S2, Ep 89: An Evening with Henry Cowen

Marvin Cash (00:04-01:15): Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. On this episode, I'm joined by Henry Cowen. Henry's best known for helping to popularize chasing freshwater stripers on the fly.

Join us as Henry shares his experiences growing up and fishing in New York City, his striper learning curve when he moved to the South, and how the gear guys have influenced his fly angling. I think you're really going to enjoy this interview.

But before we move on to the interview, just a couple of housekeeping items. If you like the podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review in the podcatcher of your choice. It would really help us out. And if you could tell a friend, that would be even better.

And also a shout out to this episode's sponsor. This episode's brought to you by our friends at the Bristol Bay Defense Fund. With the decision on the Pebble Mine's most critical federal permit application due any day now, 2020 is an important turning point in this long-running saga. To help this diverse coalition continue its efforts to protect one of the world's largest wild salmon runs and all of its economic, cultural, and ecological benefits, please visit www.bristolbaydefensefund.com and donate today.

Now, on to our interview. Well, Henry, welcome to The Articulate Fly.

Henry Cowen (01:16-01:20): Good evening, Marvin. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Happy to be here.

Marvin Cash (01:20-01:29): Yeah, I'm really looking forward to our conversation. And we have a tradition on The Articulate Fly. I always ask all of our guests to share their earliest fishing memory.

Henry Cowen (01:31-02:50): Okay. Who's your guest tonight? Oh, me. Yeah, you. All right. Me, my earliest fishing memory. All right. Now remember, I'm a child of the 70s, so I don't know how far back I can really remember.

But my earliest memories of fishing was positively fishing with my dad. And we were either fishing off of the Coney Island beaches of the steeplechase pier that went out into the Atlantic for either tinker mackerel and whiting or we were sitting in a rowboat somewhere in either Jamaica Bay or out in Rockaway Inlet fishing for fluke. And I'm guessing I was between four and six years old for the most part.

And I don't know which came first, but that's like the chicken and the egg because we did them both. When we had the time, we would rent a rowboat and go fluke fishing up in New York. And if we didn't have a ton of time, we'd take a five minute ride into Coney Island where I grew up and just, with little rods and jig for mackerel and stuff. So that's my earliest memories of fishing that I remember.

Marvin Cash (02:50-02:53): Very neat. When did you get pulled to the dark side of fly fishing?

Henry Cowen (02:55-04:20): So my dad used to fly fish a little bit on a lake up in New York State, not far from the Delaware River in Roscoe, the trout streams of Roscoe, New York, which is considered, as you know, the birthplace of North American fly fishing. We had a place up there in the summer when I was 10 years old. And so my dad used to fly fish on White Lake and Connie Angle Lake for largemouth bass. So I used to watch him do it.

And I didn't take it up. I had no interest in it until I moved up to Connecticut. And when I moved up to Stamford, Connecticut in 1988, it was probably a year or two later, in 89 or 90 when I was sitting on a beach one morning standing in a pair of waders. And as first light approached, I walked into the water with a bucktail jig and a spinning rod.

And three young guys came walking down the beach with fly rods and got in the water, not within 100 feet of me. And we just had the time of our lives catching schooly striped bass up to probably 25 inches. And as much as I enjoyed bucktail fishing, when I saw these guys giggling in the rods, these 9-foot rods doubled over, I just looked and said that was the epiphany for me. That's when I decided I got to try this. This looks like way too much fun.

Marvin Cash (04:21-04:30): Yeah. Very neat. And so that was what probably in your late twenties and so you'd been fishing gear for a pretty good while. What was that transition like for you?

Henry Cowen (04:31-09:20): It was really easy. A lot of guys that start fly fishing, they may be doing trout fishing. Most people are either trout fishing or brim fishing, I think for them either in a brim pond or in a stream fishing for trout, or maybe a few guys might be fishing for bass in their local lakes or ponds as well.

But for me, I grew up in New York City, which is a saltwater playground. So for me, transitioning from gear to the fly side, from conventional gear for the fly side just made way too much sense. My wheels were spinning 100 miles an hour because I would go to the fly shop and look at the flies that they were selling at the time. And this is, again, let's call it 1990. The Clouser Minnow was two or three years old. And there were deceivers and Dahlberg divers, and there were a lot of standard flies for stripers back then.

But the flies that I was used to fishing or the lures, I should say, that I was used to fishing, the colors were magnificent. The different color stories of a herring lure versus a bunker lure versus a mullet lure. They all had different color patterns. And I wanted that's where I wanted to get my flies to emulate those lures that made sense where you were taking a bunker or a herring and it had to have a little bit of pink in it or a herring pattern had a lighter blue versus, say, a mullet pattern, which may have had a dark green or a dark blue top on it.

So to me, it was all about how could I get those lure colors into my flies? And the only guys at the time that I knew of that were really doing that were the guys down in Seaside Park in New Jersey, where the Atlantic Saltwater Flyrodders were. That was Popovics and that whole crew back in the early 90s. Those were the guys that were really, to me, the most creative and the most inventive of both fly and color.

And I never did get to go down to those club meetings because it was just a three-hour drive from Connecticut. So I never did a two-and-a-half, three-hour drive. I just never did make that trip. But years later, having learned about it, these guys were at the forefront of this stuff.

And so for me, it was a real easy transition. The hard transition was how do I get this thing out 40 or 50 feet? Because when I first started casting, it was basically a 20-foot cast. I didn't take a casting lesson. It was like, let's just go out there and wing it. This can't be that difficult.

And, Marvin, the greatest story I've got is, so when I lived in Connecticut, I lived in a place called Stamford, Connecticut, I lived in an area called Japan Point. And literally Japan Point was a peninsula. And I was three blocks behind me to the left of me or to the right of me from salt water. And when you came out of my house, you made a right turn and walked three blocks. I had a beach in front of me.

And I would go down there in the early part of June when the sand eels were coming in. And I would, before I'd go to work every morning and take the train into Manhattan, I would be in my truck sitting there at first light. And all of a sudden, I would do this around Memorial Day. And sometime within the next 10 days, that beach would light up with stripers popping the surface.

