Housatonic River

Paul Dixon (r), former Orvis salesman and successful fishing guide in Long Island, the Keys and the Outer Banks with a happy client.

March 1993, Housatonic River, Furnace Brook
Too damn high. Met and Englishman with a nice English fishing reel. He spoke with a slightly working class accent. Wanted to ask him what he did for a living but he was driving a Volvo and was polite enough so I figured I’d limit the talk to fishing. Gave him a bead head caddis although I’ve never caught a fish on one. Paul Dixon at Orvis swears he catches fish on them but I think he’s a liar or the best fisherman since Lee Wulff. Drove off to Push em up Pool. Looked at a cabin for rent. Also went to the public library near the religious camp and then called it a day. So much for spring fishing 93, Blizzards did a number on the East. Farmington fared well – a lesson for posterity.

Paul Dixon was a salesman at the Orvis New York store near Grand Central. He was a real enthusiastic fly fisherman who spent his weekends on Long Island fishing and golfing. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of fly fishermen and women who can credit Paul with helping them out as novices. This was a man who truly loved his job. He served as a guide and was knowledgeable about trout streams, bluefish, striped bass and I think he pioneered fly fishing certain areas around Long Island in the 80’s and 90’s. In any event, Paul was always trying to get me to fish nymphs and he said that bead-heads were the way to go, certainly on the Housatonic.

Ray Bergman, another great fishing writer in the pantheon of great fishing writers, dedicates a long chapter of the book”Trout” to fishing nymphs. Nymphs are the larval form of any fly and make up 80 to 90 percent of most trout’s diets. Therefore it would make sense that you’d spend 80 to 90 percent of the time fishing nymphs. Not so, flyfisherman want to fish dry flies.
You can see dry flies float after you cast and because of that, most people prefer to flyfish with a dry fly. Never mind the fact that over 80 percent of the time the fish are feeding on nymphs underwater and dry flies won’t do a thing. For nearly all of us except the blind, seeing is believing.

Learning how to fish a nymph is a slow process. Because you can’t see if you are doing it right, the only real way to learn is to watch someone else fish with a nymph and catch a fish – that way you are seeing and believing and you then feel confident enough to do it yourself.

For me the teacher was Mark Goggin. Mark will always be my first true mentor in fly fishing. He’d grown up in Mendham, NJ. The son of an old school WASP that went to the Pingrey school and then one of the St. Grotlesex boarding schools (I think in actuality it was St. Pauls, which I’m not sure is technically a St. Grotlesex school, but you get the idea).

His father, Greg Goggin worked in finance for Merck and made a killing on the stock, at least I’d assumed he did, because in addition to buying a vintage Bentley, he also bought a cabin on the Ruby River in Montana and a nice place on the Gulf in Florida. He had a predilection for getting up at 4:30 in the morning to chop vegetables, do chores and plan elaborate parties that required the logistics of a Special Forces unit.

Mark taught me to cast properly in their backyard swimming pool by putting his hand over my wrist and generating the proper casting motion by guiding my wrist through the cast. It is without a doubt the most effective way to teach the casting motion, thereby saving a student hours and hours of misguided motions and snapping sounds.

One day, Mark and I were fishing his little section of a Primrose Brook in the woods of Morristown NJ where there was a healthy population of native browns. He put on a small nymph, a gold ribbed hares ear, and when I asked him the best way to fish it it, like a maestro he explained each step, told me how you need to pick out a spot behind a rock, toss the nymph in with a deft cast, let it drift through while keeping your rod tip up – and voila, set the hook. He did this with such ease and aplomb that I was almost unsurprised to see the rod tip start jiggling with the tell tale sign of a trout.

Sure enough he was on to a nice 10 inch healthy brown as if merely speaking the words of instruction would yield a fish, like a Hindi Guru who can transubstantiate food, gold jewelry and trinkets out of thin air. Even he admitted -- hours later -- that he was as surprised by the fish taking that nymph as I was.

Flyfishing and all fishing by its nature is a sport that requires mentors. From my father and brother Scott, to Mark Goggin, to the nameless Chinese and Vietnamese fisherman on the shores of California from whom I learned the techniques of gathering bait and fishing for surf perch upon my arrival in San Francisco, it is a constant process of gathering knowledge. We mimic those that mimic those that were successful under similar conditions in an unbroken chain of fishermen that date back to those early primitives with hooks carved from bones and stones.

If you want to learn to do something well – find a teacher. The easiest way to light a candle, which you can see at any church across the globe is to use a candle that is already lit.