S2, Ep 160: An Evening with Al Quattrocchi

**Marvin Cash (00:04):**
Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. On this episode, I'm joined by Al Quattrocchi, or as most folks call him, Al Q. Al shares his experiences growing up in and around New York City and his migration west. We also discuss Al's new book, The Corbina Diaries. It would make a great gift for that hard-to-shop-for angler on your list. But before we get to the interview, just a couple of housekeeping items. If you like the podcast, please tell a friend and please subscribe and leave us a rating and review in the podcatcher of your choice. It really helps us out. And a shout out to this episode's sponsor. This episode's sponsored by our friends at Nor-vise. Their motto is, tie better flies faster, and they produce the only vise that truly spins. Just in time for the holidays, Tim and Tyler have launched the Legacy C vise—the legacy vise you all know and love, and five amazing colors. Head over to www.nor-vise.com and check them out. Also, don't forget to check out Nor-vise's holiday promotions, but don't delay. They disappear on December 14th. Now, on to our interview. Well, Al, welcome to The Articulate Fly.

**Al Quattrocchi (01:18):**
Hey, it's great to be here, Marvin. I'm really looking forward to it.

**Marvin Cash (01:21):**
Yeah, me too. And we have a tradition on The Articulate Fly. We always ask all of our guests to share their earliest fishing memory.

**Al Quattrocchi (01:30):**
Okay. Well, what I can remember as far as my earliest fishing memory would be, as a kid, we used to fish for something called snappers. They're kind of baby bluefish. Bluefish go through different stages. They start off as snappers, then they go to tailor bluefish, and then they get bigger as they go. But when they're real little, and that's usually in the beginning of the summer, we used to go and fish for them underneath the bridges in Brooklyn. And there was a place called Jamaica Bay where I kind of grew up, and there was a lot of little bridges and overpasses along the Belt Parkway. We used to go underneath there and we used to get a net with two pieces of broomstick on each end and had weights at the bottom, and we'd wear our sneakers. And we'd walk in the water and we'd kind of net our bait. We'd get spearing, and then we would take the spearing and we'd put a little float and we'd cast them out and just watch the float until it goes down. We'd catch a pile of these snappers, and they're really a lot of fun to catch and they're actually pretty good to eat.

And then I used to also use a little lure called a sidewinder. It was a tiny little spoon. It was probably maybe a quarter of an ounce or so, and we would fish light line—four-pound, six-pound test—and catch the snappers that way too. They were really aggressive and they were a lot of fun. I think that was kind of my earliest memory of fishing.

**Marvin Cash (02:54):**
Very neat. And when did you get drawn to the dark side of fly fishing?

**Al Quattrocchi (02:59):**
It's very interesting. I always fished saltwater and I always fished spinning reels and plugs and all that stuff. And I used to read the Saltwater Sportsman as a kid. And I used to see all the articles with Joe Brooks and Lefty and Charles Waterman. They all had fly rods. These guys were monster fishermen, but they also loved to fly fish. And I always told myself I'd love to do that someday. I never had a mentor that would take me down that path as a kid. And then when I moved to California, when I went to college, I came out to California and I started tinkering around with the fly rod. And I really didn't get into it. I got into it late. I was probably, I would say my early 30s when I connected with Nick Curcione. And he was the guy that really kind of propelled me into fishing the surf. And it took off after that, really.

**Marvin Cash (03:56):**
Yeah. And what attracted you to fly fishing and kind of pulled you away from your childhood fishing gear?

**Al Quattrocchi (04:05):**
It was very mysterious to me. It was like I was trying to figure it out. As you're reading about tippet and all these things, it just allured me that it was just a fun way to do it. And for me it was almost like, okay, I did all this other stuff, I want to kind of graduate to fly fishing because it seemed like it was almost at the top of the pinnacle. And to do that in saltwater for me was just like, it was an amazing thing to try to do. And it was just something that I just always wanted to do. And then once I kind of found me, I just kind of started reading about it. And then I connected with some of the guys like Nick and some of the other people that really mentored me and got me into it.

And once I caught my first fish on a fly rod, it was over. I was like, this is the best. It's basically a glorified hand line, but it was just so—it's such an immediate connection to the end of your line and feeling the fish. And it was just, it was amazing. It's great.

**Marvin Cash (05:11):**
Yeah, that's awesome. And so, what was that transition like moving from gear to fly fishing? And did your conventional fishing experience help you or did it hinder you? What was that like?