And the day that it started, that next morning, I would go out there with the fly rod. And if I tell you, I'll never forget the first day I went out there. And I was standing in water up to my thighs. And I had stripers all around me for as far as the eye could see. And I couldn't reach the fish. The fish were 30 feet away and I couldn't reach the fish because I just started fly fishing and it was a 20-foot cast. And I just said, this isn't going to work.

So the next day I got up and went back out with my spinning rod and clocked them. And then I found that there was a place where that connected Stamford and Darien called Holly Pond. And it was the Noroton River ran into Long Island Sound. And there was a little muscle strewn jetty that went across that attached Darien and Stamford and I would get up there on the outgoing tide and I would make my 20, 25-foot cast and because of the water flowing out from the Noroton River on the outgoing tide I could just wiggle line out and that's how I actually caught my first stripers on fly rod.

Marvin Cash (09:20-09:29): That's pretty neat and it sounds like your interest in fly tying was almost about the same time you got into the sport kind of given that you were trying to bring your conventional gear to your fly fishing.

Henry Cowen (09:30-10:49): Well it was within a year I started fly tying. I bought flies for that first year and then I remember Fly Tyer magazine came out and on the cover of the magazine was a fly called a Pop Lips and when I saw that fly it was the magic moment and I just said, oh my God, this thing is going to, this thing is going to be retrieved for a fly rodder, like a Red Fin or a Bomber Long A, I said this, for lack of a better term for you guys that don't know gear as much, a Rapala, it was going to be like a swimmer with a lip on it.

And that's what set it off for me. When I saw that, I called Popovics up, got his phone number, called him up and said, how can I buy a half a dozen of these Pop Lips? And he's like, I don't sell my flies, but there's a guy up in Connecticut named Eric Peterson, who's an unbelievable fly tyer. And I said, I know Eric, he goes, he'll tie them for, he'll do custom flies for you. And Eric tied up a few of these Pop Lips and the colors that I wanted. And that was it. That was the magic moment for me that just said, I got to start tying flies.

Marvin Cash (10:49-11:18): Yeah. And I think the amazing thing too, is, and I've seen Bob tie that fly, I think it was actually up at the fly tying symposium last year, but we're spoiled now, right? We've got every possible kind of easy cure adhesive and goo, but to go back and look at literally going to a hardware store and trying to figure out what kind of sealants and epoxies would let you work with the materials you had available. I mean, it was a lot of work, not just to figure out the action, but just to make the materials work on a fly.

Henry Cowen (11:18-12:18): It's amazing how far the fly tying industry has come in 30 short years. It seems like a lifetime, but my gosh, today with the likes of the things like that Jonny King is tying or Blane Chocklett that is tying along with Popovics and Charlie Bisharat out on the West Coast, these guys are just a cut above it's just incredible to watch these guys sit and come up with this stuff.

So yeah, we've come a long way. And once again, guys are, the big thing in fly tying today is everybody's blending colors, blending this, blending that. Well, that's exactly what the gear guys have been doing for 30 years has been blending colors for all lures. So it's had a huge influence on the saltwater side.

Marvin Cash (12:19-12:24): Yeah, absolutely. So you kind of get that itch. And do you remember the first vice you bought and the first fly you tied on it?

Henry Cowen (12:24-13:03): I do. My first vice was just a regular old Regal, just a plain old Regal. And I'm sure it was a Clouser Minnow because that's the American Express. You don't leave home without that fly. So I'm sure it was a chartreuse and white or an olive and white Clouser. I'm sure I can't remember which color it was, but I'm sure that it had this gigantic white bulked up head and looked absolutely horrible. And guess what? The stripers in Connecticut did not care. They ate it. They absolutely ate it.

Marvin Cash (13:03-13:22): Yeah, there you go. And to fast forward just a little bit, so you've got quite a few patterns now that are carried by Umpqua. Do you remember the first pattern you sold professionally and how long it took you to kind of go from tying that first Clouser to getting something? I think, I guess, originally they were picked up by Orvis, but how long did that take?

Henry Cowen (13:22-15:59): Right. Yeah. So my first patterns were picked up. I think I started tying around 91. And my first pattern was picked up with Orvis probably around 96, 97. And what they took, the first fly they took from me was my Magnum Baitfish, which at the time was tied with Icelandic sheep.

And the beauty of tying a fly with Icelandic sheep is that I was tying this big 10-inch long pattern that emulated a bunker or an Atlantic herring. And when you lifted it out, most of the flies back then, most, I will say, did not shed water. Everybody was tying these gigantic bunker flies with a lot of feathers and bucktail and everything else. And it was like casting half a chicken.

And my whole thing was, how can I throw a big fly on an 8-weight instead of, I'm not the size, Popovics and Charlie Bisharat. These are big, these are guys that can play middle linebacker in their day. Me, I was a punter. I wasn't going to be able to throw the rod like these guys can. So my whole thing was, was tying this fly that when you lifted it out of the water would slim down to being a pencil. And then the minute it hit the water, it blew back up.

And so that was the first fly that Orvis took for me, the Magnum Baitfish. That fly has since, in its day, had three striped bass world record, line-class records to its credit. So it was a really good fly.

And then over time, eventually what ended up happening was I kept begging Orvis to take my Coyote fly, which was a really good fly. If you don't know what a coyote is, it's basically a bucktail jig. I'm sorry. It's basically a Roadrunner. And a Roadrunner is a bucktail jig with a spinner blade on the front and when I was gear fishing that was my absolute number one lure that I could out fish guys to the left of me throwing bucktails and to the right of me throwing bucktails I could out fish them three or four to one with that little horse head with a little spinner blade hanging off the front it was called a Roadrunner made by Blakemore.

And so I started tying when I got into the fly side I said, I need a Roadrunner for fly fishing, and that's when I came up with the Coyote. And the reason it's called the Coyote, Marvin, is because, as you know in the cartoon, what follows the Roadrunner?

Marvin Cash (16:00-16:00): Yep, the coyote.

