Pete Erickson: Fly Fishing Team USA and the Competition Mindset

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 525, featuring Pete Erickson...

Pete Erickson won the ESPN Great Outdoor Games and went on to fish for Fly Fishing Team USA, all while guiding professionally in the Rocky Mountains. He and Tom Rowland were roommates in Jackson, Wyoming in the early 1990s, and in this conversation they revisit that formative era of the fly fishing industry before diving into European nymphing, international competition, and twenty years of travel and lessons learned on the water.

Introduction

Pete Erickson: There's nothing worse than when another guide, or a couple of guides, kick your butt and then your brain starts spinning. You're wondering, wait, how did they do that? What am I supposed to learn from this? But with competitions, this sounds strange, but my best competitions are the ones where some French guy or Czech guy just kicks my ass. That's my favorite type of competition, because my brain starts spinning, wondering what he did differently. Most of these anglers on the world circuit don't speak English, so afterward they'll just hand you their flies and say, here's what I did — I fished blobs underneath the tree limbs. And I think, really? I never would have thought of that. That's awesome. You walk away realizing that the best part of the tournament was seeing that this art form just keeps moving. Hi there, I'm Pete Erickson, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Hey, everybody. We've got an awesome guest today — I'm catching up with one of my old friends, Pete Erickson. Pete and I both landed in Jackson, Wyoming in the early nineties. I got there a little before him, and he showed up shortly after. He worked in the Orvis shop with my wife, Cynthia, and we were roommates at one point. Pete has had an amazing career: he won the ESPN Great Outdoor Games, moved on to Team USA, and did all of it while working as a professional fishing guide in the Rocky Mountains, mostly on the South Fork of the Snake River. He later moved to Boise and guided Silver Creek and the South Fork.

We're going to talk about that magic era in Jackson Hole that launched the careers of Pete, me, Mattson Rogers, Carter Andrews, and so many others — Fletcher White, Lori Ann Murphy, Kim Keeley, Bucky Buckenroth, Jeff Currier, Paul Bruhn, Tom Montgomery, Bill Happersett, Oliver White, Joe Bressler, Doug Gibson, Ed Emery, and plenty more I'm sure I'm forgetting. A lot of those people are still in the fly fishing business or the television fishing business today. Pete and I share a theory about why that time and place produced so much talent, and then we get into Team USA and European nymphing, a technique that made its way back to the States through these international competitions. I had a great time talking with Pete, and I think you will too. You can follow him at Pete Erickson Fly Fishing on Instagram — we'll have that in the show notes — and you can actually book a trip with him in the summer. Here we go: Pete Erickson.

Getting to Jackson Hole

Tom Rowland: Man, what's going on? So good to see you and hear your voice.

Pete Erickson: Since we hung out, it really has been a while. I've done a number of podcasts now with people from the Jackson era, and it's amazing how many of the people we hung out with stayed in the fishing industry, and how well some of them did.

Tom Rowland: How did you get to Jackson?

Pete Erickson: I was working for Microsoft and interviewing for a new job — a young kid out of the University of Oregon living in Redmond, in the Seattle area. My boss told me that before I started the new job, I should go take a couple of months somewhere and relax. It was wintertime, so I went to ski in Jackson Hole, since I'd been there before in college. One thing led to another, and the guys I skied with said I couldn't leave the area before spending at least one spring fishing there. I'd fly fished my whole life in Seattle, so I called my boss and told him I wasn't coming back. That's about when I bumped into you guys — I worked at the Orvis shop and met Joe.

Tom Rowland: That was a cool time, because most of the people who got out there and stayed had come through the guide school, and you entered that group slightly differently, through the Orvis store. The Orvis store opened around 1990 — that was probably my first year out there.

Pete Erickson: Dave Fallon was my boss. Bill Ski and those guys.

Tom Rowland: Dave Fallon — wonder what he's doing today. And Cynthia was working in the shop with you.

Pete Erickson: Yeah, that's probably how I got connected to all sorts of fishing trips and roommate situations with you guys — had to be nice to the guy who booked the trips, right?

Tom Rowland: That's right. That was such a cool time. I went to the guide school, then Fletcher went through it, and a year later Mattson Rogers went through, along with Jeff Klausman and so many others. It turned out to be the greatest talent-recruitment idea ever. At the same time, across town you had the Jack Dennis crowd — Carter Andrews, Jeff Currier, Paul Bruhn, Tom Montgomery, Bill Happersett, Oliver White. Doug Gibson and Ed Emery were on the South Fork, Dirk was at the South Fork Lodge, and you had Bucky Buckenroth, Gary Beebe, Lori Ann Murphy, Kim Keeley. It's a total who's who.

Pete Erickson: It was a weird deal, because for five or ten years, if you flipped on OLN or ESPN, I knew everybody personally who was on every show — I'd spent time in a tent with them on an overnight camp. It was strange how it all emanated from this one little area.

