A River View : Many Are Discovering That Fly-Fishing’s Ambience Is a Natural for Them

The other day, Dave Whitlock met a man fishing the White River near Norfork, Ark., where he lives and asked, one fisherman to another, “How ya doin’?”

The man, who, Whitlock guessed, was retired, looked up from his lawn chair and said: “Oh, it’s been pretty slow this morning, but that’s OK because I hate cleaning ‘em, anyway.”

That was Whitlock’s cue.

“I asked him, ‘Did you ever think about catching and releasing them?’ And he said, ‘I catch and release. As soon as I get my limit, I release all the rest of them I catch that day.’ ”

Another time, Whitlock had just caught, photographed and was preparing to release what he described as “a rather large brown trout” when he was approached by another man.

“He walked up and asked what I was doing. I said, ‘I’m releasing this fish.’ He said, ‘Oh, you got your limit?’ I said, ‘No, it’s just too big and beautiful a fish to kill.’ And he said, ‘Hell, I’d eat it.’ ”

Some people, Whitlock laments, just don’t get it.

Whitlock is to fly-fishing what Joe Montana was to football before his arm went bad. While Montana was at Anaheim last weekend watching the 49ers beat the Rams, Whitlock was nearby in Fullerton at Bob Marriott’s annual Fly-Fishing Fair with some other superstars of the sport, including Lefty Kreh and Gary and Jason Borger, father and son. They showed people how to cast and tie flies, and they also talked about another Montana--the state--and where the sport fits in the ‘90s.

Sport? Fly-fishing is also regarded as an art form and an ethic, especially by those who do it--an aura many believe is successfully transmitted by Robert Redford’s film from Norman Maclean’s book, “A River Runs Through It,” which was filmed in Montana, the Mecca of American fly-fishing.

Jason Borger, 23, was fresh out of the University of Wisconsin with credentials in film and television production when he joined the film crew as a production assistant, technical consultant and on-camera double for 90% of the fly-casting scenes. He is the fisherman on the poster--although, as Kreh pointed out, the cast he is making is more spectacular than practical, with the line twirling high over his head.

“Jason is a beautiful caster, and that’s a horrible cast,” Kreh said, wincing. “Nobody will ever cast with a line like that. They must have air-brushed it.”

Otherwise, fly anglers agree, the film is true to their passion.

“One of my friends described (fly-fishing) best,” Borger said. “She called it ‘a ballet of nature.’ ”

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The film was set in Montana in the 1920s. Most of the fishing scenes were filmed on the Galatin River, one of the remaining pristine blue-ribbon streams.

“It brings you back to a time when people were closer to the earth than they are today,” Borger said. “Nobody on the film crew had any idea about fly-fishing. Redford and producer Patrick Markey did. But at the end the whole film crew appreciated it. I think now it’s starting to be accepted on the mainstream level.”

Gary Borger--fly-fisher, author, fly-tier and teacher--said:”One of the reasons Redford wanted to do it was that this was his subtle way of saying, ‘Here’s what we had in Montana in the past, and it could still be this way, had we just taken care of it. Now it’s time to take care of it.’ That’s what I think is going to happen in the ‘90s, partly because of this movie.”

Whitlock recently visited New Zealand, which has exceptional fly-fishing.

“New Zealand reminded me a lot of when I first started fly-fishing out West,” he said. “I fished for 20 days and I never saw what I would call a piece of litter--nothing, no cigarette butts, plastic wrappers, cans, nothing.”

And, Whitlock said, most of the anglers he met in New Zealand were practicing catch-and-release.

“You begin to think of a fish as too special to kill,” he said. “He’s worth so much more in the stream than on the table.”

Other fishermen accuse fly-fishers and, more recently, bass fishermen, who also advocate catch-and-release, of just “ripping lips” or torturing fish by catching them over and over.

“I would give them the option of which would you rather I do,” Whitlock said. “Catch you on a treble hook and cut your head off and take your guts out and take you home and put you in the freezer, or stick a barbless hook in your lip, pull you in and then turn you loose?”

Whitlock adopted his ethics early. “When I was born I had a number of different physical disabilities,” he said. “I had polio, rheumatic fever and a severe spinal injury. I was pretty much an invalid through my preteens. But my folks all fished and hunted and that was something I could do. Where a normal child would be more taken up with team sports or social things, I had time to myself outdoors, and nature became my best friend . . . a friend that never criticized me or looked at me like people did.

“As I became an artist, I had no interest in including humans in my artwork. I had to grow up from that.”

Whitlock said that fly-fishing also taught him to be out in nature without being destructive.

“When we’re young, we’re hot-blooded and aggressive,” he said. “Once you begin to release fish, you feel better and better about it.

“Most (fishermen) don’t enjoy killing fish or cleaning fish. I think, too, as most people mature, they quit hunting as much and do more photography of wild game. I have so many guys tell me, ‘I don’t hunt anymore. I just got tired of killing,’ . . . or, ‘Hunting with a camera is more fun.’ What they’re really saying is that they’ve begun to appreciate the life of nature rather than the death of nature.”

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From a practical view, Gary Borger said: “Fly-fishers have always been active environmentalists. . . . You have to know about the insects and the places where the fish live.

“(That’s why) it’s the most productive way to fish. Somebody who’s a good fly-fisher can catch way more fish than someone with bait or worms. If during a hatch when all the insects are coming off the water and the fish are eating on the surface and you’ve got the right fly, you can just boom, pow, bang-- pull ‘em out of there. Power Bait isn’t going to work.”

And at those times, when a fly-fisherman is in tune with nature, Borger added, “You realize how delicate this whole system is.”

Women, Kreh said, seem attracted by the sensitive nature of fly-fishing. He said 20% to 30% of the people who attended his recent series of seminars in Australia were women.

“It used to be, if you had a woman in your clinic she was either looking for a guy or figured if she didn’t learn to fly-fish she wasn’t going to see her guy,” Kreh said. “Now they just want to learn to fly-fish.

“You don’t need a lot of strength to fly-cast. In fact, having a lot of strength can mess you up if you use too much force. Fly-fishing is done in pretty places. The rods are light and easy to handle. You don’t need to fool with live bait.”

Also, Kreh said, many women want no concessions.

“They don’t like ladies’ rods and ladies’ reels,” he said. “They just want to be treated as just another fly-fisherman.”

It’s a sport open to all, as Whitlock’s two friends in Arkansas have found.

“To participate in fly-fishing, you have to become a naturalist,” he said. “A person who understands what water is and what lives in it and how to enter into that little drama and play that game of creating an insect imitation to fool a trout.”