Henry Cowen (16:01-18:17): The coyote, so that's how it got its name. And so that fly came out. Orvis absolutely refused to put that fly in a catalog because the spinner blade made it a very nontraditional fly. Back in the mid-90s, the question was, is it a fly or is it a lure? And that came up, and there was a whole debate on that, on when a fly is a fly and when it's not.

And so I had a very good friend up in Connecticut that I started fishing. I should say a good acquaintance that became a friend over the years that I used to fish with from now and then on the beaches of Connecticut, Lou Tabory. And Lou said to me, Henry, you need to send that fly to the IGFA and let them tell you if you catch the world record, will they verify and give you a world record?

And I said, that's an interesting idea. So I sent it to them. I had to send them five flies. And I sent them five and they sent it out to their fly fishing gurus that made up the board. And that was basically Stu Apte, Billy Pate, Mark Sosin, Lefty Kreh, and Chico Fernandez. And sure enough, four out of five said yes.

And Orvis still wouldn't like the fly even with that letter, but Umpqua would. And so I kind of moved companies and went from Umpqua because they were taking the Coyote. And that fly was taken back by Umpqua back in the early 2000s. And it's been with them almost 20 years. So it's been a fairly successful fly.

The interesting thing about fly design and these companies that we're designing flies for is Bruce Olson, who used to run sales for Umpqua, said to me, if your pattern lasts 10 years, you've got a classic. Anything that goes beyond 10 years, consider yourself lucky. Most flies don't last 10 years. So I've been blessed that I've got a number of flies now that are going on 15, 17 years with them. And so I've been really fortunate and I've got a couple with the Orvis still in there that they're still running, that they must be tying themselves or from, I don't know what they're doing, but those flies have been in their catalog for the better part of 18, 20 years as well. So I've been really fortunate, Marvin.

Marvin Cash (18:18-18:39): Yeah, really neat. And you've kind of touched on this a little bit earlier on in the interview, that when you were designing flies, you were really trying to replicate conventional lures. Is that kind of been the main driver behind your tying? Or do you also kind of have specific fishing problems that you're trying to solve when you're doing fly design?

Henry Cowen (18:40-22:10): That's a great question. It's probably a little of both. There's no question that when something new comes out that is hot as a fire. I still love going out in my boat. And when I'm not with a customer, when I'm not guiding, I love throwing a bait caster or spinning rod in my boat. I'm not a fly only kind of guy. And I can just fish harder and faster with a conventional rod in my hand so I can figure out the pattern.

And when something new comes out, like, for instance, a new color, one of the hot colors in the last 10, 12 years on the gear side is a color called Sexy Shad. You didn't see that anywhere on the fly side, but guys were having just tremendous success on area lakes with Sexy Shad, which is nothing more than gray over white with a chartreuse yellow line going down the middle of the lure. And so now all of a sudden we're tying flies up in Sexy Shad and they're extremely successful. It's a great color combination. It's not just chartreuse only anymore. There's a lot of really good color combinations.

And so staying on the cutting edge of what's going on on the gear side, I think is extremely helpful to the fly side. And then obviously there are times where you just have to solve a problem. One of the problems we had years ago when I was fishing Lanier was when the fish are on these itty-bitty threadfin shad. Let's just call them young of the year threadfin. Between an inch and an inch and a half long, the stripers, we'll see them up on top just absolutely devouring thousands of schools, a thousand school of baitfish packed together tightly. It looks like something you'd see on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic.

And you'll get into that prey and throw a fly and they don't eat. And you're sitting there going, you got to be kidding me. How can that be? I'm throwing a two and a half inch long, three inch long Clouser. How are you not eating this? Or a small deceiver. And they would need it.

And now all of a sudden, now you've got to go back to the drawing board and figure out, OK, how am I going to solve this problem? And by the way, if you were to ask Lefty back in the day when he was around, and I had asked him this many years ago, and I said, Lefty, what's the hardest fish you've ever had a hard time trying to get to eat a fly? And Lefty said to me, he didn't even hesitate. he said, striped bass when they're on itty bitty baits, he goes, they are next to impossible to fool.

And so that's one of the things that I learned. And that's how we came up with the Something Else fly, that kind of solved the problem. And the Something Else fly is nothing more than a polar fiber Clouser, tied with a little bit of a throat of hot pink flora fiber. And it's the combination of using something so supple that it can breathe and move even when it's free falling along with that little bit of flash in there that that's the ticket so that that didn't come from the from the lure side that just came from solving a problem so in answer your question i think i think you take a little from both sides you know what i mean you solve a problem and and and you learn what you you keep you you keep in touch with what's going on on the gear side at least i do yeah no it makes a lot of sense are

Marvin Cash (22:10-22:15): Are you working on any new patterns now that you're prototyping when you're not fishing with clients?

Henry Cowen (22:16-22:26): I'm letting Blane prototype all his flies. I'm a big fan of Chocklett and his flies. I'm going to let him prototype. I'm just going to let him figure it out, send me the flies, and I'll fish them.

Marvin Cash (22:27-22:27): There you go.

Henry Cowen (22:27-23:51): And not to go off topic too much, but when Blane developed his Game Changer fly, that all came, that whole idea of his of getting the fish, the fish spines and getting it to wiggle. That was one part of the of figuring out the problem that he wanted to do. And the other part was his original ones all had lips on them to get them to wiggle left and right. And at the time he was playing with those and sending me prototypes to fish and try and whatnot. Blane and I are extremely close.

And I said, Blane, there's a lure out there called a Seville Magic Swimmer. Are you familiar with it? And he was like, no, not really. And I said, let me send you one. So I sent him one and it's an articulated lure with no lip and it wiggles. It's got that serpentine wiggle. And I said, Blane, you've got to figure out how to make this fly that you're doing work like that lure without the lip.

And son of a gun, if anybody could do it, he figured it out and deserves all the credit in the world. But again, there's what I consider the hottest fly in the United States today, bar none, how that transcends back to the gear side and what he was able to figure out. It's just amazing to me.

Marvin Cash (23:51-24:11): Yeah, that's really neat. And as we kind of start to talk a little bit more about stripers before we talk about how you crack the code on freshwater stripers, when you move to the South, just to give us a little bit of context, can you kind of give us a brief overview of kind of the season and the life of a saltwater striper versus that of a freshwater striper?