**Al Quattrocchi (05:23):**
It didn't really hinder me. I think in a certain sense it helped me because I understood how to cast and I understood the dynamics of a cast. But the whole transitioning into the fly fishing world was the whole timing. And the fact that you weren't throwing a weight, you were throwing the weight of the line and understanding load and stopping the rod and all that. It was just, I had to reset my mind, but I knew what I had to do. It was just a matter of trying to figure it out, getting my brain and my mechanics right. And once I did, it was pretty smooth. It was a smooth transition.

And for me, as a creative person, it opened up so many lanes for me because now I was like, I can not only get into like even doing rod building, but you could also start tying your own flies and going to stores and finding weird materials and designing things and see if they'll work. And it was like, I was like a kid in a candy shop when I picked up the fly rod. It was crazy.

**Marvin Cash (06:26):**
Yeah, it's funny, when you're talking about that, it makes me kind of remember when I first started moving into fly fishing and I came to it late too. I was always scared to go back and touch a spinning rod because I was afraid I was going to mess up my casting.

**Al Quattrocchi (06:41):**
I never felt that way. I always, even till today, I love throwing a Zara Spook or fishing conventional. I like fishing every way. To me, the fly rod was just a really refined tool to be able to experience a different way of fishing. And a lot of times, a more productive way of fishing. In certain circumstances, the fly rod is king. You can't touch it to anything else. But I'll throw a harpoon if I have to. I just love being on the water and fishing. So it doesn't matter to me which way I do it.

**Marvin Cash (07:17):**
Yeah, it's very neat. And I know from our earlier conversations that even though you started fly fishing late, that you had an opportunity to really spend time with some of the really great people in our sport. And I was wondering if you could share with our listeners who were some of those folks that mentored you, and what did they teach you?

**Al Quattrocchi (07:39):**
Well, I took a class when I came out to California because I couldn't take it anymore. I had to figure out how to do this fly fishing thing. So I took a class at UCLA called The Art and Science of Fly Fishing with Neal Taylor. And Neal Taylor was really a great fly fisherman out here. He lived up in Lake Cachuma and he was kind of like a Lefty Kreh in the sense that he was a master marksman. He did a lot of the shows, a lot of shooting, and he was a champion caster. He did bass plug casting and fly casting. He was phenomenal.

So I took this class and I told him, I said, Neal, I really don't want to learn about insects. I want to be able to grab a fly rod and run to the ocean. And he laughed at me. He goes, Al, you can put on a piece of yarn and catch a fish in the ocean. That's not—anybody can do that. I said, I don't care. That's what I want to do. So he taught me about trout fishing. I really learned everything about trout fishing with Neal and casting. He showed me a lot about casting. It was great, but that's kind of started me off.

But what really propelled me was when I met Lefty. It was interesting. There was this fly shop out here called Marriott's Fly Shop. And I walked in there as a young man and I saw on the board that it said fishing Hot Creek up in Mammoth—Lefty Kreh. And I did a double take. I'm like, Lefty Kreh? That can't be the same Lefty Kreh. So I asked, is this the real Lefty Kreh? And they're like, oh yeah, Lefty's going to be doing a class up there at Hot Creek. I said, sign me up. I said, how many spots are there? He goes, there's six and you have like one left. I said, sign me up. I didn't even know where Hot Creek was.

So I had to get my little Thomas Guide map out at the time. I had my little Volkswagen and I drove up to the mountains and I get there and I'm like, where's Lefty? I know he's coming. He's coming. Where's Lefty? All of a sudden a Learjet comes flying down with an airport close by and they drive Lefty over and I got to spend three days with Lefty and it changed my life. I mean, that was like phenomenal. Because he taught me how to double haul. And while he was at Hot Creek, he laughed at me because he goes, how do you know all this stuff? I used to read all the magazines. I knew all the great guys. I knew about how Lindemann and Frank Woolner and Charlie Waterman and Milt Rosko and all these old East Coast names, because I used to read all their articles like, I used to eat them up.

And I was asking Lefty about all these people and he goes, how do you know all these guys? Well, I just, I read. I read a lot. I'm really into it. And I said, there's this one cover Lefty that just came out on Fly Angler and it blew me away because it was all the baits that I grew up with—the spearing and bay anchovies and all that stuff—but it was all done in epoxy and it was like for me it was like looking at eye candy. And I said, who is this guy Bob Popovics? And Lefty goes, oh, that's Bobby, yeah, yeah, yeah. He lives in Seaside, New Jersey. He's a friend of mine and he's really a great fly tier.

