with certain fly fishing companies and started his shop, which was and is a terrific place to visit.
Then came the schools and the guide business and lots of other stuff that I will never know about nor should I know about.
That was the beginning of the Monomoy flats promotion.
Guides appeared like grass the following spring and soon everybody who didn’t have a job was an expert flats guide and so it went. It took some of the unemployed off the corners I guess and helped kids become fishing guides instead of landscapers right after they had finished being paperboys.
It was a guide tradition with no history and no right of passage and no fundamentals.
Everything has a beginning. It began.
It was a created entity and it was maintained by marketing forces bringing people to the shops to hire guides and take the school. Monomoy was the focus of the whole of it but I am getting ahead of myself again.
The shop had not officially opened yet the first year I did go. I arrived one morning and met everyone and had a great time. The owner was staying in the shop at the time and things were still being formed everything was new and I had never been to Monomoy and I was excited about going there. Dave had talked it up quite a bit.
I went and there were hoards of fish. The opening between north Monomoy and south Monomoy was very different than it is now. The cut was much smaller and there were several channels and lots of high sand that you could walk-on and the islands themselves were quite a ways away. We left stage harbor and right away there was a tremendous amount of current just outside of the mouth and a major rip formed towards the east and the water was extremely clear and shallow. It was beautiful looking water. I would have stayed right there and been quite content to fish those currents and bars. We moved past those bars and went up on plane and flashed across the flats like in a dream and I remember being struck by how beautiful the place was and how clean the water was and how interesting the bottom looked with the sand and the grass as it went whizzing past.
We came to the cut between the islands from the west and there was a tiny hump just off the shore to the south of the cut with little waves making little surf splashes on it and we slid up close to it and the water had to be 12 to 18” deep no more and I looked, and in those days my eyes were better than they are now and there were so many bass lazing around that tiny hump that it was dazzling. I fished. I would make a cast it would land and I would watch them rush the fly and before they could get it I would yank it right out of the water. I must have done that three or four times before I decided to close my eyes or look down and strike when I felt the hit. It worked perfectly. I got my stupid brain and myself out of the way and started catching fish.
There were fish everywhere and after a while we ambled over to the edge of the sand on the other side of the cut, which was less than one hundred yards away, and there were hundreds and hundreds of fish there too. Bob took me up inside and showed me a long ‘river of sorts,’ that headed south and cut through a long shallow flat and it was deep and blue green and it had hundreds fish in it that stayed there even when the tide went out because the water was so big and deep there. It was remarkable and I liked to fish there and I came back and fished it often that year. That place is not there any more. It has filled in and totally disappeared. He also brought me across a great wide deep basin that had grass on the bottom and was from 4’ to 18’ deep or so and it went from just inside of the channels that faced west between the islands and broadened and went all the way up to the back of South beach with no shallow water but lots of current and shallower places and edges but the whole center was clean ad deep with no bars and felt just like a lake. It had no resemblance to the shallow winding riverine way it looks now. I liked that area a lot and it was full of fish and sand eels and the place was alive and crawling with bass everywhere. I was able to spot fish that were deep and fish to them and catch them.
It was remarkable and a wonderland for fishing then. That afternoon I came back to Monomoy with some one else and we anchored on a big flat and fished some current flow and the flow was very marsh like but without the marsh and I was able to wade across from the south island across to the north island and there was a very large concentration of fish there and they were stacked up on the side of the current and there were thousands of them there. They held in the current and fed as they held. Catching was easy and I was using droppers and as it got dark the catching got to be wildly nutty I had to stop and sit down. The water was interesting and complex with lots of fish and food. I came back a few times that year and the next and I liked it and enjoyed it but I stopped coming for several years until about three years ago. The place was dramatically different. I did not recognize the area at all.
I remembered the two Islands but the water in between them was tiny and now it is gigantic. It is not at all the same. It is interesting but the holding water that was there is not there any longer. The water flows only in that snaky river that is all dry land when the tide is out and when the tide is in there seems to be fewer places to look for fish than there used to be. There are fish there but they are not exciting in the way the move and feed or hold and I think that that is simply because the areas have changed and are less dramatic then they used to be.