Tom Rowland: What do you think was special about that time and place?

Pete Erickson: I think the area attracted us, and it was also the only guide school of its kind — an original idea, and we were all looking for that. We almost knew it was happening while it was happening, because we'd see each other on the river and fish together. Remember that snowy day when you caught that huge eight-pound brown on the South Fork?

Tom Rowland: Oh, yeah, absolutely — that was when Carter was working on the double bunny and I was working on the Rowland's Rabbit. His proved way easier to throw, smaller, and had a cooler name, so it won out. Nobody wanted to throw my creation — about a twelve-inch crosscut rabbit with a trailer hook. It was hard to throw and miserable, but it did work a little.

Pete Erickson: It caught that giant fish that day, in a snowstorm.

Tom Rowland: There were so many good memories from that time. I've talked about it with my own kids, who've considered getting into guiding — there was a really special thing going on. Gore-Tex waders were new, rods were getting better and easier to throw, fly lines were improving, the Rocky Mountains were getting a lot more tourism, and then there was the movie. All of that combined into a perfect storm that carried me for the next fifteen years of my career, because I kept getting new anglers who had never really fished before. We'd fish together for four or five years trout fishing on the South Fork, and then once I got started in the Keys I'd suggest they try saltwater fishing, and that whole group of anglers was ready for the transition. When I went down to the Keys I was able to have a fairly full book, which was very rare — I don't know that I could repeat that if I'd come a few years earlier or later. It was a special time for so many reasons.

Pete Erickson: Totally true, and same with me. My only competition experience back then was the One Fly every year, where I'd get a free rod and a shirt, but that whole scene became a springboard — I was able to do well in the fly fishing industry, in rod design, working with companies, and getting to travel through competition. We all knew everybody in the industry. We'd be at camp and I'd ask, hey Tom, who do you have today? And you'd say Charles Jardine's group, and I'd say I've got Lee Perkins today, and we were guiding all these luminaries who basically ran the industry. You learn so much in the boat from those people.

Tom Rowland: So much — Charles Jardine coming in from England and showing us what they were doing over there. In some ways they were way ahead, in some ways way behind, and you'd pick up little pieces of what he showed you and apply them on the river. The moral of the story is if you keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, you can learn a lot.

Pete Erickson: And appreciate your own time period. All the young people in the industry right now have their own time period happening, and they just need to keep their eyes open and appreciate it, because it's happening wherever they are.

Tom Rowland: It is. Innovations keep happening, whether in saltwater or freshwater, like permit fishing — when I first got to Key West, permit fishing was just getting started. Dale Brown and Steve Huff were inventing the sport, and guys like Marshall Cutchin were making big advancements. The same thing's happening today; the good old days are right now, wherever you are, and you have to appreciate and embrace that. You've seen that kind of technological and technique innovation with Euro-nymphing, and that's one of the things I want to talk to you about. But to get there, you started with competitions — I didn't know until I read your bio this morning that you won the Great Outdoor Games.

Winning the Great Outdoor Games

Pete Erickson: The year after you were there — 2002, I think.

Tom Rowland: I've got two posters hanging here that I had everyone sign — one from 2000, the year I won, and one from 2001 when I went back and didn't win. I was looking at them wondering if you were there that year, because shortly after that it moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and then Reno.

Pete Erickson: It was Madison, then Reno — I think Reno was first. Do you see the outdoor games poster behind me? It's signed by Lori Ann, Carter, everyone who was there. Carter even signed it "go big or go home."

Tom Rowland: That's so cool that you kept that poster. The two years I did it, they had stacks of posters lying around that they couldn't hang up and told us to take as many as we wanted. I took two and had the foresight to get people to sign them — before I won, which was lucky, because I'm not sure a couple of them would have signed afterward. It must have been twenty years before I finally had them framed; they'd just been sitting in a rod case in my tackle room.

Pete Erickson: Same idea for me — Jeff Currier was spending the night once, doing a show in Boise, and suggested I get some of mine framed. Chuck Barnett won it the year you were there, and he signed my poster too. I even have the gold medal in this office, which has a lot of my fish and memorabilia in it. ESPN treated it like a big deal — they flew us out, paid for everything, and I got a real check for winning.

Tom Rowland: That must have started after I won, because I don't remember getting a check. I do remember it being marketed as the next big thing — the idea was that alongside the Olympics every two years, this could be another outdoor Olympics or X Games type event. It didn't quite make it that big, but it was cool while it lasted.

Pete Erickson: It made it a good number of years, and we were lucky to benefit from it.

Tom Rowland: How did participating, and then winning, affect your career from there?

Pete Erickson: At that point you knew me as a guy doing pretty well for Bressler — one of the lead guides — but with nothing outside the Jackson scene except maybe a Clacka Craft pro staff spot. As soon as I won, it was like a monsoon. The ESPN people told me I had to be available for autographs the next day, and I remember thinking, who wants my signature besides the waitress at the diner? But there was a whole line of people, and it changed things — it opened up the industry for me, let me meet people, and eventually led to work as a rod designer for Echo, which I'll get into.