And I said, well, I've never seen anything like this. He goes, yeah, yeah, Bobby's really great. He's doing a lot of stuff with epoxy and stuff. And Lefty goes, I'm trying to get him into Umpqua as a pro tier. And he goes, he just sent me a video, a VHS cassette on how to tie all these things. He goes, when I get home, I'm going to send you the cassette out. All I need you to do is just make me a couple of copies. I said, no problem.

So a couple of weeks passed by after I had my time with Lefty and I get this package and I'm like, I couldn't believe it. There's a package from Lefty. I opened it up and he sends me this VHS tape with Bobby tying all these flies that nobody on the West Coast had ever even seen before. So I call up Nick and I said, Nick, I just got the Holy Grail. He goes, what do you mean? I said, I got the tape to tie all these amazing epoxy flies from Popovics. We've got to watch it.

So Nick was a bachelor at the time. He had this like 40-foot television and he goes, come on over, we'll watch it. So we popped in the VHS. We sat down there like two little kids and we watched it and we were blown away. And that spring Nick was actually working for Orvis. We went up to the San Mateo show and Nick goes, come up with me, we'll hang out. So I went up and the first day I was walking around and I got back to his booth around just before lunchtime and Nick goes, hey Al, you're not going to believe this but I met your buddy. I said, who? He goes, I just met Popovics. I said, get out of here. He goes, no, he goes, we're going to have lunch with him. I said, really? He goes, yeah.

So we had lunch with Bob Popovics and that lunch fortified a friendship that lasted for I don't know, 30 years. It's like Bobby invited us back east. We started fishing the Vineyard. We started hanging out. I started meeting all these people. And it just, everything happened from that, from the moment I met Lefty. It changed my life. That's how important Lefty was to me. And Lefty remained a friend until his passing days. We used to email and talk to each other all the time. But it's amazing how one person can take somebody and just, like a pinball, hit you and you ricochet somewhere else. And I can never say enough about Lefty Kreh. He was always giving of information. He was always generous. And he was the one guy in this industry that I could always know I can call and get the right answer. He always helped me out.

**Marvin Cash (13:13):**
Yeah, and it's interesting too, because you weren't his only pinball, right?

**Al Quattrocchi (13:17):**
That's exactly right.

**Marvin Cash (13:18):**
Right? I mean, he's an incredibly generous guy. I had a chance to spend time with him at fly fishing shows in Virginia. And it's funny you mentioned that Bob Popovics VHS tape. And I think I know the one you're talking about. It's probably the one where he takes two vises and puts the string across and ties some of his larger patterns.

**Al Quattrocchi (13:40):**
It's the one where his cat walks across the table, if you remember that part.

**Marvin Cash (13:45):**
Yeah, I'll have to go back and check. Yeah, it's funny because so Fly Fish TV actually has them and you can buy them. And so there's some great ones. There's some of Popovics. There's some of Bob Clouser and Lefty. There's several of those. And it's just, oh it's super cool, right? I just think it's super special—just that old guard of the sport. And then, getting invited back to—

**Al Quattrocchi (14:14):**
And then we got invited back to the East Coast—me and Nick and doing stuff out here—but we got invited back east like in the early 90s and we got to fish with Paul Dixon in Montauk when he invited all the writers out to Montauk in June. It was like June. And he was trying to show everybody that there was a viable flats fishery for striped bass. This is really early on. And I was like a fly on the wall. I was hanging out with those guys and everybody was there. I mean, Jose Wejebe and Lefty and Jimmy Buffett. And it was just, it was insane. Flip wasn't there, but the Sea Lion 2 from the Walker's Cay Chronicles was docked there in the Montauk Yacht Club. And John Applebaum and his dad, who I think they were the executive producers of the show, they were all there. It was just an amazing, amazing time to be in fly fishing.

And everybody got paired up with a different guide each day. I remember I got paired up with Joe Blados one day, and Joe was showing me these flies, these crease flies. I go, what the hell is that? He's like, oh, this is one of my crease flies. This is a great fly and I catch all these fish. I go, Joe, that's the ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. And he was laughing and we started fishing. I mean, it was slamming fish and I'm fishing crease flies with Joe Blados. It's like somebody pinched me. Now, kicking back, how important that was and how cool that was. But I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time and be around some of the best people in the industry and some of the big names. And they really shared a lot with me and upped my learning curve and helped me out. And I've been doing the same ever since. I try to pass knowledge forward. I try to help people out as much as I can. I mean, I feel like I'm indebted to do so. That's been my mantra.

