No press is good press

It’s best for everyone if we in the fly-fishing media keep our focus on trout

My main money-maker gig is “content director” (an ambiguous job title that, by design, leaves itself open to all manner of obligations and responsibilities) at a pretty major fly-fishing media outlet. Vague title aside, it ain’t a bad gig, and I’ve had infinitely worse. A large portion of my work for this fly-fishing media outlet involves curating fly-fishing photos and videos. For those unaware, fly-fishing culture anywhere more than 100 miles inland is, by and large, trout culture. This means I’ve looked at shit-tons of trout pictures. I rather enjoy this part of the job.

I’ve viewed countless photos of mossy-backed brook trout, butter-bellied brown trout, sherbet-hued rainbows, and crimson-chinned cutthroats with no wane in my wonder because their beauty continually defies my belief. Every time I think I’ve seen the most jaw-dropping trout in the world, here comes another photo or video competing for that top spot. Despite the ball-and-chain drudginess always packaged with a job you know you need, this is a serious perk.

Let me say it plainer: If I could look only at well-composed trout photos and video—no preening people or blatant marketing in the frame—for a paycheck, I’d be hard-pressed to find a single gripe.

Let me say it even plainer than that: I love ogling purty fish. Period.

Trout are an ancient lineage, older than the fish families I am more familiar with, which adds to their well-bred mystique. And while canned corn, tiny marshmallows, and the humble earthworm threaded on a hook have led many a trout to its doom, until trout grow to enormous sizes—and even then, too—they are bug eaters. This is the very reason fly-fishing came to be. An insectivorous lifestyle lends itself to a more genteel perception of the fish as well. According to most fly-fishing scribes, trout “sip,” “pluck,” or, at their most ill-mannered, “slurp” flies, both the real and artificial.

The trout’s comeliness, elegance, and perceived etiquette go fin in hand with the exquisite artificial insects fly anglers tie, loft, and drift into trout lairs with an earnestness that leads you to believe there is nothing in the universe more important than fooling that particular fish. The trout’s classic beauty and the angler’s dedication to the craft, along with the aforementioned sophistication (and a healthy dose of pretentiousness), transcend the bloody reality of driving a hook into a fish’s jaw and tussling with it to the point of its exhaustion. They—the trout, the angler, the flies, the looping fly line—elevate one another. They produce an ineffable synergy. They are intertwined, inseparable, and the combination transforms the brutish practice of capturing a wild animal into a dynamic form of art.

A ridiculously romanticized take? Absolutely. And if asked, the trout would likely disagree. But trout can’t tell us what they think (like we would really want to know) and, dollars to donuts, this is how 99 percent of fly fishers see it.

But while I love looking at images of their lithe and gemlike forms, trout reside only in the digital world for me. They don’t swim the waters I normally wade. My quarry with a fly rod in hand are the sunfish.

Local creek-dwelling members of Centrarchidae, the sunfish family, might surprise you. Black bass—largemouth, spotted, and Neosho—are sunfish. Crappie are sunfish. And then, of course, there are all the disc-shaped, spiky-finned bunch colloquially filed as “perch,” “bream,” “brim,” “panfish,” and just plain ol’ “sunfish,” no matter which particular species they actually are. For clarity’s sake, in this essay we’ll go with “bream.”

In the fly-fishing world, bass get the bulk of press as family representatives, which still ain’t much. They’re the biggest and therefore make for more dramatic photos, videos, and stories, because in American culture, size definitely matters. Reflective again of our cultural values, bass are ambitious (or is it greedy?). They will eat anything they can fit in their maws—bugs, frogs, other fish, birds, snakes, small turtles, baby muskrats. They would certainly eat you if they could. And they do not sip. Bass “smash,” or “detonate,” or “annihilate” flies and prey. And though they are not known for great stamina, those first few furious headshakes and runs to thick cover can trigger fret about just how many nicks are in your leader and the trustworthiness of your knots.

Bass are sexy too, but in a predatory, mud-tire, trucker-hat kind of way because they’re mostly mouth and decked in camo. When caught from clearish water, largemouth feature subtly gilded olive-green tops with creamy bottoms. The black accents along their lateral lines are striking when viewed out of their element, but surprisingly cryptic underwater. Spotted bass share some color with the largemouths but trend toward bluer, steely hues with even more dramatic black accents and rows of little spots dotting their belly scales. Neosho look a lot like smallmouth—solid or tiger-striped bronzey brown, often edging into copper, with lightly smoked bellies that sometimes run more sooty.