The origin of how I actually got into it wasn't through the outdoor games directly — I think you, Fletcher, and maybe Lori Ann were in it, but I hadn't even watched it or known about it, which I should have, since any fly fishing shown to millions of people is a cool thing. The next year, Fletcher, who was my boss, told me I was one of his lead guides and needed to do the ESPN fly fishing challenge, filmed over a week on spring creeks in Montana. I told him I didn't like competitions — I'd had a client dive out of my boat once to save his fly during the One Fly, and it freaked me out. I understood it was a fundraiser doing a lot of good, but it soured me on competitive fishing. Fletch overruled me and sent me anyway.

I met Mike Dawes that morning, we drove up together, and it turned out a lot of people I looked up to were there too — John Barr, Bob Jacklin, and others, all on teams like Team Sims and Team Sage. I figured no matter how it went, I'd at least meet cool people and maybe learn something, which ended up being the real reason I stuck with competitive fly fishing: relationships, learning, and travel. I was there with Jim Hickey and Whitney McDowell, just supposed to get exposure for Worldcast, which was a reality show filmed over a week. Somehow we ended up winning — I'm still not sure how we beat Team Sims, since they'd been guiding that water the week before — and that win got us an invite to the Great Outdoor Games.

By then I was excited, because there was a lot of camaraderie; everyone was nice to each other, and John Riggins was the host. We flew out, rented a house, and had a great experience. One of the biggest things was hanging out with the pro bass anglers — Peter T and that crowd — and realizing they had a cool life: they travel and compete for a living, with their trucks and bass boats. It changed my perspective — I started seeing it like competitive skiing versus free skiing, or people who golf on weekends versus competitive golf. I realized I could still have my solitude on Silver Creek or the ranch on my own, and this competitive world was just a different thing to learn from. Everyone I met was nice and welcoming; the competitions always seemed secondary to building relationships and learning about fishing.

Tom Rowland: I had a similar experience not knowing if I'd like competing, then loving my first one. It brought back feelings of being a high school athlete — that game-day feeling, the preparation, having the event on your calendar. I loved all of that. But what I loved more than anything, in every type of tournament I did —

Pete Erickson: Didn't you do a redfish tournament?

Tom Rowland: Yeah, redfish tournaments and tons of others in the Florida Keys — a whole tournament scene, all charity events. They were cool because it was the heyday of the Redbone Tournament, raising money to cure cystic fibrosis. The first time I went, I almost broke down in tears over the work they were doing — Gary Ellis's daughter had the disease, so there was a face to it. People raised tons of money and companies got behind it, and real progress was made. There'd be a hundred boats in one of these events and a huge scoreboard, written in marker since there was no internet or TV coverage — everyone's name, what they caught each day, how many points. I'd stare at that board and see that guides I respected hadn't caught anything, while someone else caught a bunch — you'd realize he went west while everyone else went east, and he caught all the fish. It was turbocharged learning, and it was completely accurate — if someone posted a score, there were pictures to prove it. No smoke and mirrors, just real results on the board.

Pete Erickson: As a guide, you're learning constantly. There's nothing worse than getting beaten by another guide and having your brain spin trying to figure out how. But my favorite competitions are the ones where some French or Czech angler just kicks my ass, because then my brain starts working on what they did differently. Most of these competitors don't speak English, so afterward they'll just hand you their flies and say, here's what I did — I fished blobs under the tree limbs — and you realize the art form just keeps evolving.

The Road to Team USA

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about that particular kind of competition. To bring listeners up to speed — you went from the Great Outdoor Games to Team USA, and I know very little about it. This is where my career deviated into saltwater; Carter was dabbling in this world and I was interested, but I decided I had to go all-in down here, so our paths split. You and I both won the Great Outdoor Games, and then you pursued this other path. Tell me how you got on Team USA.

Pete Erickson: I actually remember a phone call with you back then — you said you were curious about it and asked if you could come up and go through a competition, and then a couple of weeks later you said you couldn't fly up.

Tom Rowland: I probably had two kids at home, both in diapers.

Pete Erickson: Team USA has been around since the eighties. It falls under the same Olympic-sanctioned umbrella as competitive casting — it's sanctioned by FIPS-Mouche, an organization headquartered in Europe, and there's only one Team USA allowed to attend the world championships they sanction. It isn't only in Europe, either — a year and a half ago I was competing in South Africa.

To do these presentations I've studied the history — competitive fly casting and fly fishing have been going on for a couple hundred years, especially in England, so this isn't something that started ten years ago. Back then, some industry people and shop owners in Jackson, including Jack Dennis, realized there was no real US representation, so they started a team. Do you remember the world championships being held in Jackson?