**Marvin Cash (16:08):**
Yeah, absolutely. And for you and fly tying, did you kind of take the leap for fly fishing and fly tying at the same time? Or did you have to fly fish for a little while before you got called to the vise?

**Al Quattrocchi (16:23):**
No, I did. I kind of did them hand in hand. I joined a club out here, a South Bay Fly Fishing Club, and they were mostly freshwater guys. But that's how I learned how to tie flies. I was tying Woolly Buggers and just playing around on the vise and learning. And then I started to do stuff for the surf right away because like, you can just figure it out. And they always kind of went hand in hand after that.

**Marvin Cash (16:47):**
Yeah. Very neat. And how long did you tie before—because I know that Umpqua carries your patterns—before you were able to sell some of your patterns professionally?

**Al Quattrocchi (16:59):**
A guy named John Sherman, who was the Simms rep out here, he actually talked Umpqua into doing a surf fly series and they took a couple of my patterns. And the one that was most popular was the beach bug. That was the one that I sold first. And that did really well, did really well for them. It was basically just an attractor pattern that didn't foul and fished pretty well out here up in the surf. It didn't really look like much. It was sort of like a shrimpy type of pattern. But that pattern got a lot. It's interesting. When you tie something and you throw it out into the world, you never know where it goes or who fishes it or who does something with it.

I remember once seeing an article in Saltwater Fly Fisherman. Some guy in Louisiana caught like a 35-pound redfish on a beach bug. He just used a little bit of rabbit at the end. And then another experience which really blew me away was I hosted a trip once to Christmas Island. And we were waiting in the airport to go to Kiribati. It was a Tuesday. And there was another gentleman from a different group. His name was Steve Horgan. And he was an older man and he was from Detroit. And he was just talking to a bunch of the guys that were in my group. And all of a sudden, one of my friends said, hey Al, come over here. You've got to meet this guy.

So I walk over there and I said, hey, how are you doing? He goes, I'm fine. I go, are you going to Christmas Island? He goes, oh yeah, yeah. I go, like, every couple of years I go to Christmas Island. He goes, I go by myself. And he goes, I'm a multi-species fisherman. I said, really? He goes, yeah, yeah. I just love to catch different species. And I catch them. I take pictures. And I come back home. And I try to figure out what they are. And I make a big list and stuff. And he goes, one of my favorite flies is this fly called the Q's Beach Bug. And I go, really? He goes, yeah. I said, well, you know, my name is Al Quattrocchi. And he looked at me. And he goes, you're the Q's Beach Bug guy? I go, yeah, that's my fly. He goes, oh my God, can we take a picture? I said, of course.

So we took a picture together and we struck up a friendship. And he sent me all these pictures of these crazy fish that he caught on the Q's Beach Bug. And what I did was I made a box, a wooden fly box. And I had it engraved with a signature and it said Q's Beach Bug on it. And I tied them, a dozen of them. And I sent it to him. And he was just over the moon. But I would have never known that if I stopped and talked to him about what he was doing and stuff. And it just turned out that that was his favorite fly. Who knew?

**Marvin Cash (19:35):**
Yeah, very cool. And when you design flies, Al, do you try to—are you—do you see sort of an application from gear fishing in your youth? Or are you trying to solve a specific fishing problem? Or is it a little bit of both of those?

**Al Quattrocchi (19:52):**
It's pretty much all of the above. I learned a lot from Bob Popovics. He really mentored me in fly tying. Bobby's approach was always look at the bait, study the bait, watch how it moves in the water and try to duplicate it and make it durable and simple. I try to do that with a lot of the different baits we have out here on the West Coast. I do very much so talk to a lot of the conventional guys, the guys that throw plugs because they can do things sometimes we can't as fly fishermen. And I'm always trying to figure out how to accomplish what they accomplish—how they can get something to sink out or walk on top of the water or whatever.

And I'm always trying to think outside the box and try to figure out ways to do things that are different. So I definitely like to keep my mind open and I like to try to see what other people are doing. And sometimes I can improve on it. Sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can go a completely different direction. But that's the beauty of being creative and having the opportunity to fly tie because we can do anything we want with the vise. As long as we understand the materials we're using, there's so many different applications on making things float or make things sink or make things move and swim and do all sorts of stuff. So it's fun.