Henry Cowen (24:12-27:27): Yeah. I mean, they're not particularly different than the stripers all, whether you're a saltwater striper or a freshwater striper, you all run up the rivers to spawn. most of the time. If there's a river system involved, they're going to run up the river and spawn. So the stripers in saltwater, most of the population come from either the Hudson River group or they come from the Chesapeake Bay group. And the Chesapeake Bay certainly has the largest population of saltwater stripers.

And those fish run up into the bay and up into the into the rivers spawn and then they make their their their migration north as you know after April and May or March and April when they're up there spawning come April May they start making their migration north go up the east coast and run all the way up to probably as far as Maine and probably a little further and then they summer over in the northeast up in that New England area

And when the water temps start cooling off, they leave the estuaries and the bays of Maine and Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Connecticut and come back down and pass Montauk Point and go back south and end up either back up the Hudson River or or the Chesapeake Bay. So that's what the stripers basically do. And their life cycle is they can probably live upwards of 20 years. Those fish can go 60, 70 pounds. It's possible that there's an 80 out there on occasion, maybe. I don't know. I think there's a new world record of 80 pounds. I'm not 100% sure the past couple of years. But they easily can get to 50, 60 pounds if they're not harvested. And they can grow. They can live long enough to grow to that weight.

And so that's the big thing with saltwater. In freshwater, our fish generally only live anywhere from 10 to maybe 14 years on average. And that just has to do a lot with water quality and things of that nature. And they just don't live quite as long. So naturally, they don't grow quite as big on the high end.

The freshwater striper. What's interesting about them is that because they're landlocked, the ones that are in lake systems enclosed, those fish, because they've got a bait source 24-7, they grow grotesquely wide. They get these gigantic, enormous bellies. And just to give you idea. An average fish in the salt, a 30 inch fish in the salt is 10 pounds for a striped bass. A 30 inch fish on a lake is probably 13, 14, 12 to 14. So they're just heavier at that length, but they just not going to live as long. Maybe too many Big Macs and French fries. They're not working out as much. They don't have current that may have a lot to do with it. It may be we'll have to ask Dr. Fauci and find out what's going on with that.

Marvin Cash (27:27-27:49): Yeah, there you go. And so you spend kind of the first half or so of your life up in up in the New York area and you migrate down to closer to my neck of the woods in the late nineties. And you start fishing for stripers on Lake Lanier. And I think it took you about six months to crack the code on them. Can you share what that process was like? And if there was some light bulb or aha moment while you were trying to piece it all together?

Henry Cowen (27:50-31:28): Yeah. So naturally you do what you know. I've been striper fishing from the mid seventies to the mid nineties in the Northeast. And so I know exactly what needs to be done. I need to go fish structure because that's where stripers in Maryland, they call them rockfish and they call them rockfish because they're always around structure, whether that's a jetty or rock piles or pilings or sandbars or rips or points or anywhere there's structure, lighthouses, that's where stripers hang out in salt.

So coming down here, I said, well, it's the same kind of fish. It's a striped bass. So I would come down here and the first, as you know, six months, I would go into a cove and on the if one side of the cove going in had all the structure, whether it was docks and pylons and rocks and blowdowns. And the right side of the cove was just a red clay bank. I went down that left side and fished it all the way to the back and back out. And if I didn't do anything, I ran to the next cove and fished the left, whatever side had all the structure.

And the epiphany was I wasn't catching anything. And all of a sudden, one day I saw birds flying into a cove and some gulls, And I went back in there and sure enough, the stripers were on the bank with the red clay, just tearing it up. And I caught my first fish on Lanier. And when I got done, I was very happy because I had caught a fish. But what I had noticed more than anything was, why were the fish on the red clay and not going down with the docks and the pilings and the blowdowns? And but they weren't.

And so that was the epiphany. The epiphany was the threadfin shad liked the red clay better than they liked the structure. And so the red clay was the ticket. That was the light bulb moment for me.

I was also very, very fortunate back around 1999 or 2000, right around there. I met, so at the time I was 40 years old and I met a guy who was 57 and his name was Tom McHugh. and he was a just a good old southern boy from south carolina who lived in gainesville georgia been fishing one year for 30 years as a gear guy and it was i i met him on the lake on the first day that he ever came out with a fly rod and you know marvin you know the type the elbow is sticking way out he looks like he's casting like the statue of liberty and and you know with these gigantic open loops and the fly isn't going anywhere

And I just at the end of the morning I drove my boat up to him and introduced myself and told him I was happy to see him out with a fly rod because at the time it was just me and one other guy. And he was the third one I'd ever seen with a fly rod out there. And I said, I can probably help you with your casting. And I said, by the way, that fly you use, and it was a I want to say it was a chartreuse Woolly Bugger. I said, it might work, but you can do better than that.

So I said, I'm happy to help you out if you're interested. And he just looked at me and he said, if you'll help me with my fly fishing with the right line, because I thought he was fishing a floating line, which was not going to work. He basically said, I'll give you my 30 years of Lake Lanier knowledge. I'll trade you for your knowledge on how to fly fish.

And that formed a friendship over the next 15, 16 years until he passed away. And that really sped up the learning curve. And he, by the way, remember, Here's another guy who was a gear guy.

Marvin Cash (31:30-31:50): Yeah, absolutely. And so are there, is there maybe obviously being nice to other anglers is a great lesson, but what would you kind of maybe say the average angler should take away from your experience learning to fish for stripers on Lake Lanier that they could apply to their everyday fishing to help them become better?

Henry Cowen (31:51-36:15): Well, paying attention is really important. Learning, seeing what's around your environment. If we're specifically talking stripers versus other species, whether it's bass or anything, paying attention to things in detail.

I would say the most important things you can do is, number one, make a log. A fishing log is invaluable. The days that you're successful are as important as the days you're not successful. And you'll be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together by having a log and going, boy, isn't it interesting?