Tom Rowland: I do remember that.

Pete Erickson: Team USA didn't do well — may have finished last, on our own home water, against maybe thirty countries. So some of the organizers, including Jack Dennis, decided to field a more competitive team and set up a selection process: anyone trying out had to have tournament experience and have won a major competition of some kind — a lake tournament, the One Fly, the outdoor games, anything.

Tom Rowland: That's strange, because there were so few competitive fly fishing events at that point.

Pete Erickson: Totally — they also pulled in people who'd won casting competitions, since those were more common than fishing competitions. Then they held a mini fish-off with a few candidates and took notes. Luckily for me, the fish-off happened on the South Fork, so I looked okay. Next thing I knew, I was flying to Spain sitting next to Jeff Currier, who tried to teach me the ropes, telling me these Europeans would "take your pants down" — that as a guide you get comfortable thinking you're a pretty good fisherman, but on their home turf they're incredibly skilled anglers, not just nymphing specialists but amazing dry fly fishermen. Most of these tournaments are won with 7X and small dries.

I also remembered my earlier experience guiding the Italian team — you guided them too, around '97. Joe warned us that we'd be guiding teams who barely spoke English. I remember thinking I'd be stuck on a boat with guys from the other side of the planet who didn't speak my language, and sure enough there was a real language barrier. But I noticed they were fishing 7X with ten-foot rods — nymphing rods weren't really in production yet — because they needed the length to fish three flies. One of them, Pierluigi, who'd been world champion the year before, had a small Woolly Bugger on his top dropper and two CDC flies below it, on an eighteen-foot, nearly level 7X leader. I watched him dance the bugger through a riffle and realized he was using the front fly to draw fish toward the other two — the opposite of what I expected. At one point he netted three fish on a single cast, twice in one day. I'd never seen anything like it and realized there was a whole level of angling I didn't understand. I stayed in touch with those guys and I'm still friends with a lot of them on the circuit today.

That's kind of how I got onto Team USA — I got shown the ropes and had some success with finishes, and the travel has been one of the greatest things about it: meeting people, learning, seeing the world. The team has since evolved into more of a circuit, kind of like trying to make the US ski team — anglers compete in regional events, build points, and eventually qualify for a national team. There are rules: no split shot, no indicators, continuous line — a lot of these rules exist to protect the resource, since flies have to be spaced a certain distance apart to avoid snagging fish. There's also always a conservation symposium at these world championships, funded in part by entry fees, so the events are highly focused on protecting the fishery.

What Is European Nymphing?

Tom Rowland: Before we go on — it's interesting that they don't allow split shot or indicators, because I don't know much about European nymphing. It goes by so many names: Euro-nymphing, Czech nymphing, Polish nymphing, contact nymphing, long-rod nymphing, American "hot sticking." I missed this whole wave, since I wasn't fishing trout much and just kept doing what we'd always done. It's interesting, because this happens in saltwater tournaments too — when you outlaw something, competitors figure out how to do that same thing even better without it. If indicators had stayed legal the whole time, would people have just kept getting better and better at indicator nymphing, without ever needing this new style?

Pete Erickson: That's a good question. I think indicator fishing was more of a North American phenomenon than a European one — they did a lot of Sawyer-style nymphing and sight-nymphing, since their water is clear and their fish are spooky. An indicator is basically like dropping a medicine ball on top of a fish.

Tom Rowland: Then why outlaw it, if it's already a disadvantage?

Pete Erickson: You can still get around it — you could tie on a Chernobyl ant and fish it as an indicator, or dry-dropper it. Their goal was to keep the leader clean, stepped down, with space between the flies, partly to raise the technical level. It's funny — when a rule is placed on you, you eventually get better. Some of our younger anglers in the early 2000s were great indicator fishermen who struggled when we made them take the indicator off, but eventually they realized how dynamic it is to fish without one — constantly adjusting depth by feel instead of sliding an indicator up and down the line. Once you get used to it, you don't want an indicator in the boat at all.

Tom Rowland: Who was the first non-indicator fisherman I ever saw? Joe Bressler — that guy never used one, fished a girdle bug, and would smoke everybody. He went on to win the One Fly. He showed up at the Orvis store without a fly, grabbed something out of the bin, and went and won the thing.

Pete Erickson: He was probably just too lazy to go get indicators — he learned to fish before they existed, so that's all he knew. I remember how Joe would always make us take him out as a client before we could guide anyone else, for free, because he didn't want to be stuck in the office. He'd throw a long leader out on the Snake, let it sink, dance it around, and catch huge sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-inch cutthroat in water I didn't even know held fish. People get hung up on the origin of techniques, but the truth is these things have been done for hundreds of years and just rotate around based on the area. Euro-nymphing has its own identity, though, because things like beadheads were actually invented for competitions, since split shot wasn't allowed.