I have noticed that the guides who do fish on the flats seem to like to anchor on edges to deep water and have their clients cast into the deeper water with sinking lines or/and with spinning rods now whereas when I fished there in years past there seemed to be much more energetic chasing of the fish and stalking and wading the flats going on.
When I look at the water now it is different then it was and that alone may explain the change in tactics from the more energetic methods of the past to a more sedate bottom approach. It could also be guide apathy and I am sure that that is a big part of it.
I have asked lots of people about how they enjoy the place now and many are content to just be there as it is very beautiful. It is not at all the same as it once was and it is filling in and the vast areas of deeper water are gone and the place is mostly dry land at low tide now and the texture and shape of the western bars has changed and the current on the western side is more soft and easy now and the tops of the bars are gone and the structure of them seems to have softened and is not as dramatic as it was ten years ago. I do not fish there all the time and I have no vested interest in promoting the place. I like it and I like it a lot and I like other flats on the cape as well and some I like much better. It is not a stable environment. I have seen it change dramatically in many ways in a relatively short period of time and the changes are dramatic and are all pointed towards the area filling in and having less holding water for the fish to stay in and less environment for the bait to stay in.
I personally think the best fishing was in the period when it was changing from what it was when the opening to pleasant bay was there to what it is now but who knows. Nature can and does do dramatic things quickly. There used to be houses out there in front of Chatham light. I have been told they disappeared in one day. Who knows, a big sea from the right direction on the right tide and anything can and will happen. If that happened the tub would be flushed out in no time. The areas between the islands would be swept and deepened and the currents would change the whole place dramatically. If something dramatic like that does not happen then I think that the place will change even more in the direction it is going in now than it has already maybe for the better maybe not. It may turn into a big deadish no current sand flat. There will still be stripers there no matter what happens to it. Places fill in and places open up. Sachuest point near Newport R.I. used to be an Island and not connected with a road to the main island as it is now and so was Beavertail separate from the main island of Jamestown and there was once a barrier beach from Point Judith to Black point. Cape Cod is much more fluid than the rocky shoreline of R.I. so I would expect you will see much more shifting of the sand and more dramatic major changes in areas like Monomoy in much faster time. It is changing and it will continue to change regardless of anyone’s or any businesses opinion or desire for it to not change.
I miss those days when Reed and Brewster came down from the cape to the Rhody Fly Rodder meetings and the fishing was easy and clean and the fly fishermen in those days were a good hearted bunch. There were about twenty or thirty of them from here to New Jersey in the seventies and early eighties and we all knew each other. The fact of the matter is those of us who were fishing through the fifties and the sixties and the seventies and the eighties still know who we are. Men’s memories change slower than Monomoy I guess. The real History of salt-water fly-fishing is not “Subject to,” marketing blabberwocky. Lets “Save the stripers,” as that is the only thing
Your question is a good one.
The answer is it was inconvenient to the industry to have a broad marketing plan based on the wide variations in methods that were known.
Casting and distance were easily taught and the tackle sold and the methods promoted all were connected to a product line that cold be sold as a package that would get a beginner fishing in an afternoon and the money spent would be predictable and substantial. It was simply good business to ignore anything that did not fit into the tightly controlled business model.
The business functioned as a unit created to sell predictable product in a sustainable and controlled fashion. It worked until 1997. Then the market was saturated with similar product and it began to implode.
The two books that you mention were written before the invasion of the business of fly-fishing began. That is why they are different.
This web site tries to keep the link to the traditions of the past alive.
That is all I try to do. I owe it to the integrity and decency of the men who came before and to those new fly fishermen who are looking for a connection to the true roots and methodology of fly fishing in the salt that is based on real grass roots experience not a created business plan.
What is good and true in the new methodology will last and it is right that it does. It does not, however, replace what is good and true that was passed down to us from the past. It is necessary that the past be known and not be ignored through a forced ignorance of salt water fly fishing history for no other reason than inconvenience to a salt water business marketing plan that has shown itself to be bankrupt.
The literature of the past ten years is in my opinion mostly grifter generated.
My opinion.
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