Here's a perfect example. I know that when I am going to striper fish on my lake, and by the way, we have a fantastic world-class spotted bass fishery, Kentucky Spot Fishery here on Lanier. And it works the same with them. I know for a fact that on the upside of the full moon, somewhere between five and eight days prior to the full moon, up until the day before the full moon, if I had to pick when to go fishing, those are the days you want to fish.

You need to pay, and by creating a log and going back and looking month after month after month after month and going back and going, geez, I've had three of my best days this month are always on the front side on the upside of the full moon. Well, hello, there's that should be an epiphany to you right there. And the same thing works on the downside of the moon up to three days. And the same thing on the new moon, three days before, three days after. You don't want to fish the day of the moon, but before and after. And if you keep a great log and keep records, you will learn those things.

Pay attention to what other boats are doing. Don't crowd them. But you're going out on a lake and you're striper fishing and you see seven or eight center consoles in an area. Obviously, that tells you there's probably fish over there. So you don't want to crowd them, but go over there and see what's going on. It's not always about fishing. A lot of what can be learned is through observation. So I think that that's a big part of it.

The other thing is trying to develop a network can be really, really helpful with other anglers that you can share information with that you trust, that aren't going to blab it to five other guys and try and figure things out, because it's certainly much easier to find fish on a lake when there's three of us going in three different directions than we're all going to the same place. So developing a good network can be very, very helpful. And talking with other folks that are willing to share information is a good, positive thing. So those are the things that I think are really important in paying attention.

Here's something else. Like when I when I lived in New York, one of the things I used to do, I caught my biggest striped bass, Marvin, fishing under the Marine Parkway Bridge in that that connected Brooklyn to Breezy Point Queens. There was a just a suspension bridge that was two lanes in each direction that had traffic lights, not traffic lights, had lights on the bridge so that cars could see where they were driving, just regular lights on the bridge. Those lights would create shadows on the water from the bridge. We'd walk under the girders on the bridge and sight cast to stripers going in and out of the shadows from those lights that cast the shadows under the bridge. And we would catch stripers up to 50 pounds on gear.

When I came down here, somebody had made mention about dock light fishing. And once again, I just went back to my roots going, the fish like lights on the lake. And for guys that don't know, dock light fishing is some of the easiest fishing that there is for stripers on any impoundment in the United States. You put a dock light up and you create an aquarium for striped bass. So especially if you can use an above water light or what's really great are those underwater green lights made by Hydra Glow or Green Monster. Those guys are, they're fantastic.

But once again, you could see how you can learn so much from where the salt and transition it down here. There are things that work and then there are things that don't work. And so it's just a matter of keeping good records and paying attention. That's going to really help you the most.

Marvin Cash (36:16-36:45): Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And we've touched on the impact of conventional angling on fly angling, But it's really more than you spent the first half of your fishing career only fishing gear. You have pretty deep roots into the conventional world. I know you regularly spend time with O'Neill Williams and Shaw Grigsby and other folks. What is it that you're kind of harvesting from them that you're bringing to your fly fishing?

Henry Cowen (36:47-40:49): Yeah, that's a good question. And let's just, I'll say this. I mean, you take guys like Shaw's at the top of the game in the BASS or now whatever. Now it's Major League Fishing that they've moved on to the next, whether it's FLW, BASS, or now it's Major League Fishing. The top anglers in the world that fish the United States tournaments, and Shaw is certainly right up there with one of them. Same with Lefty on the fly side. He's one of the great anglers of all times, but not only a great ambassador, but an unbelievable angler.

Well, at the end of the day, you know as well as me that when you were a little kid and you were playing basketball at 10 years old and you were playing with the kids that were 12 and 13, you were getting your butt kicked. But it made you better. You became better quicker by playing with the talent. And so for me, having been fortunate enough to meet and fish with some of these guys, certainly what that does is you can just learn and pick up little things, just watching them fish, watching them retrieve the fly.

I'll tell you something, Shaw Grigsby is a gear guy and one of the great world-class gear bass anglers, here in the country and around the world, And yet this guy loves tarpon fishing with a fly rod like nobody else's business. I think if you asked him if he had one more day on the planet, what would he do? He would take a fly and probably fish the anywhere from Homosassa to Tampa. And he'd be out there throwing a fly for tarpon.

So everybody loves to trickle over to one side or the other. I am just not a believer when somebody says, oh, look at him, he's fishing the dark side. He's on the gear side. And, hey, I caught a lot of fish with the fly rod because of the gear. I mean, one of the big bites that we have on our lake is called the bomber bite. And if you don't know what a bomber is, a Bomber Long A is a six and a half inch long lure with a lip on it, a plastic lure like a jerk bait with a lip on it. And you throw that bait up on points and sandy beaches in October in the dark.

And if I were to go and do that with a fly rod, it would take me forever to figure out which points they're on. I might have to hit eight points before I find a fish. But what I'll do is I'll take that bomber and take the hooks off and just throw that bomber on a conventional rod. And the minute I go to the first two, three points, I don't catch anything. Go to the fourth point and I get my string tug. I now reel it in. I put my bomber away and I pick up the fly rod. And I use my conventional gear sort of as my bird dog to find where I'm going to catch those fish on fly.

So I think that there's a lot of good reasons why the two kind of meld together just beautifully, both the fly and the gear side. But the funny thing is, is that all these luminaries that I've had the fortunate chance of meeting, like Lefty and like Shaw Grigsby and O'Neill and all these guys all do both. They do fly, they do gear. Jose Wejebe, he did fly, he did gear. Flip Pallot, he did fly, he did gear. So you don't want to just kind of pickle yourself into a corner.

I think it's good to do both. And I think you'll be a more successful angler that much quicker if you'll adapt to what the environment tells you you need to do. And when I'm throwing gear, I can hit more points a lot quicker than I can with throwing a fly, even though I'd love to catch them on a fly. But I just know I can, if I go out fly fishing on the bomber bite, I can probably hit six or seven points in three hours with a fly rod. And I can hit 25 points with a with a bait caster. So you tell me who's going to be more successful.

Marvin Cash (40:50-41:06): Yeah. It's interesting. because as you're saying that, it makes me think about and then there are times when the fly rod is a better tool, like fishing lily pads for largemouth bass, where you don't have to bring the lure all the way back to the boat. You just can kind of pick the lily pads apart. So it's kind of interesting, right? It's kind of about bringing the best tool for the job.