Tom Rowland: Right — because you couldn't use split shot, it drove a whole wave of new flies that became even more effective, since the bead simulates an air bubble and adds weight in different ways depending on the material. The same thing happens in saltwater tournaments — if chumming is banned, anglers start threading pieces of shrimp all the way up the leader instead, and it ends up working even better than chumming did, simply because the rule forced innovation.

Pete Erickson: It's a little ironic that rule-makers, trying to protect the resource, sometimes just open up a whole new avenue. In the Czech Republic recently, they emphasized keeping fish in the water the whole time on the way to being measured — that's usually the goal behind the rules, even if the actual effect is different.

Tom Rowland: Same thing happened in tarpon fishing around Gasparilla, where live-baiters and "jiggers" clashed — live bait anglers would set up a slow natural drift, and jiggers would run in front of them and jig through schools of rolling tarpon, foul-hooking fish along the jaw in some cases. Eventually the rules changed to require live bait because the jigging technique was considered too effective. I don't know that I can get behind banning a technique just because it's too effective with rod and reel — isn't that the goal of every style of fishing, to catch a fish on every cast? At some point it's up to the angler to decide they've caught enough and move on to something else.

Pete Erickson: I always tell people that the catch rate nymphing a riffle on the South Fork is about as fast as any fishing I've ever seen, and there are places in Europe with grayling that are almost as fast. It's up to the anglers pounding those fish to know when to roll off a hole and move on, out of respect for the resource. In some parts of Europe there are literally signs asking Euro-nymphers to take it easy on certain holes, because you can burn one out completely. For me, as soon as I start having success, I switch things up — I can't handle it.

Tom Rowland: You're allergic to success — oh, we caught a fish, gross, let's stop doing that.

Pete Erickson: I just want to see if something else will work.

Tom Rowland: For people listening who don't know what European nymphing is, can you give a primer? Americans weren't really privy to this technique until Team USA started going over, coming back, and saying you won't believe what's going on. When I guided the Italian team, I didn't have that same experience — I was showing them fish and they were struggling. You saw something I never did.

Pete Erickson: There are different levels of fishing prowess across countries — the Italian guys I guided were dialed in on catching a lot of small fish, so for fun I cut their leaders in half and put on Chernobyl ants instead, and after that it became their favorite competition, because the practice fishing for big fish on the banks with foam flies was so much fun.

Tom Rowland: That reminds me — I had Ed Emery on the podcast, and he talked about the Chernobyl ant making its way to Jackson from guiding on the Green River, where it originated. People used to travel a little circuit through the West and share what was working, and someone would show up with a new fly nobody had used before, and suddenly everyone's using it all day. You see that pattern in bass fishing, saltwater fishing, and fly fishing alike — something comes from one place, moves into a new area, and goes crazy. That's exactly what happened with European nymphing coming into the US. So give us the short version: what is it, and how is it different from what people already think of as nymphing?

Pete Erickson: I didn't know anything about it either — I probably went whole summers without ever tying on a nymph as a guide, and considered it a good year if I never caught a whitefish. Then Jack Dennis told me about a guy named Vlade who had revolutionized this style of nymphing in Poland. In a competition back in the eighties, he reportedly caught more fish by himself than the next three teams combined. He developed a tight-line, contact style of nymphing — what became known as Polish nymphing — fishing almost entirely under the tip of the rod.

There are differences from old-school high-sticking: the gear, the long rods, the light lines, the technique. High-stickers in the seventies weren't using 7X — they were on 3X with girdle bugs and split shot. Some say the style developed in Poland because the anglers' fly lines were falling apart, so they were forced to fish very close to the rod tip and into the pods of grayling, and they realized that direct contact with the fly was the real breakthrough. I went to Poland with one of my teammates, Norm, for one of Vlade's boot camps on the San River and the Dunajec — we were terrible, and he'd practically yell at us and throw rocks. But after a few weeks of a world champion correcting our technique — lead it faster, rig it this way — you start to realize this isn't some gimmick where you throw a stick of dynamite in the water and net everything. It's fishing, and everybody who learns the technique still has to decide where the fish are, how to present the flies, dead-drift or lead them, and how to choose the right pattern.

Jeff Currier was good friends with Vlade and had been over before, and guys like Jay Buckner had done earlier competitions and were among the first to recognize this stuff and push the rest of us to learn it or get our butts kicked. I didn't do great in competition with it, since Europeans will always beat you on their home water, but the strange part was bringing it home — I'd take my rig over to a hole on the South Fork and get one cast, one fish, over and over, even when nothing else was working, and clients would ask me to teach them. Every trip overseas, guides in Spain or wherever would show me something new. In the Czech Republic recently, our guide David — one of the top ten anglers in the world in my opinion — was fishing everything on the overhang with a bow-and-arrow cast. I asked him what tippet he was using and he said 7.5X; I asked if he could go down to 7X and he said no, that would spook the fish up — he even fished 8X at times.

