Rescuing Chuck Stranahan

Masako and I fished yesterday on a new, small Oregon stream—forested, beautiful, not teeming with, but sufficiently supplied with native cutthroat trout that were not exactly bashful about dry flies. My favorite wife was armed, as she almost always is on trout water these days, with a size 12 white-posted Brindle Chute. Brett Tallman, our guide to the new stream, and I followed along, pleased enough to watch her work the small pockets and pools expertly, enticing the occasional splashy rise, extracting the occasional pretty trout.

Masako made about ten casts that slipped her dry fly beneath an alder overhanging a deep pool. Nothing came to the fly. She moved up ten feet to where a limb drooped lower over the dark water, made another cast—and rather than hooking a trout, she hooked the very tip of the limb. She thrashed at it for a while, but the fly was fatally ensnared, so she broke it off. That was the practical thing to do. But I had tied that fly to her tippet earlier, and I could see it easily—its white wing poised against a dark green alder leaf, suspended over the water. The sight of it forced me to enlarge my own engagement with the offending limb.

“That fly,” I told her, “was tied by Chuck Stranahan.”

“Who is Chuck Stranahan?” Brett asked.

“The originator of the fly,” I said. “Keeper of its secrets. The only one who knows the mixing formula for its brindle body, and the formula for dyeing its mottled hackle. Owner of a fly shop on the Bitterroot River… dean of the river, among a few other etceteras.”

A few moments later, I was at risk—wading to the tops of my waders, on slippery bedrock, at the edge of a ledge that promised a swim would be the result of any next step. The limb was a foot out of reach. I stretched—even teetered—but I’d noticed earlier in the day that the water felt cold. I took its temperature and discovered I was right. I definitely didn’t want to go swimming in it.

I backed up a step to solidify my position, wound up with my jointed wading staff, and took a vicious swing at the limb. All hell broke loose—but the limb didn’t. The jointed staff blew apart. One of its parts smacked against the end of the alder branch, sending leaves and everything else flying… everything except that Brindle Chute. The parts of the staff all recoiled on their shock cord as abruptly and violently as they’d separated, rejoining themselves with a metallic clatter, and ending up held in my hand exactly as if nothing had happened. I’d nearly been knocked off my feet by the recoil. A fleet of alder leaves floated slowly down the pool. The white post of the parachute fly, dangling a few inches of Masako’s tippet beneath it, remained right where it had been placed by that errant cast: a foot out of my reach.

A moment later, my Skip Morris Small-Stream Special fly rod was at risk. It’s a seven-foot four-weight. Skip built it for me after reading what I considered the ideal rod in my early book An Angler’s Astoria. We worked on that rod for weeks—me casting it in public parks and parking lots, Skip fine-tuning it to my desires. I knew nothing about rod design, still don’t. But I knew what I wanted, and how it should feel, and Skip was able to convert my desires—and my feelings about those desires—into the perfect small-stream fly rod: brisk, commanding, able to turn over a bushy size 12 fly and place it precisely where I wanted it to land, without any thought on my part. I’ve fished it for more decades than I care to confess.

I separated my own fly, on Skip’s rod, from its keeper, opened a V between the leader butt and the rod tip, slipped the V over the end of the limb, tightened it, and yanked. The Brindle Chute came away, dangling from the tip guide. A few more leaves fluttered down to the water and floated away. The limb itself, stripped of its leaves and the fly it had captured, wept over the pool like a dead branch. I gathered in the fly and examined the rod. Nothing was broken—which would have broken my heart.

I waded out, shook myself like a Lab after retrieving a wounded duck, stuck the fly in my vest patch, and went back to watching Masako. She’d already moved on from the scene of her crime, casting another Brindle Chute over the next pool upstream.

It’s foolish what we’ll do—what we’ll risk—to rescue a fly that takes only a few moments to tie. When it’s a Brindle Chute tied by Chuck Stranahan himself, it might be crazy to try to make sense of it—or even attempt to explain it.