Henry Cowen (41:08-41:32): Yeah. And it's solving the problem. It almost goes back in a in a different way. You talked about, well, are you designing a fly to make, to emulate the salt stuff that you're seeing is eventual or you're doing it to solve a problem well we're fishing on we're picking the we're picking the right gear to solve that problem that time you know on a lily pad there's no question i'd be fishing a fly first you know absolutely positively yeah really interesting and you know and not only do you guide for for stripers and spotted bass but you also you know guide for carp and you know so you move down to to north georgia

Marvin Cash (41:32-41:44): in the late 90s. How did you get into the guide game?

Henry Cowen (41:44-44:15): What happened was, again, when I moved down here, there was one guy who was guiding for fly fishing down here on the lake. And he was using a floating line, and all he fished was a white Lefty's Deceiver. And that's all he knew. And he had some success. And I came down, and I hired him just to see what he was doing. And he took me into the back of a cove up shallow and he didn't know a thing about intermediate lines and sinking lines or anything like that or different flies.

And so I knew with my experience on the Northeast saltwater fishing that I could fish all levels of the water column where he wasn't aware of that. And I started having some really quick success after that first six months, I really started putting things together fairly quickly. By the year 2000, 2001, it was all coming together beautifully. It took three years, but it was really all coming together.

And Gary Merriman, who owns the Fishhawk in Atlanta, kept saying, I need you to take some of my, I have a half a dozen customers. I'd love for you to take out striper fishing on Lanier, guide them. And I said, Gary, I'm in the rag business, man. I sell baby clothes. I'm not looking to be a guide. And so I didn't do it. And a month later, he calls me up and he starts pestering me. And this went on for four or five months. And I just said, uncle. And I said, all right, I'll take out six customers, but no more than six.

So I took out six guys and I actually really liked it. I found out that I actually, the funny thing, Marvin, is if you came fishing in my boat with me as a buddy, I never get in the front of the boat. My whoever's ever my guest fishes the front of the boat. And that's just the way I am. And the front of the boat, as you know, always has the advantage because you get the first shot. But that's just the way it is. And that's the way I fish. So no matter who gets in my boat, you're in the front.

And guiding is kind of the same way. I never realized that I could have so much fun with somebody, not fishing, but getting somebody to catch a fish and the pleasure out of it and helping create a lifetime memory. And so eventually Gary went from six to the next year to 10, the next year to 12, the next year to 20. And so if anybody's out there is pissed at me being a guy, they need to call Gary Merriman up and blame him.

Marvin Cash (44:15-44:27): Yeah, there you go. Fair enough. And one question I always ask all of our guests that are guides is to kind of share what they think the biggest misconception folks have about the life of a guide.

Henry Cowen (44:30-45:52): The biggest misconception. There's a couple. But I'd say one of the bigger ones is that your sports, your anglers, most of them don't cast the way you would expect them to cast. You may be an advanced caster as a guide, and most of your clients are going to be anywhere from novice to intermediate. And so you've got to be patient. And, man, you have got to coach them up.

Nobody, you've heard all the stories about guys going down to the keys and getting yelled at and screamed at by the best of them. And my feeling is when you're hiring me and spending money to go out on the boat, I need to be encouraging, not discouraging. So you've got to be patient. Expect that your customer isn't going to be the best caster.

And the other thing I would say is, as a guide, if you think it's a wonderful lifestyle, but you better have a spouse on the other end that makes a lot of money because it's hard to make a living as a guide. It really is. You better have a sugar mama on the other side of this. That's bringing in the bucks because it is, you lose a lot of days to weather and cancellations and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so, but I think those are the two biggest misnomers about about guiding.

Marvin Cash (45:53-46:22): Yeah. Got it. And I've listened to some of your earlier interviews and you've talked a lot about how secretive fishermen were when you were coming up, I think you were talking about how literally people would go out on the jetties when it was dark and come back before the sun came up. So no one would know what they were doing. And we know that's all changed. And I know one of your big, think something that's really important to you is sharing information. Why do you think that changed and why do you think that sharing information is so important to the sport?

Henry Cowen (46:23-49:28): That is, I'm always troubled by that question. Because on one hand, when you're a guide and you start sharing your waters, you're giving up your information, which means you're making your fishery harder. And my carp fishing is the perfect example that nobody was really carp fishing down on the flats of the Chattahoochee where I fished down in Roswell. and I started guiding and talking about it more, letting people know that there's a great fishery down there. And since then, my fish have gotten harder. So there's no question it's a double-edged sword.

However, this is a we're on this planet and sharing it with a lot of people. And if it's something that you love to pieces, my wife is really big on karma and she's gotten me to believe in karma. And so I am a huge believer in paying it forward. And that's now, that's how I've been living my life since I moved down here is that I am just trying to pay it forward. And and I'm not going to kid you by paying it forward. It makes me feel good that I know that there's so many people out there that can enjoy what I love doing and now they're loving it.

But on the on the downside, it's made what I love doing that much more challenging because pressure doesn't leads to tougher fishing. And so that's that's the hard part of that and if you want to be a guide or you want to be a writer or you want to be a an author or whatever it is, you're going to be giving up stuff that you're making your fishing harder.

And so I have a lot of respect for the guide. There's a lot of these young guides now that are coming up. I was speaking to one of them tonight, matter of fact, I was on the phone with Daniel Bowman, who's a really wonderful young guide up in North Georgia. And he's fishing some waters that he is keeping really, really quiet and doing really, really well with. And I totally respect why he doesn't want to announce that because especially when you're fishing a river, a lake can take a little more pressure. A river can't really take a lot of pressure.

And so this is this is the toughest part about sharing. You can share, but you can only share so much. At some point, you have to kind of say, OK, I'm going to tell you what you can do up here in North Georgia, but I'm not going to tell you exactly where you can do it. But go figure it out. You pay your dues. And that that, quite frankly, may be enough but nobody's going to say, Oh, by the way, I was on Lanier and I was in Cocktail Cove in the back on the left and man, the fish came up because the next day there's going to be 30 boats in there. So that's what the internet has brought forth today and that's what's really changed probably over the last 20 years, more than anything. Everything used to be a whole lot more secretive back then.