We're lucky, those of us who got to go over and learn that style, because it turned out to be so effective on our home rivers that it spread everywhere instead of staying a competition-only technique. People I teach don't realize beforehand how close the contact is — it's almost like sight-fishing dry flies twenty feet away. When a fish takes that close, it sends a jolt through you that's different from setting the hook at a distance; you're just instantly connected to the fish, watching the sighter — the colored section of leader we use in place of an indicator.

Breaking Down the Euro-Nymphing Rig

Tom Rowland: Let's go through the rig briefly.

Pete Erickson: You can do it with a nine-foot rod, but it doesn't work as well, because you need the reach and the angles — that's why the industry has moved to long, light rods, typically ten to eleven feet. Competition rules cap rod length at eleven feet, so the industry doesn't build anything longer. You can fish a regular fly line with a long leader, though rules also cap leader length at roughly twice the rod length, to encourage anglers to actually use their fly line rather than just casting straight mono, which some competitors — especially in the southern US, on rivers like the White River — do very effectively.

Thinner leaders are usually better, since they sink faster and offer less water resistance, giving a cleaner presentation; a thick, tapered leader moves around in the water and telegraphs your presence to the fish. So most of us fish level leaders rather than tapered ones. In the Czech Republic I fished mostly 6X and 7X the whole trip, which lets beadhead nymphs do their thing properly. Long leaders and beadheads are key to the style, and that's part of why tungsten and jig hooks became so popular — those jig, or grub, hooks were originally developed for competition, since a jig hook rides point-up and bounces along bottom without hanging up, whereas anglers used to have to add lead to the top of a standard hook to get it to flip over. Fishing jig hooks on the South Fork, I used to get hung up roughly eighty percent less than guides fishing traditional hooks.

Beyond the gear, it's a lot about using your legs, staying in close, controlling your position. There's a short-line style, fishing basically under the rod tip — which is what I was taught — that works well for grayling holding in a spot they've settled back into after being disturbed, since fish will disperse and then resettle. In other parts of Europe, like Spain, Italy, and France, and to some extent the Czech Republic, the fish are so spooky you can't get that close, so you're casting a longer distance and short-lining it from farther away — that's the difference between long-line and short-line technique. Worldcast had me record a podcast on the details of all this a while back, on the Worldcast Angler site, for anyone who wants to go deeper.

The biggest overall takeaway is staying in direct contact with your flies. At the Great Outdoor Games, I fished with a guide named Andy, a great fly tier who didn't compete the year I was there but knew the water. They filmed an indicator angler with an underwater camera and showed a fish come up, grab the fly, and spit it out without the indicator ever moving. Then they filmed a European nympher — I think it was me — and as soon as the fish touched the fly, contact set the hook instantly. That's the real difference: it's not just the light leader and staying in one seam for a better drift, it's that you don't miss the take. When things get tough, fish will mouth a fly and spit it before an angler watching an indicator can ever react; with direct contact, you're already tight.

Tom Rowland: As an angler trying to be well-rounded, you should know all of these approaches, even if you're not the best at any one of them — that's part of the responsibility of being a complete angler. For me, that means being able to pick up a baitcaster and throw it well enough to fish a jig, being able to spey cast, being able to throw a ten-weight at a permit. Each one takes practice. Before we move on, tell us about the flies, because that's a whole different subject — a lot of people just nymph with one single fly. This is basically a two- or three-fly rig, right?

Pete Erickson: Usually two, though it depends on the competition — I've fished three flies on lakes, and in the Czech Republic, and I've also fished a single fly, bow-and-arrow casting small overhung rivers. You tie the flies off a tag, often with a barrel knot. The bottom fly is called the point fly — it's heavier, which helps control depth and drift, and it can act as more of an attractor with a heavier bead. The dropper fly above it is usually more of a natural imitation, and when fish are active they'll often come up for that one instead. It's flexible — you can switch which fly goes where. I can send along some pictures of the flies we used in the Czech Republic to put on the site.

Tom Rowland: Let's do it — we'll put them up. A lot of people who listen to this podcast like to get out of Florida and experience different kinds of fishing, including fly fishing for trout, so being able to talk to someone who's learned from anglers all over the world and brought it back to the South Fork, the Snake, and Silver Creek is great. I'm sure you're testing weird things on Silver Creek, since that's your proving ground — if a technique works in the Czech Republic and on Silver Creek and the South Fork, you've probably proven it works almost anywhere. And that constant contact you mentioned really is the whole story — there are so many times when a client is indicator nymphing, you're telling them to set, they say they don't feel anything, and then their buddy comes through the same run and catches three fish. Every one of those missed takes was a real bite, even if the indicator never twitched.

Team USA Today

Tom Rowland: Where are you with competition now? You spent about ten years doing this, took a break, and now you're back — what does that look like?

