The fish were starting to come into the rivers, at least that’s what people were telling me. Local streams were sending down freshets from winter rains to inspire the annual run of steelhead and all of us in the fly club were more than ready to greet the newcomers. All of our fish runs had been a bit late this year, and we were hoping for a good late run, rather than a run that just didn’t bother to show up!

After doing a bit of inventory, I found that I could use a few more shrimp flies for my boxes. As a matter of principle, I manage to snag most everything above and below the water line, and generally scatter my gear at streamside. Naturally, I don’t have the coordination to tie up my own offerings, so I cornered my buddy, Chuck Cameron, to order up some refills. Chuck has a little shop over on the Washington state side of the river in Long Beach, and always has a good supply on hand.

A lot of the folks in our local club, Rainland Fly Casters, have crazy skills in fly-tying. Henry Hoffman (to be featured in one of my upcoming articles) was one of the best feather breeders ever. His chickens grew unique feathers for fly-tying that even today bring big prices on the Internet. Dave Hughes, another of the club’s early members, has written a lot of terrific books on every aspect of fly-fishing, and ties some pretty nice stuff himself.

Chuck, who is closing in on his eighth decade, doesn’t have all the fingers he started with, but can still tie a fly that is darn near too small to be seen without magnification! And they all look wonderful. So I put in what I thought was a very simple request for a steelhead-appropriate “shrimp fly.” Chuck has sold me a lot of flies over the years, with several different fly patterns, and was more than happy to take care of the empty spaces in my fly boxes.

Endless Variety

When I asked Chuck to rustle me up a half-dozen, he started playing “twenty questions” with me. Apparently you get as many variations of “shrimp fly” among tiers, as you get, “paintings of women” by great artists. Now there is a pretty good explanation for the variety. After all, there are a lot of kinds of shrimp. You can get them in the market in any size from cocktail to jumbo prawns. The bait stores offer everything, from the delicate San Francisco Bay shrimp that you thread gently onto the hook to the local variety of “ghost shrimp” that hide in holes in the mud and have pinchers that look like they could take off a finger! There are many shapes, colors and sizes of shrimp, in both salt and fresh water.

In addition, every fly tier worth his salt has a personal vision of the perfect shrimp fly to appeal to a fish. Even though I had purchased one I liked from Chuck before, I couldn’t really describe it very well and it turns out that he builds dozens of varieties, not to mention all the different hook sizes and variations in color and material.

I really should have known better. On one of the club’s tying nights, I had observed about twenty of our members creating a new fly based on a model presented by a guest instructor. Each tier got an identical packet to work with. We got to see the master tier’s work closeup as he put his fly together, and everyone sort of worked along at his own pace. As I walked around to look at the results afterward, every fly was quite different from the prototype. They all bore the mark of their creators. Seems that, as in most different mediums of expression, there are a lot of “impressionists” working the fly vices.

Not Perfect

After a number of conversations with Chuck over the next month or so, I bought several packets of shrimp flies. All looked great and I’m sure will catch fish, but none matched that special one that I had liked so well. After awhile, I had pretty much given up on my fixation on the ideal shrimp fly. After all, I had a bunch of new offerings of fur and feather that should do the job.

So you can imagine the elation I felt when, on a scouting venture to try and catch one of the newly arrived “metal heads,” I opened a pocket in my vest and found, wedged in a tiny little fly case, the fly of my obsession! Elated, I tied the fly onto my leader and made a few dozen casts. I didn’t have any quick success so I switched it with another fly I had promised to give a road test. I carefully put my special shrimp on the patch of lamb’s wool on my vest for safekeeping.

The sun was sinking as I headed back toward the truck. As an afterthought, I reached for my vest to pull off the shrimp fly and put it back in my box. It was gone! Somehow the hook that I had so carefully driven into the fleece had fallen off. I scrambled back to the river to hunt it down. There was still enough light so that I could see the bank and streambed, but it was nowhere to be found. Crestfallen, I drove back home.

Determined to find a facsimile to show Chuck, I put the words,  “shrimp fly,” into my search engine on the computer. That was no help at all! Give it a try, you’ll find hundreds of patterns. And I couldn’t find any that looked like the one I lost! I realize it probably wouldn’t make a bit of difference to a feisty steelhead, but somehow, it makes a difference to me.

Bob Ellsberg’s column, Fishin’, appears monthly in RV Life and at rvlife.com.

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