**Marvin Cash (21:13):**
Yeah, absolutely. Are there some of the kind of next generation of fly tiers that you like to follow and kind of see what they're up to?

**Al Quattrocchi (21:23):**
Yeah, I like seeing what Blane's doing. The Game Changer is kind of a cool idea. I always like looking at what—there's so many great fly tiers out there now, especially in social media. Now you can have access to so much more than you normally would. But, yeah, I mean, even my friend Trevor with his Trouser Worm that he was catching carp and trout on by just punching little circular punch holes of craft foam and threading them on a string and then making it like a little articulated tail that would float up. I mean, that was very ingenious. We used it out here in California for carp. And I actually use it sometimes for Corbina. It's like a little red worm that sits in the sand.

So there's lots of ideas out there that you can kind of incorporate. But I always try to give credit to the people that came before me. I think this is important for young fly tiers is, the only way we move the needle forward in fly fishing is to understand what was behind you. And we've kind of lost that a little bit because everybody kind of changes a color and calls it a new fly and does this and does that. And we're all kind of guilty of doing similar things to that effect. But you should always try to go back and try to understand the history of the sport and how it evolved. And if there's a certain fly, go back to the original and say, you know what, this is an application of a fly that—it's a Clouser-style fly. Or this is a Lefty-style baitfish. Or, because there's only so many things you can do in fly tying. And I always try to give credit to the people that came before me because I'm living on their shoulders. So it's good to do that, I think.

**Marvin Cash (23:16):**
Yeah, absolutely. So your book, The Corbina Diaries, I don't know, has it officially been out even a week yet?

**Al Quattrocchi (23:25):**
Yes, it's a little over a week.

**Marvin Cash (23:26):**
A little over a week. And so I was really curious, this is your first book, and I think you told me before we started recording that it was kind of gestating for about 20 years. Talk a little bit about the genesis of the project.

**Al Quattrocchi (23:42):**
Yeah, we have this crazy fish out here called the Corbina. It's a croaker family and it shows up in large numbers in the early summer. And I think that's because they might be spawning. We don't really know a lot about them, but they come in really shallow. They almost have a triangular-shaped body. They don't have an air bladder, so they can literally just glide in half an inch of water. And they come in in large numbers primarily when the sand crab beds start showing up big time in California. So they primarily feed at that time of the year on sand crabs.

And when I first came to California, I used to see these things all the time. I used to kick them in the water. I mean, they're just everywhere. But they were very finicky and a lot of people said they were hard to catch. And even the bait guys have a hard time sometimes catching. So I caught my first one, I think, in the early 90s, and I was just literally not even targeting them. I was fishing for perch, I think, and I caught one. And my buddy Nick was telling me, man, that's fantastic. You've got a Corbina. That's really hard to catch here. Fish of a lifetime really. And that's mainly because we were throwing heavy lines. We were throwing red core shooting heads with easier running line and trying to get as far out as you can in the surf line. And there was nothing subtle about throwing those big heads.

But around 2000, things started changing. There was a lot more young guys were out there fishing and the lines started becoming integrated and we could get these sinking lines that were all one piece and we could get them lighter. They would still sink pretty good but they were lighter—they were like 200 grain, 175 grain—and they kind of changed the game a little bit because now we could make a little bit more delicate presentations. But the flies were still hitting heavy. We were using epoxy flies trying to figure out how to do sand crabs and it was like throwing a pebble in the ocean and they would scatter. These fish were very, very finicky. They would scatter all over the place.

So it wasn't until my buddy Paul kind of played around with a fly that Del Brown created called the Merkin fly. And he called it the Serpent Merkin. It was just an adaptation of Del's fly but it landed soft and it allowed us to really put these sand crabs softly in front of these fish. And when they would start to come in and feed, they would see those little sand crabs swimming across the bottom and we would get them. And we started routinely catching Corbina. It's like we broke the code. And we started catching them.

I started writing about it and I've got my buddy Paul writing some articles and doing presentations. But still nobody was really catching on because they were difficult to catch and it wasn't—it was like you had to know the time period of when they were going to feed. There would be a magic window on different tides of when they would actually start to feed. And it was definitely a learning curve. So like if you jumped into the Corbina game 10 years ago or 15 years ago, you might have struggled a couple of seasons and not really get any until you finally maybe land one. Like I know people that went two or three seasons. They get one. Then finally they catch them.

