Legendary fly fishermen share secrets of Ausable River

Fly fishing icons discuss philosophy, technique

Growing up as a young fisherman south of West Point where the Hudson is wide and warm, John Spissinger had read stories about the icy Ausable and the splendid trout that lurked therein.

It was 68 years ago, and his friend’s father, a roofer, set out on a pilgrimage to Upper Jay with the two seriously amped boys in the canvas-covered bed of his work truck.

“I was going on the trip of a lifetime,” Spissinger said. “I was going trout fishing on the Ausable River, and I’d read all about an iconic site.”

They stopped in the Elm Street Inn in Keene for directions, and he and his friend burst through the doors asking if anyone could tell them where they could find the Ausable. A man somberly put his hand on his friend’s shoulder and said, “Son, don’t get too excited — but it’s right there.”

 And sure enough it was. At their campsite 5 miles downstream, “I’m looking down at the river and I’m seeing these rises, all these fish are coming up. Holy ****!. Never seen anything like that before. And boy, did I get revved up for the week, (but) I caught maybe three trout because all that I knew how to do was fish with worms, spinners and spoons.”

So, for a quarter, he bought a Japanese fly, tied it to his spinning rod and almost immediately saw a fish rise to take it. Both Spissinger and the fish were hooked, and because he couldn’t afford to buy all the flies he wanted, Spissinger learned to tie his own.

Spissinger and Rich Redman, two icons in the field, spoke about fly fishing and all things adjacent to fly fishing on a recent Saturday morning at the Keene Valley Library. Spissinger displayed his dazzling collection of hand-tied flies. Redman was on tour with his two-volume “Conservation Conversations” books.

Redman said his typical fishing day starts without getting a line wet. He’ll grab some coffee and sit on the river bank, “digging on life” and watching the water. Particularly, he’s looking for bubble lines that give away the direction of the current, black water that is indicative of depth, downed trees where fish like to hide and “bug factories” where conditions produce trout food.

In fact, it’s hardly an overstatement to say that before considering what the fish are eating, he considers what the bugs are eating. Rotting sticks, leaf litter and farm field runoff can all determine where the bugs go, and where the bugs go the fish are sure to follow.

Fly fishing: Where science meets philosophy

Spissinger and Redman exist in the confluence of fishing and philosophy, half art, half science.

British Revolutionary War soldiers practiced the art near Philadelphia, although they made little effort to match their artificial flies to those insects of the New World.

Back into the 19th century, the East Branch of the Ausable was the prized fishery, more so than the West Branch. But then a lot of things began to go wrong. Loggers reshaped it to be wider and straighter. Trees cut along the banks deprived the water of shade and fish of cover from osprey and eagles. Roads built in the floodplain separated the water from bug food. 

Savvy fishermen understand how these man-made influences affect the fishery. For example, the East Branch north of Upper Jay is wide, shallow and devoid of trees overhanging its banks. That warms the water heading downstream, meaning that at the confluence in Au Sable Forks, the bugs will hatch and the fish will bite earlier in the season than they will in the cold, rushing waters further upstream.

Patience is required to detect a hatch; experienced anglers know to wait until the sun warms the waters, and even then, when the first bugs hatch and the first fish rise to take them, it’s best to go in to “chill mode” and wait for the developing aquatic drama to play out, Redman said. It won’t be until the hatch is in full force that the big fish take notice.

The color and shape of the water, along with the presence of boulders and deadfall will suggest where the fish are hanging out. The bugs hatch in oxygenated riffles and the fish wait just below in pools or around boulders where the water velocity is less and they don’t have to expend as much energy fighting the current.

Fly fishing’s deep roots

Along with Redman’s scientific perspective, Spissinger said fly fishing has a philosophical side.

“The thing that enamors me about fly fishing is that it’s a way of combining the different ways we exist in the world,” he said. “We could look at the ecology and genealogy and morphology of streams. That’s how scientists look at it. We could also look at it from the standpoint of aesthetics, the beauty of what we behold, and we could also look at fly fishing in terms of the creativity that’s involved in the construction of flies. I like the idea of unifying the technical, the scientific and artistic dimensions of life.”

Some of Spissinger flies are large and gaudy, some scarcely bigger than the point of a pen. Multiple flies might resemble the same insect at different stages of its life cycle. Others are “impressionistic” and not necessarily patterned on any one bug.

If the etymology is rich, so is the literature. Among the hundreds of books on the art of fly fishing, is the nun Juliana Berners’ 15th century “Treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle,” the earliest known book on sport fishing.

Fly tying can be incredibly scientific and detailed, from the nib and subaquatic stages to the dry stage where flies sit atop the water drying their wings so they can fly away. “Attractor flies” are for less discerning species such as brook trout.

For Spissinger it has been a lifetime of entertainment and education. “​​I would make my high school biology teacher proud right now, because I learned more about entomology and the pursuit of my fishing than I would have in any class I could have taken,” he said.