Pete Erickson: We have a youth team, an adult team, and a master's team for anglers fifty and over. I probably put in ten or eleven straight years on the adult team — I was never on a youth team, since that division only goes up to age eighteen and didn't really exist until later. Once my kids were young, I didn't want to spend three or four weeks at a time traveling twice a year to learn foreign rivers, so I took a long break — six, seven, maybe eight years — and rejoined on the master's team once my kids were older. It's been fun because a lot of the same Europeans I competed against on the adult team are now on their master's teams too, many of them former world champions, and the relationships have stayed strong. All told, I've probably been doing this for about twenty years with a gap of six to eight years in the middle.

Tom Rowland: At the very beginning, Team USA was terrible and finished last on our own water. Where do we stand now in the world rankings?

Pete Erickson: It depends on the venue, but our adult team is solidly a top-five team now, and it's not uncommon for us to medal — we've missed gold by just a couple of fish a few times, including a silver finish a couple of years ago. We're one of the more respected teams on the circuit. Our master's team is roughly a top-three team, having finished fourth in the Czech Republic and second in South Africa.

It's interesting that as the industry tries to attract young anglers, they gravitate toward this style — not just the competitive side, but the technical, dynamic nature of it. Companies like Echo, who I design rods for, are pretty supportive, because there's a massive world market where competitive angling is a way of life, especially for the Brits and other Europeans.

Tom Rowland: It's the same here with how big bass fishing and competitive redfishing are — huge money and huge participation, which a lot of those countries just don't have. We're lucky to have Florida and the whole East Coast up through Maryland and Maine, plus California as a totally different fishery. Some of those countries are landlocked and don't have that opportunity, so this circuit is the next best thing. And then there's all the coarse fishing over there for carp and so on.

Pete Erickson: Coarse fishing is almost bigger over there than our bass fishing. The World Angling Games bring everyone together for a world championship — they held one in Portugal, in the Azores, and Carter was on the sea-fishing, deep blue-water team. At the hotel I ran into Roland Martin, Gary Yamamoto, Kevin VanDam, and the rest of the US bass team — we had beers and dinner and hung out. Roland didn't remember it, but he'd actually done an overnight trip and filmed a show with us on the South Fork years earlier.

Tom Rowland: He's awesome — I had him on this podcast, and it's one of my favorite episodes I've ever done. He told the whole story of how he got into fishing, and he went well out of his way to make time for it. I also once ended up on a Bass Pro Shop seminar tour with him — two stores in the Panhandle, one in Louisiana, four stores over a weekend — and I rode the whole way with just him. He's the nicest guy, and the innovations he brought to bass fishing really moved the sport forward.

Pete Erickson: Really cool guy — you'd think, watching him on TV with that smile, that it can't be real, but it is. When I told him Europeans don't have anything on US competitive bass anglers, he pushed back and said the Italians, for instance, are excellent — they just don't speak English or live here, which is why you don't hear about them, even though Japanese anglers and others come compete in our tournaments successfully. Sure enough, in that world championship the Italians ended up beating the US team for a medal. He told me the Europeans are legitimately great warm-water anglers, even without ESPN coverage of their tournaments — there's real money in it, especially around carp.

Overall, some of my greatest experiences on the road have come from food. In Portugal, my guide handed me a chicken foot out of my soup and told me to suck the fat off it — I'd already decided it was the best soup I'd ever had, so I just went with it. In the Czech Republic I've always liked beef tartare, but some of my teammates were shocked that we were eating raw beef straight out of a pile.

Tom Rowland: Have you ever gotten sick from something like that?

Pete Erickson: I try to avoid that story, but yes — this year. It wasn't from anything exotic; guides tend to have steel stomachs from eating rough food on the river our whole careers, so I've never really had food poisoning. One of my teammates and I grabbed potatoes at a little deli one morning and both got sick. That's the only time it's happened, even after eating things like eyeballs. Jeff Currier, on the other hand, won't even let river water touch his mouth when he bites off his flies, because your body just isn't used to the local bugs when you're traveling. I've been lucky, but that one time got me and I missed two days of practice. Otherwise the food in the Czech Republic was great, and I learned a lot about how the fish behave there — a lot of dry fly fishing, and despite assumptions that heavily fished European rivers are all stocked, almost all the sections I competed on held wild fish: wild browns, wild grayling, wild chub.

Tom Rowland: Is Team USA competition always trout and grayling?

Pete Erickson: That's the main focus, though if we're somewhere like South Africa we'll take a day to go catch yellowfish just because we're there. But the core focus is always trout and grayling.

Rod Design and Twenty Years of Lessons

Tom Rowland: It's been awesome catching up with you — I know it's a Sunday, so I appreciate you making time. To wrap up, what would your three biggest takeaways be from these twenty years of world travel, competition, and bringing it all back to your home water?