Marvin Cash (49:29-50:16): Yeah. And I think too, I think on the angler end of it, that anglers need to really appreciate the investment that people like you or Blane and other guides have put in to learn the fisheries and learn your craft. And to your point, there's about, and to your point, there's being generous, but just because you go for a guide day doesn't mean that you're supposed to open and tell all of your secrets either. So I think the individual anglers need to be a little bit more appreciative and understanding, the time that you guys have put in to figure things out. Because I sometimes have to tell people, it's like, if someone came into your office and said, here's 600 bucks, tell me exactly how to do your job, you'd never do it.

Henry Cowen (50:18-52:06): That's right. Well, the other thing is, especially in our sport that we love, Marvin, you go to these shows and I'm not telling you anything you don't know. One of the big, this has been going on for years. The big problem is you look at two thirds of the guys and the gals that are in, that are in the door. And most of them are over 50, 55 years old and a good bit of them are over 60.

And so we are in the industry, we are just absolutely craving young folks to come in, young men and young women of all types, all ethnicities. We just want more young people involved in the sport. And so I'm a 60 plus year old guy. if I'm not going to share it with the young guys and get them involved and help them along so that they can love it and appreciate it, what is it going to end with? It's going to end when the last 60 year old passes. We've got to keep paying it forward and passing it on. If you love it, then I think you just have an obligation to pay it forward. It's just that simple.

By the way, that's why I, so when you talk about the young guys in the sport, like we were talking beforehand off the air, guys like Landon Mayer and George Daniel and Blane Chocklett. These are the young guys that are doing it. So I am so proud of those guys because they are the superstars in the sport right now and they are doing it right. They respect what they've learned from the from the older generation, but they're doing it right. And they're just paving the way, the way it should be paved. And so I really feel like our sport is going to be left in great hands to the next generation.

Marvin Cash (52:06-52:33): Yeah, no, I know all three of those guys and they're just not only are they good anglers, they're just really great people. You know, and kind of a related point is kind of interesting. I'm a big believer that teachers learn as much from their students, or let me see if I can say it a little bit better. I guess I believe that teachers learn as much from their students as they teach them. And I was kind of curious what you've learned from some of the folks that you've mentored and paid it forward to.

Henry Cowen (52:35-54:29): Well, listen, anybody who thinks they know it all is sorely mistaken. Okay. Sorely mistaken. I mean, I'm always learning stuff, especially I'll tell you the one fishery that absolutely, I love learning more about is the carp fishery and what these fish are doing and why they're eating and why they're not eating.

And there was a young guy named Brandon who lived in Georgia. He's now working up for Orvis and in Manchester. And Brandon came to me, he started fishing carp probably about three years ago. And we were talking and whatnot. And I was, and he was telling me about how, when he'd see the fish on the surface and they were sunning themselves, all of a sudden they'd go down and I was just figuring, okay, well, they're now moving along. He would throw that fly. And when they'd go down, that's when he would catch them.

Now, I never heard of that before. He said, Henry, I've tried it once. I've tried it 30 times. So there's always guys that are coming up that are paying and I think some of these young guys, I mean, listen, nothing against us old guys, but these young guys are just some of the best hot shots going right now. And when I tell you these guys can talk the talk and walk the walk, the guys like Jake Darling up at Unicoi Outfitters. There's a whole bunch in this Daniel Bowman. These are young guys that are barely 30 years old. Maybe they're in their mid to late 20s. And these guys are paying attention, figuring it out. And you'd be crazy not to want to go on a boat and figure out what you hadn't figured out that they did and just add that to your quiver because that may put an extra bite or two in the boat. So why wouldn't you? And so to think that we all know it all and have learned it all, that's just a farce. That's a misnomer. You can always learn. You can always learn.

Marvin Cash (54:30-54:51): Yeah, and it's interesting, too, kind of talking about the fly fishing shows. One of the neat things to do is to have a chance to grab beers with guys like that. And what I always find really interesting is how if you take three different guides and ask them how they solved one particular problem, they've got probably at least three different ways that they figured out how to solve it.

Henry Cowen (54:52-55:09): Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. The biggest problem with that is that these young guys can drink you under the table. So that's the biggest problem is sitting down with these guys to have a beer. The next day you wake up and you overslept because you never realized you could drink that much.

Marvin Cash (55:10-55:26): Well, it's important to learn things every day. That's true. So so you've already done a tremendous amount in your angling career, Henry. What else do you want to accomplish as an angler, a writer and a guide before you hang up the rods?

Henry Cowen (55:29-59:30): What do I want to accomplish? I don't mean to push a hot button on on a political scene. But one of the things that's going on today about everybody being more inclusive, whether it's Hispanics, African-Americans. I don't care if you're transgender. I don't care. I would love to just see our fisheries become more inclusive and we see what's going on politically out there with all the stuff going on. And I just think that we can all show a little bit more, more love and bringing people into something that is such a great sport.

I spent a lot of years when I used to write for American Angler and I wrote quite a few years for Fly Tyer. I was on their masthead as well. One of the things I did was trying to find articles to write about young fly tyers that nobody heard of that are doing really cool things. And so I got to I got to write about Jonny King and I got to write about David Nelson. And you can find these diamonds in the rough if you'll just open your eyes up and not worry about what's in it for you. But what's good for the sport is really good for you. And I think I'm starting to live more of my life that way.

And so I am going to, just to give you a for instance, if I go to a boat ramp and I'm putting my boat in the water and I see a young person or a person of color, I'm going to go up to that person and make them feel welcome and just say, hey, how you doing? Good for you. Glad you're going. Oh, you're going carping today. That's great. Yeah, I hope we do well. And just I think that's a big part of where my head's at these days. And that's important to me.