Now you can go out and guys get 20 a season, 50 a season—I don't know how many—but it's only because of this whole idea of the way we approach them, the lighter lines, the softer flies, understanding their feeding habits, understanding the patterns that they go into. And I talk about all of that in the book. It makes it a lot easier now to go out there. And I think if people get the book, pick it up and read it, it's pretty much giving you a DIY on how to have enough information in it. It'd be dangerous to go out there and actually try to get one. So it's cool. They're one of the toughest fish, I think, personally to land on a fly rod.

**Marvin Cash (27:43):**
Yeah, it's interesting because I listened to your interview with the Bowmans and you guys were kind of trying to discuss whether you thought it was harder to catch a permit or not. And I'm assuming that it was that challenge is what kind of drew you in and to kind of crack that code.

**Al Quattrocchi (27:57):**
Yeah absolutely. I mean, I remember going down in the morning and if I got a bump on the fly that was a win. I was like, wow man, I got my fish bumped my fly today. That was awesome. And it took a while and then we would catch one and I'd go, okay, I'm going to save this fly because this is a fly, man, this is the fly. And then I would fish that fly for another week or two and never even catch one. And I'm like, oh man.

And finally, when we got that Merkin, that really changed it. And then the Holy Moly is just an adaptation of the Merkin. But it was basically that sand crab style fly. When you strip it and it lays underneath the sand and forms like a little bubble that kind of crawls along the sand. And they see that. They think it's a fleeing crab. They go right over it and suck it right in. A lot of times they'll even get it way back in their crushers. They really want that fly. That was the ability to change the game, figuring out what they were going to eat. Yeah, it was cool.

**Marvin Cash (28:59):**
Yeah, very neat. And some of my listeners may not know this, but in your non-fishing life, you're a partner in a creative agency. And if you haven't seen the book yet, folks, I mean, it's beautifully laid out, beautifully designed, very different from most fishing or fly fishing books I've ever seen. And I was curious, Al, if you could just share with us kind of what you were trying to achieve from a design perspective when you laid out the book.

**Al Quattrocchi (29:25):**
Absolutely. I don't like to do the same thing twice. I'm not that guy. And I love reading different fly fishing books and I've read many, many, many fly fishing books. And they're all awesome. They're all awesome. But they all kind of look the same. So I wanted to do something a little different. And in advertising, there's something called disruption. And a lot of the big advertising agencies use that term. And basically what it is is, if you're black, I'm going to be white. If you're red, I'm going to be blue. I want to stand out. I don't want to be like everybody else.

So I decided when I designed this book that it was going to be kind of like a coffee table book, but with information and illustrations and really cool photography. And I wanted every page to be a discovery. So every time you turn a page, it's different. You're not going to see the same thing each time. And I think for me, it's kind of fun because it takes you on a journey through the book and it just keeps you interested. So that was my premise—was try to do something that was different, but yet exciting and fun.

And you look at the magazines, the fly fishing magazines today, like the Drake and Tail and stuff, their layouts are really great. They're fun. It's not the same cookie cutter thing that goes through each magazine. Everyone might be a little different. They might change the font on one article or they might run a big spread on one article and different photos and maybe one's an illustration. And that was the concept. I wanted to have something that kind of felt more like a fun periodical type of diary-ish type of book. And I think I kind of accomplished it.

**Marvin Cash (31:10):**
Yeah, I think it's a beautiful book. And one of the things that struck me, I had a chance to spend some time with it before the interview, is you can really see in it that it's an homage to this small group of people that cracked the code and then kind of shared it with the next group of people. And I was wondering, for my listeners who don't live in Southern California, which is probably a good chunk of them, can you tell us a little bit about that culture?

**Al Quattrocchi (31:38):**
Yeah, it's almost like the skateboard culture in California, when the kids started dropping into the empty swimming pools and using those escape ramps. I kind of felt we, in a certain sense, we kind of were doing the same thing. We discovered a really cool fish that was always there, but no one really wanted to try to attempt to catch it with a fly rod and try to catch them in a way now that it's doable. It's like we've gotten to the big wave and we actually got down that wave.

So there was a group of guys that probably maybe 10 to a dozen guys that every year I would see them on the beach and they were up from anywhere from Santa Barbara down to San Diego. Wherever the fish were, we'd end up all being at the same place, looking at each other like, hey, you know. And we called each other the Corbina Patrol. We just kind of made a funny name for each other. And I started making t-shirts and decals and we were on some of the different boards and the boards we were on were mostly spin—spinning conventional boards—and we were showing these guys, these spin guys, hey look at this, we're catching these fish on flies. And they were like, oh man, those Corbina Patrol guys they got something going on.