Pete Erickson: Probably the biggest one is realizing how much I didn't know I needed to learn — which I think is true in all of life. The relationships are the second: once you broaden your horizons and leave North America, it really changes you as a person, gives you different perspectives, and makes you less locked into one way of seeing the world. Third, I'd say it's changed how much fun I have with fishing generally. A lot of trout guides eventually feel ready to move on to something different — you told me that yourself once — and after fishing in Europe among giant wild fish, my own perspective changed too. Now I can go to a river and be genuinely happy catching ten- or twelve-inch fish, appreciating the challenge instead of thinking of them as small. You never know what can shift in your perspective until you experience something different.

One more big takeaway I didn't mention: getting to move into rod design with Tim, at Echo. He approached me because I understood the technique and had seen enough rods to contribute, and it turned into something hugely successful — people all over North America use these Euro-nymphing rods now, and we sell them worldwide; Europe is actually one of our biggest markets. Learning rod design from someone like Tim, and his brother Steve, was an amazing experience that never would have happened without all that travel.

Tom Rowland: I had something similar working with Jim Barchi developing saltwater rods — you don't realize what goes into it until you're in it. You pick up a rod and it's either great or you can't throw it at all, and you think, if they'd just spent two more weeks tweaking it, it would have been perfect. I remember one blank they sent me that just didn't feel right until I put a heavier line on it — it turned out to be a perfect line size up from what it was designed for, so we went back and redesigned the lighter model separately.

Pete Erickson: The power was just off.

Tom Rowland: Exactly. You learn all these intricacies about the sport we call fishing, and that's really just one small part of it — the same applies in bass fishing, carp fishing, saltwater fishing, and every individual species within saltwater fishing has its own nuances. That's why fishing is a lifetime pursuit, and for me a lifetime learning opportunity is what keeps it fun. When I feel like I've hit a plateau and I'm not learning as much anymore, that's usually my own impatience talking, and the fastest way to keep learning is to try something different — travel, get into competition the way you did, learn from people in other countries, or just move on to another species entirely.

Pete Erickson: Totally. I actually still owe you a book back — I've had it twenty years.

Tom Rowland: Does it have my name written inside? I used to put my name in every book — that's why you don't loan books out.

Pete Erickson: You were helping out a first-year guide with it.

Tom Rowland: I gave you that book and told you that you should read it. I'd learned that lesson myself from Jay Buckner, who used to come to the guide school and teach us the history of Jackson, the rivers, and the old cowboy stories — things to talk about on a bad day, things to talk about on a good day, things that make you a more interesting person to have in your boat and make the trip more memorable. It's not all about the fishing. That was a big part of what made that little area so special — and it wasn't just happening there. West Yellowstone and Bozeman had Bob Jacklin and others doing the same thing on the Henry's Fork. But in Jackson you had Verne and Joe Bressler, Jay Buckner, Jack Dennis, and so many outfitter and guide luminaries who showed young guys like us what it meant to be a true professional guide. Someone like Chris Patterson raising a family on guiding, or Bill Happersett booked solid all season, showed us this was a real profession, not just something college kids did hungover every morning. If you didn't understand that early on, Verne Bressler would beat it into you until you did, or you wouldn't be there much longer. He was awesome, and what an opportunity to learn from him.

It's been great catching up with you, and I'd love to do this again. Congratulations on a great competitive career and a great guiding career — you've immersed yourself in it and done awesome. It's great to see.

Pete Erickson: Great to catch up with you too. If you ever get out this way, definitely come stay with us. I'm actually thinking about having my seventeen-year-old son go through the guide school — I don't know if your son has ever thought about it, but that would be wild.

Tom Rowland: That would be so cool, I wonder if that's ever happened before. My boys are both in Bozeman, Montana — one's graduated college and the other's a junior, and my daughter is a freshman at Auburn.

Pete Erickson: You let your daughter go to Auburn? Your family's split.

Tom Rowland: I did, and I went to Alabama myself, but it was the better choice for her, and she's having a great experience there so far.

Pete Erickson: Good — my son just got accepted to Montana State.

Tom Rowland: Really? Is that where he's headed? We'll have to hook him up with my boys — I bought them an old beater drift boat, and they're out on the water constantly, hunting and fishing. It'd be a great connection for him to meet my son Hayden, who could show him how to European nymph.

Pete Erickson: My other son, Miles, does that too — I'm actually trying to get him to put the Euro-nymphing rods down for a while and get him casting a double taper properly.

Tom Rowland: I'll tell you what, that's one thing my boys can really do — throw a line — because they learned to fish in saltwater. I'll look down the river and there they are, throwing ninety feet for no reason, with fish sitting right under their feet.

Pete Erickson: They're casters.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, they're casters. But anyway, man, congratulations on everything, Pete. It's been awesome reconnecting with you, and I look forward to staying in touch.

Pete Erickson: Nice — tell Cynthia hi.

Tom Rowland: I will. Alright, see you.