There is a special place in hell for whoever writes the rules. Boring, nitpicking little fuckers, like a dad at a slumber party telling everyone to keep it down. That line is too heavy, this rod is too light. This fly must be tied as such and fished in this particular manner, or a fish will never eat it. What are you, stupid? Granted, flies for specific occasions are needed, and a fly-fisher needs to be sneaky, capable of casting a fly accurately, and aware of which bugs the trout are into at the moment. It just appears that it isn't long after these necessary skills are acquired before everything gets tossed into the air, and we are all left guessing. This is why, when people usually split off into team Imitative or Suggestive concerning fly choice, I've chosen to keep my ass firmly planted in the KISS camp.The Fiesta Amigo, my all-occasions wet fly, is a direct result of this.
Tied on 2x strong nymph hooks, the Fiesta Amigo can be swung, sunk, or even floated if they are small enough and I use Gink. The bodies I make from SLF Spikey Squirrel Dubbing, with a soft hackle hen feather wrapped around the neck. Some I dub thicker than others. There's also one with a peacock body and grizzly hackle; not pure Amigo but close enough to be named one and competent enough to get it's own full line in the wet fly box. I tie it in 8 colors and 6 sizes, but I usually use the olive, peacock or brown ones in size 16 or 18. This fly is my admittedly-hyperbolic middle finger to the ultra-realistic flies and all of the assumptions about how much a trout really thinks before he eats that go with them.
I got the idea after reading David Hughes' book Wet Flies. In it, he recommends as an experiment tying one simple wet fly in multiple sizes and colors and then matching the hatch at the river with the closest color and size combo. My brain took this as a challenge, and not long after reading the book I had created the Fiesta Amigo and vowed to fish them exclusively for a full season. I lasted until ice-off, about two months, before tying up a big batch of drys, but in that time and the months since I have learned that:
Bug colors are mostly pretty similar.
Size matters.
Presentation, particularly on the first cast, matters most.
There is a lot of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence out there showing that I know how to catch a fish, some of it stored in the form of photographs, but mostly I just talk a lot about fly-fishing. The point is that I don't think the proof is compelling enough to hold up in a court of law. If you genuinely believe that I know what I am doing and ever ask me how to do it, furthermore, it is tantamount to asking me where the songs I write come from. "I don't know, I'm still figuring it out" is probably the correct response. Instead, you will get a bombardment of sometimes romantic, sometimes technical, but never complete, thoughts. Some of it would make sense, the majority would be jargon and most likely accompanied by a few lies to add some spice if I felt like I was losing you. This all happens with the best intentions, and I am trying to be helpful. There is nothing I love more than getting a friend onto a fish. Still, I am doubtful anyone was ever a better angler after hearing me fumble through Bryan's 150,000 Vague, Enigmatic Fishin' Tips. For some reason, it always comes off sounding simple, even though I am not sufficiently dim-witted or new enough to the sport to think that this is the case.
That said, there is one piece of advice I have for anyone looking to up their game: make your own Fiesta Amigo box, or something similar, and fish them and only them for an extended period. At the very least, your presentation will improve, which is more than enough reason by itself to give it a shot. You also start to get this feeling that in most cases, when a trout refuses your fly, it's not the fly's fault. As I said, the majority of the bugs you pull out of the water will be size 16-22 and, you know, brownish green. More likely the fish didn't see it or wasn't hungry, in my opinion. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?
By now it should be clear what exactly a Fiesta Amigo is and why I use it so much, and this past season during runoff I wanted to see how well this baby did on those warm-water species. Runoff seemed to go on forever in Colorado this year. Clear Creek was too high for after work fishing trips for most of the summer. I wanted to die. During the worst of it, when every river everywhere was a raging milkshake, I frequented a group of ponds up in Longmont that had been closed since the flood but had recently reopened for fishing. At least that's what Geoff (or something), a shirtless stoner that randomly attached himself to us, told my friend Ryan and I when we showed up the first time to fish them. We didn't question him. He was pleasant to hang out with and had good weed, and he even made a trip down to the convenience store to pick up some sodas for us three. He was the kind of guy that shows up to the lake with his conventional rod and reel, but fishes whatever lures he finds in the mud without worrying about it. I guess he picks his fishing buddies the same way he chooses his tackle. Most days going fishing you run into a weirdo, but you don't usually make a short-term buddy out of them.
Ryan is also a spin-caster, but the more sophisticated kind with a tackle box full of all sorts of jiggly, jangly doo-dads. I know our kind aren't supposed to mix, but he's one of the best fishing buddies a guy can ask for. Ryan always shows up on time and doesn't complain about the weather or how early it is. He's got the bug as bad as I do, he just uses a different stick and reel to satiate the monkey. Sometimes he will use one of my extra fly rods, and sometimes he will even catch a fish with it. Ryan is not a picky man. It seems that he will try to catch anything that swims on any gear as long as it gets him outside and on the water. We met a long time ago when I was still in the beer biz and he's one of the only guys that stayed in touch with me when I quit drinking. I'm lucky to know him.
The ponds were a blast. Ryan cranked in a few nice 16-18 inch largemouths on a giant red plastic worm. I was concentrating on the panfish, or at least that's what I was telling people. Here they are larger than you usually find, and I could not drop a Fiesta Amigo into the water without having one take it. I must have caught thirty that day. The problem is that I could see bass holding at the bank, and every time I cast to them, some dumb bluegill would dart over and take the fly before the bass even had a chance to look at it. I wanted a bass, specifically a largemouth on an Amigo, but, you know, I was “focused” on the panfish.
So, that’s how it went most of the day. I would get bored of catching bluegill, swap over to a different fly, get frustrated from the lack of action, then switch back to the Amigos and the non-stop panfish bite. I did manage to land a perch while I was at it. All the while, Ryan was catching nice bass on a regular basis, and ultimately I got fucking sick of it and decided to get down to business. Changing flies was not an option. Time to find the right bass.
I found him at the north end of the third pond on the trail. Hanging out all by his lonesome self with no bluegill in sight, this bass was the one. I tied on a size 10 Amigo, the brown one with gray soft hackle, not the brown one with mottled ginger and red thread. This was probably going to be the most comfortable cast I could ask for as a fly-fisher on a pond with no boat, clear of brush and with plenty of room for a real back cast. My first shot went unnoticed. On the second I gave the fly a quick twitch as it sank down into the strike zone. I assumed the flick of the tail indicated a take. The weight felt on the rod after making my set confirmed my suspicion. Don't fuck this up now, I thought. Yes, this is ultimately meaningless, but I'm proving a point, goddamnit.
The fish came to the net fairly easily. Not the biggest fish in the world, but a chubby fourteen inches. Largemouth bass, size 10 Fiesta Amigo lodged in his jaw. Mission accomplished. Posed him for the hero shot, then back into the pond he went. The whole time I had a strong case of the I-Told-Ya-So's, although I'm not sure who it was directed at. Probably just the same Them I am always referring to in my protest songs. The people writing the rules, keeping the people down, telling me I can't smoke weed in Elevenmile. No, no-one ever told me it wasn't possible to do what I just did, but it just feels implied when I walk into a fly shop or login to Instagram. Fancy, expensive gear must be replaced by newer, fancier, more expensive gear. The simple rarely gets the buzz it deserves, and when it gets the job done, I feel like I am in on something that most people are missing. And on a split-cane rod, nonetheless. I am thirty-two going on seventy.
Fly-fishing is full of opportunities for full-on decision paralysis. For me, I'm going to choose my partners because we get along, spots because there's fish, and flies because they work. Everything else counts as rules for rule's sake, and we all now know how I feel about that shit.