We kind of created this little cult, this little culture. And we all learned from each other. Everybody was pretty much open to sharing and talking about stuff and learning about stuff. And we just kind of moved it along. We moved that needle over, I'd say, the course of maybe 10 years. We just really got it to a point where it got to a point where one of my buddies, John, who's really a good fisherman—and he was literally taking pieces of bamboo, just a crooked piece of bamboo, and putting dyes on it and catching Corbina on bamboo rods, like an old bamboo rod. Or I think he even used one of those Korean telescopic rods, like an 18-footer or something. And I think he got a Corbina on one of those.

We were just trying to do different things on how to catch these fish just because we were having so much fun. And so that's kind of how it generated. And I just want to talk a little part of the book in the beginning is really an homage to those buddies of mine that were out there just pounding it and trying to learn from each other and trying to figure it out.

**Marvin Cash (34:04):**
Yeah, very neat. What was the writing and editing experience like for you?

**Al Quattrocchi (34:11):**
It was a little painful. But at the same time, it was good because with the COVID lockdown thing, I had moved my office to my home. So I had all my computer stuff available to me. During the day I would work at my company. And then at night, I said to myself, you know what, I have all my stuff. I have, I don't know how many years, 20, 25 years of photography and stuff. I got to really start doing this. If I don't do this now, I'll never get the opportunity to do this because I've been threatening to write a Corbina book for 15 years. I felt like I'd been pregnant for 15 years. And I finally popped out this kid.

And it allowed me to focus. It allowed me to write an outline and ask myself, okay, you know so much about these fish. You've done this for such a long time. How are we going to organize those thoughts? How are we going to get this into some sort of a book form? And I just made myself an outline and I reached out to Dr. Milton Love, who's a great marine biologist. And he was willing to give me some information about sand crabs and some of the history of the Corbina. And I have a lot of friends in the industry that I said, you know, guys, everybody loves sight fishing. Can you guys give me good quotes?

So I have a bunch of really cool people giving me great quotes about sight-fishing. And I just started going, approaching it like building a house. I got my framework and then I would just start to knock them out one section at a time. And then when I got it all together, then I kind of put it down in a form where I could actually visualize it. And I started breaking it up into pieces and figuring out how the book was going to lay out. And I got really lucky this year. I found a really cool secret spot that kid Chris Nichols had turned me on to. And in one day, I probably got 10 of the best photos I've ever taken for Corbina this past season. And that all went into the book.

All the little pieces came together. A kid from San Diego said, hey Q, I got this great drone footage of a sequence of hooking a Corbina. I said, would you send it to me? Absolutely. So all these little pieces came together. It was really a family collaborative thing. All my friends gave me little bits and pieces. And I was fortunate to be able to round it all up and put it together and organize it. And then the editing thing, sending it out to friends and family and stuff—everybody read this. I mean, there's typos. And it was really like a, it was a homemade thing. It wasn't like a, I didn't have a publisher that did this for me. I did everything. So it was kind of a cool experience, but it was, it wasn't easy. But I'm glad I did it. And I'm so happy I got the monkey off my back and I got this book. It's a book done because it's been something I've wanted to do for a long time.

**Marvin Cash (37:10):**
Yeah, absolutely. And Al, what was the greatest challenge or surprise in the process?

**Al Quattrocchi (37:18):**
Greatest challenge or surprise? Well, being in COVID-19 enabled me to do the book. So that was an unexpected thing. Had I not been in a situation where I had the ability to really focus like that, it probably would have never happened. I'm trying to think of what surprises. Oh, yeah, here's a surprise. One of my friends called me and said, hey, yeah, I'll check this out. I just went to a garage sale and I bought all these really cool magazines called Angler Magazine. It was a California fishing magazine from the 70s. And he goes, I just found this really cool article about Nick Curcione wrote about catching this first Corbina. I said, no way. He goes, yeah. I said, can I get that? He goes, yeah.

So he gave me the article. And I made a nice copy of it. And I called Nick. And I said, Nick, do you remember this magazine? He goes, oh my God, yeah. I said, would you mind if I publish this page? He goes, oh, absolutely. So that was a great thing that just came out of nowhere. It was like, serendipity, man. It just happened. And a lot of little things like that happened that made it special.