Though the hues of each type vary, the bass silhouette is instantly recognizable no matter the species. Neosho, adapted to relatively cooler and swifter waters, are the more gracile of the bunch, more trout-like than any of the other bass, but even they are built on the stout side—less lean and athletic, and more square. Spotted bass generally run even stockier. Largemouth can be downright burly. I have caught pot-bellied specimens of all three.

Crappie look like sunfish who couldn’t decide between being a bream or a bass—big-mouthed and disc-bodied—and the two species come in silvery white flecked with black or black flecked with silvery white. In my mind, this salt-and-pepper packaging is a nod to the sweet and delicate meat they carry underneath it. But crappie aren’t particularly “sporty” fish and often resign themselves to the stringer after a couple of headshakes and a short run. And no one I know intentionally fly-fishes for crappie. Or, if they do, they don’t ever talk about it. Likely this is because there’s no imagined “sporting” quality. Crappie are meat fish, much like catfish were once regarded before folks figured out that 30-pound flatheads pull like submarines on a rod and reel, meaning a “big game” fishery was right here all along. We just couldn’t see it for all the trotlines.

And then we have bream. Their shape is easily recognized, too. I’ve often wondered if their nickname of “panfish” has less to do with their magnificence on the plate and more with their skillet figures. Bream are the most brilliantly colored genus of the sunfish family, and, like birds, it’s the male of every species that gets most gussied up in order to impress the females.

There’s everyone’s first fish, the bluegill, with their dirt-dauber-blue operculum flaps, rosy to mahogany breast, and penny-colored bellies. Green sunfish, often a first fish, too, because every puddle and ditch homes a population, are stunning as well. Picture what looks like a miniature, rounded-off largemouth with a sage-green (hence the name) base, sky-blue specks on the body, peach-colored operculum tips, Tron-blue piping on the face, and accented with fins trimmed in chromium yellow or blaze orange. But the most dazzling of all creek Centrarchidae are the longears, Lepomis megalotis.

And their magnificence will blow any trout plumb out of the water.

Viewing the longear in silhouette, it looks like any other of the Lepomis clan—that familiar circular form and jutting dorsal fins. But shine light on a longear and the ambiguity explodes into a kaleidoscope come to life. Naming the colors on a longear leaves me at a loss, and seems a ridiculous notion anyway.

How do you name the colors of a flame somehow blazing through clear creek water?

How do you find words to describe a palette usually revealed on only the most bodacious psychedelic trips, but now emblazoned on a little fish?

While they’re pugnacious to the point of walloping bass-sized poppers, and plenty feisty on the hook, they’ve never garnered any press. There are no specialized techniques or flies or gear for longears, but that’s largely because you don’t need any. I don’t know that they’re naive so much as fearless and practical. When you swim in those liminal currents as both predator and prey, survival is about taking advantage of any opportunity no matter how tall the odds. They’ll smack about anything.

Put another way, longears FAFO with every fly flung at ’em.

Because longears don’t give a fuck.

You’d think this five-gallon pluckiness in a pint-sized package would garner some media attention out of sheer admiration for the underdog. But there are no videos or articles about them. I’m sure it’s attributable to their diminutive size; a big one might go nine inches. I’m positive it has to do with their rugged homes, as the most incandescent longears lurk in the most remote, unsullied creeks. And I’m certain it has to do with their stark native crudity—that raw audacity and gumption that compels them to take yet another whack and yet another hook in the lip for their efforts.

But I’ve watched a thousand videos starring 10-inch brook trout and read countless fawning essays about catching cutthroats in alpine lakes after a five-mile hike in paper-thin air. And I’ve watched skilled angler-influencers pluck trout after trout from a run not unlike a possum plucking October persimmons. So I wonder if it is a cultural thing, if the longear comes across as the piscine version of hillbilly tacky, like an overwrought work of cheap art that would hang best on the walls of a single-wide, double-axle. Or maybe the longear is much like moonshine—too ornery, too bawdy, too pagan, too system-shocking—simply too much for the refined palate.

And maybe this is good, because Gawd knows the last thing I want is more people poking around in these creeks.

It sure as hell ain’t worth your time to seek out the most lonesome hollers and traipse up those slick-rocked creeks, still gouging their channels with eternal patience, just for the chance to behold fire in fish form. It’s clearly not worth your health to walk more than you wade, encountering numerous opportunities to blow out a knee, cottonmouths at every bluff-rimmed bend, and timber rattlers in every detour around the deep holes for a glimpse of the most sublime of fishes.

Maybe it’s best for everyone if we in the fly-fishing media keep our focus on trout.

Bonus: Video of longear dads guarding their nests.