Adventurous Women Wade Into World of Tweedy Males

Carefully wading through a sun-dappled river, Jane Gibbs tries not to spook the brown trout she senses nearby.

She knows they’re there. She’s seen them and caught them before in this birch-lined stretch of the Au Sable River.

Alas, on this day neither a woolly bugger nor an olive caddis fools the trout prized by fly-fishing devotees. All Ms. Gibbs has to show for her efforts are snags in some low-hanging trees and debris.

But surrounded by exquisite Adirondack mountain scenery and sounds, she’s hardly dejected.

“I fish and fish,” says Ms. Gibbs, 37, of Boston. “Even without much to show for it, I’m glad to be outdoors.”

She’s not alone. Five centuries after an English nun wrote the first known book about fly-fishing, women are wading into rivers, streams and brooks in growing numbers. They’re becoming passionate about a sport traditionally enjoyed by a tweedy, elitist male crowd.

“Fly-fishing was a forbidden realm; it was a man’s world,” recalls Patty Reilly, 45, a free-lance guide based in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “You should have seen the expressions on some men’s faces when they’d see I was their guide.”

Although women have always fished, they were few in number. Many were taught by their grandfathers, boyfriends or other relatives.

“For many years I didn’t have anyone to fish with except men,” says Ms. Reilly, who like other guides and outdoor outfitters note the growing number of women anglers.

“I have husbands calling me to sign their wives up for lessons. But once the woman gets out on the stream, the fascination with fishing becomes completely her own.”

Joan Wulff, 69, who owns The Wulff Fly Fishing School on the Beaverkill River in New York’s Catskills region, says, “Women always thought the sport was closed to them.

“Now, 25 years after the women’s movement, they’re independent and realize they can do anything they want to.”

Her late husband, Lee Wulff, was a fly-fishing legend who pioneered catch-and-release fishing and designed flies that bear his name.

Lori-Ann Murphy, owner-operator of Reel Women Expeditions in Victor, Wyo., says women, like men, enjoy fishing as an escape from their daily routine.

“Women will spend their days on the stream and their evenings congregated around a campfire, smoking cigars and swapping fish stories,” she says.

Orvis, the outdoor outfitters, reports that the enrollment of women in its fly-fishing schools has swelled in the last two years. Women now comprise 38% of the students, says Gwenn Perkins, director of Orvis Women’s Outdoor Program and a nationally recognized fly-fishing instructor.

The Reel Women mailing list has grown from 250 names to 2,500 over the last few years, Ms. Murphy says.

Last year more than 80 attended Orvis’ two women-only clinics in Manchester, Vt. Programs now are being offered in four other states. There are also Orvis-hosted women-only fly-fishing trips to the Caribbean, Alaska and the American West.

“You can no longer say to a woman when she arrives into a fly-fishing shop, ‘Are you looking for something for your husband?’ ” Ms. Perkins says.

She notes a 150% growth in women’s sales in 1995-96.

“Women are the fastest-growing aspect of the fly-fishing industry,” Ms. Perkins says.

One of the reasons for that growth is an improvement in equipment for women.

“If a woman is comfortable outdoors--able to endure the cold, wind, biting insects and rain with dignity--then she’ll love fly-fishing,” says Ms. Wulff, whose long list of achievements include winning best distance cast in the fishermen’s distance fly-fishing tournament in 1951 when she cast her line 161 feet.

The key word is ‘comfortable,’ according to Ms. Wulff. She used to fish with a fiberglass and bamboo rod and wear men’s boots and waders that on her were “like death traps.”

Manufacturers now make graphite rods and design boots and waders to fit a women’s shape.

Women tend to excel at fly-fishing because it’s a sport of finesse rather than strength, says Ms. Murphy of Reel Women Expeditions, whose students have included Meryl Streep, Kevin Bacon and Martha Stewart.

Rhythm and timing are the key. Women are fast learners and are more patient than men, who tend to use too much power when they’re frustrated, she says.

Nancy Zakon, 53, an instructor who has fished rivers from Maine to New Mexico and Florida to Montana, has even made fly-fishing accessible to women in Manhattan.

When she founded Juliana Berners’ Anglers fly-fishing club several months ago, there were only six members. Now 70 take advantage of the club’s monthly fishing trips, casting clinics in Central Park and cocktail parties and lectures.

“We enjoy the intellectual content of the sport,” says Ms. Zakon, who likes figuring out what insects are hatching and reading water currents.

“For having small brains, those fish are really smart.”

The club is named for Dame Juliana Berners, a nun who wrote the first publication on fly-fishing, printed in England in 1496. This year marks the 500th anniversary of the publication of “The Treatise Of Fishing With An Angle.”

In her writing, Dame Juliana describes how to make a two-piece fly rod. For fishing line, she tells how to dye white horsehair natural colors to match the water. She recommends hooks for certain fish and advises on conservation.

One of Orvis’ newest programs is Casting for Recovery, a fly-fishing program for breast cancer patients that includes instruction, basic stream entomology and an evening group forum led by a registered psychotherapist to discuss emotional recovery-related issues.

The motion of fly casting helps restore shoulder mobility that may have been reduced from surgery, says Dr. Benita Walton. “But just as important is the psychological component--the solace provided by beautiful, wild outdoor settings.”

Joanne Lawson of Washington, D.C., is among the women eager to get out as the sun rises, and then later return for some evening fishing in a moonlit-streaked stream.

“Reading or vegging-out doesn’t make me relax,” says Ms. Lawson, a member of the board of trustees of Trout Unlimited board of trustees. “I have to override my mind.

“Fishing is one of the things that takes my mind off everything. I’m too busy scrambling over rocks, looking up to the next pool, watching for motions and rises, ducking branches and moving over logs to be passive or think of much else.”

Ms. Lawson, a landscape architect, has fished the Au Sable south of Lake Placid, N.Y., the Shenandoah River in Virginia, Maryland’s Gunpowder River and various wide rivers out West. She enjoys fishing for its physical workout, mental challenge and scenic surroundings.

“Fly-fishing takes you to some of the most beautiful, clean places in the world,” she says.

Fly-fishing is how Margot Page, former editor of The American Fly Fisher quarterly journal, bonded with her husband, Tom Rosenbauer, who heads hunting and fishing marketing for Orvis.

Although she was first introduced to the sport by her grandfather, Sparse Grey Hackle--an icon in the fly-fishing world--Page didn’t get hooked until meeting her husband.

“I wanted to find out what drew him to the sport,” says Page, 43. “I did it as a way to understand his maniacal interest.”