**Marvin Cash (38:30):**
Yeah, very neat. And where can folks find the book?

**Al Quattrocchi (38:34):**
Okay. There's an online store called Love, L-O-V-E, to the number two, flyfishmedia.bigcartel.com. That's the store. Or you can go to alquattrocchi.com. It's like my little website. It's linked up at the top. It's, you spell my last name is Q-U-A-T-T-R-O-C-C-H-I. So you can either go to alquattrocchi.com or you can go to love2flyfishmedia.bigcartel.com and the book will be there.

**Marvin Cash (39:10):**
Yeah, that's awesome. And I'll drop those in the show notes too. Cool. Yeah, absolutely. And you've done a lot in your angling career and you're certainly not done by any stretch of the imagination, but I was curious, what else you wanted to accomplish in the sport before you hang up the rods?

**Al Quattrocchi (39:28):**
Well, Marvin, I got to tell you something. A couple of years ago, I accomplished what I always wanted to accomplish. And I don't think I could ever beat it. I landed a close to 80-pound roosterfish off the surf in Baja, sight-fishing on a fly. I don't think I'll ever beat that accomplishment. Because to me, catching a fish, sight-fishing off the beach is the pinnacle of fly fishing for me personally. And to do that on such a magnificent species was just, I still pinch myself and I still remember that day vividly, how I landed that fish. And that was, that's it. I mean, I can literally hang up my rod at this point and knowing that I accomplished that. And that's something that I've always wanted to do is land a nice size fish off the beach. And I never thought I'd catch a 70 to 80-pound rooster off the beach on a fly. It was unbelievable.

**Marvin Cash (40:31):**
Yeah, that's pretty neat. And talking about COVID, you have all this outreach and educational stuff that you like to do. And I'm sure COVID has certainly disrupted in 2020. But can you share any of the events that you hope you're going to be able to hold in 2021?

**Al Quattrocchi (40:48):**
Yeah, there's a few things. I'll be doing some Zoom stuff. And another thing that's interesting is I connected with a friend, this young guy named Joshua Schwartz. He's a top chef. And we're going to be doing a thing called Travel Creole Hospitality. And what that is, is we're going to literally take a five-star restaurant anywhere we go. We're going to do our first one hopefully in July. We're going to do a trip up the Sacramento River to Striped Bass. We got three guides. It'll only be for six guests. But we got this amazing James Bond house and we're going to have unbelievable food and we're going to do a beer tour at the Sierra Nevada Beer Brewery and we're going to have live music. It's going to be a really cool experience for people. So it's going to be a little bit different than what people have done in fly fishing. So I'm looking forward to that. I don't know where that's going to go, but that's something that I have planned.

The other thing that is happening, I think I can talk about it, is I'm going to be the Western editor for Pêle Magazine. And they want to have more of a presence here on the West Coast. It's a great East Coast and Southern Coast magazine. So I'm going to try to help obtain some content from here, from California. And I think we're going to try to do some fun articles on California. So I'm looking forward to helping out the editor there. And other than that, I'm just going to try to keep pushing along and tying flies, writing stuff, trying to help kids get into the sport and get off the vices and do what I do.

**Marvin Cash (42:35):**
Yeah, that sounds like a plan. And what's the best place for people to get in touch with you and to keep up with all your adventures?

**Al Quattrocchi (42:45):**
I can be emailed at love2flyfishmedia at gmail.com. And if they want to just check the website I have, I'm always putting up really fun stuff. That's alquattrocchi.com. That's the best way to see where it's going on.

**Marvin Cash (43:04):**
Got it. And you're also on Instagram too, right?

**Al Quattrocchi (43:09):**
I am. Yeah. I think it's Al Quattrocchi. Cool.

**Marvin Cash (43:12):**
Yeah. And I'll drop all those in the show notes. And Al, it was great spending time with you. I really enjoyed your book. And I appreciate you carving out a little bit of time for me.

**Al Quattrocchi (43:24):**
Marvin, it tickles me that you say that you love my book because I appreciate your candid explanations. I love what you do. And I really like your podcast. And I'm just grateful to be here. So thank you so much for having me.

**Marvin Cash (43:40):**
Well, it was my pleasure. And again, super appreciate you making the time for me. Have a great evening.

**Al Quattrocchi (43:46):**
All right. Take care.

**Marvin Cash (43:48):**
Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed that as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Again, a shout out to this episode's sponsor, our friends at Nor-vise, www.nor-vise.com. Head on over there and check out all the great products and their holiday promotions. But remember, they're done on December 14th, so don't delay. Happy holidays, everybody. Thank you, everybody.