MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Fall 2017

40 ML BLUE FALL 2017 MOUNTAIN LIFER READING THE RIVER FOR JEFF KINCHEN, FLY-FISHING IS A CREATIVE PURSUIT WITH ROOTS IN THE CLOSE OBSERVATION OF NATURE words and photo :: Nelson Phillips In the age of information, there’s a lot of content out there depicting boisterous fly- fishermen reeling in fish after fish, laughing and carrying on like bears at a waterfall during spawning season. That’s half the story. You don’t get to see those guys listening, adapting, or observing their surroundings. Maybe I suck at fishing because I learned the wrong way. I skipped the required material on common sense and patience. Jeff Kinchen did not. “My dad taught me,” says Kinchen. “He fly-fished a lot. When I first started fishing I didn’t use a spinning reel or anything—it was fly-only.” I’m in Kinchen’s basement. He’s something of a natural historian, a storyteller, and a self- taught keeper of intricate bush knowledge. His fly-tying station is well-lit in the back corner of the room, covered in hides, bits of trinkets, mounted fish, and Mardi Gras-esque dollar- store feathers. His collection of second-hand lures adorns a highway sign on the wall. Rods and reels occupy the roofline. He begins to rifle off some of his immediately available supplies: household materials like vacuum- cleaner bristles, tinsel, pieces of plastic or nylon fibres, scrap metal from the lids of mason jars, feathers, and hair from deer, moose, rabbit—you name it. “The funniest little things turn out to be so useful if you take notice,” he says. This year Kinchen was featured at the Walter’s Falls Group of Artists summer exhibition, where his flint-knapping and flies were on display. “Sometimes flies don’t have to look like anything, but can start to represent a lot of things,” he explains. “Brownies [brown trout] eat a lot of mice, especially up top of the Sydenham River in the swampy areas, where mice will swim across the water. So I started tying a lot of these “mice.” The fish is only seeing it from the bottom, so it’s just a piece of foam on top, a piece of rabbit fur and a piece of deer hide for a tail.” Part of the expertise of knowing what to tie for a certain species of fish, or even a certain river, can be largely dependent on the fish’s attitude—not so much the diet of that fish. Sometimes, they’ll bite out of plain aggression. At this stage it’s all about knowing what’s going to rile them up. “They’ll just see something moving… they might think it’s a crayfish or something, no one really knows why they hit. Some salmon just want something intricate and crazy. It works basically by pissing them off… But a lot of the time I just end up tying them like this because they’re pretty,” laughs Jeff. Fly-fishing is dependent on knowing about where you are, what the fish are eating, how the weather contributes to different insects hatching at different times of the season, and even where sunlight hits the water. It’s much different from picking up a box of dew worms from a bait shop and chumming the water with a beer in hand. A cognizant fly-fisherman like Kinchen is learning as he goes. “This one time my buddy and I were trying to catch steelhead. I think it was January; they were so slow and sluggish. We were so confused, we couldn’t catch anything all day until he finally caught one. He kept it, and we checked out its stomach. All that was in there were these tiny red worms, and as soon as we started tying those, we were hitting fish the next day. How would you know they were eating something like that?” A huge supporter of catch-and-release, Jeff has honed this approach for years, learning about the ecosystems he fishes and interacts with. He lets most of his catches go, from behemoth carp and smallmouth bass, to brown trout, steelhead, chinook salmon, and even catfish. “If you go to a river that you’ve never fished before, start turning over rocks or start taking a seine net to see what bugs come out of the current—then you’ll have an idea of what the fish are probably feeding on. A lot of fly fisherman become entomologists because they’re studying the insect behaviour almost as much as the fish behaviour. I’ll see bugs all the time and get excited about it because I’m learning. I have this book and I write down when minnows, ants and scuds [freshwater shrimp] start hatching, and all the different larval stages. You start learning a lot about the river.”