One of the things that I'm very involved in a lot of different fundraisers and I'm using whatever reach I have to help where we can raise funds. One of the things we're just in the middle of getting started with, David, is there's a there's an outfit out there called Nomadic Waters. And what they do is they are an Amazon peacock bass outfitter. And they just canceled their entire 2020 season this fall. And the guy who runs the operation, there's two owners, basically. And the one who's the U.S. owner here lives not far from me here in Georgia. And he's going to be just fine. But his whole village of where everybody comes from, those 20 people that work for his organization, whether they're guides or chefs or they clean the boats and whatever they do, they're just part of his organization. These people are going to have no money for the 2020 season.

So we here are a lot of us here in Georgia and we have we've reached out to people in as far out as North Carolina, out in Colorado, Landon Mayer. And Jean Bruun is a guide out in Jackson Hole. We're all putting a fundraiser together over the next few weeks. That's going to be coming up sometime probably end of July and August where we're going to be giving away, raffling off some just fantastic equipment and trips that you can take for very little money. And it's all tax deductible. And we're hoping we can raise $15,000, $20,000 that can go a long way for this village in the Amazon. And so things like that, that's what really gets me going these days. If you, if, if you must know, that's, it's not about what my next fly is going to be, or, you know, yeah, I'm coming out with a book that I'm very excited about. We can talk about, but that, that's not what turns me on, helping others and making others feel inclusive. That's, that's where my head's at.

Marvin Cash (59:30-59:58): Yeah, and it's interesting, too, because the situation in the Amazon, and I've had similar conversations I can remember with Peter Stitcher at Ascent Fly Fishing, because he really kind of tries to take that same holistic approach with his tyers in Kenya. What we don't understand in the United States is that those jobs, they don't just support the person doing them. They're supporting usually an extended family of people that rely on that person for their livelihood.

Henry Cowen (59:59-01:00:27): Marvin, you couldn't have said that any better. And it's the old that takes a village. And so our village here in the United States is going to try and help nomadic waters village in the Amazon. And I just think the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I think about being able to help like that. It just it makes me feel so good. So if I can do more stuff like that, I'm fulfilled. I'm a lucky man.

Marvin Cash (01:00:28-01:00:42): Yeah, well, I think too, I think it's just, it's so easy to focus on the negative. But I think we all have a tremendous ability to do an incredible amount of good in the world if we would just kind of slow down and think about it a little bit.

Henry Cowen (01:00:44-01:00:46): Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you 100%.

Marvin Cash (01:00:48-01:00:49): So, yeah, yeah.

Henry Cowen (01:00:49-01:01:08): So that's what I got cooking. That's what I see for the future. I'm still, if I had, listen, I'm not going to kid you. My time's going to come one day when I'm going to have to hang my rods up. But if I had one more day to fish, I'm just telling you right now, it would be on a bonefish flat. That's where I would be.

Marvin Cash (01:01:08-01:01:40): Well, there you go. And you're reluctant to talk about your book, but I'm going to tease it out of you. We've been eagerly awaiting the book, and I know that Lefty is the one that made you commit to write it. And you've done a lot to popularize Chasing Stripers in Freshwater. And like so many things, I know that your release date has been disrupted due to COVID. And so do you want to kind of update our listeners on kind of the update on the release date and if there's an opportunity to preorder the book?

Henry Cowen (01:01:41-01:03:24): Yeah, the release date is going to be in 21 now. They haven't said whether it's going to be March, April, May, but Simon & Schuster is going to be distributing it. It's through Skyhorse. It'll be on Amazon. So I'm sure you'll be able to go on to Amazon and preorder it. But it's I was very, like you had said, I was very fortunate. Lefty came to me with this project and hooked me up with Skyhorse.

And so it's going to be a book about freshwater striper fishing anywhere in the United States, whether you're stripers or hybrids and from coast to coast. And we touched upon all of it. And I've got some just the top guns in the freshwater striper business have all lent their knowledge to the book, as well as some of the top, believe it or not, I hate to circle back some of the top gear guides that have helped. And I'll say their fingerprints are all over the book, even though it's fly fishing. And even though this is a fly fishing book, if you were not a fly fisherman and just a gear guy, this this book will help you locate, find and catch stripers. So I'm pretty proud of it.

It took it took a little bit longer. It was supposed to be released a year ago, but when Lefty got sick and passed away, I went into a funk as if it was my second father. And so that that just threw me back a whole year. And then I just I grieved and rebounded and wrote it. And I'm very fortunate that I've had some, like I said, some great people, Dan Blanton and especially Dave Whitlock, very involved in the project. And so I'm looking forward to it. It'll be next year. It'll probably be sometime around spring of 21.

Marvin Cash (01:03:25-01:03:33): Well, very, very neat. And you mentioned your fundraiser for the Amazon. Are there any other kind of Henry Cowen news and announcements you want to share with our listeners?

Henry Cowen (01:03:35-01:04:20): Any other news or announcements? All guide trips have been canceled through this summer due to COVID because I'm too scared to get in a boat with anybody. And we're booking trips for the fall, but we're going to pray that something, this thing goes away. And if not, we'll be canceling it. You can change my name from Henry Cowen to Captain Cancellation. I'll be canceling those trips in the future if COVID doesn't go away. I'm just not going to risk it. And it's a shame, it bothers me because I really miss being on the back of the boat with somebody, whether I'm pulling them for carp or taking them for stripers. But this is what we have to do. But no other announcements. Everything else is pretty much standard.

Marvin Cash (01:04:21-01:04:32): Well, there you go. Well, listen, why don't you let folks know where they can find you on the Internet and follow your adventures on social media when you do get back on the water so maybe they can get on your guide calendar for the fall of 2020.

Henry Cowen (01:04:33-01:05:44): Okay, well, they can reach out to me at 678-513-1934. That's the home number where they can reach me. You can go to www.henrycowen, C-O-W-E-N, flyfishing.com, and check us out. We have videos on that we're trying to, when we've got folks in the boat, that we're constantly updating where we can. And on Instagram and on Facebook, it's just Henry Cowen. nothing nothing special and and that that's and actually i i will tell you if there's something you want to laugh at and and marvin i don't know if you've seen the video but if you go on to vimeo onto my vimeo page of henry cowan and look for the bananas are lucky video we uh my a very dear friend of mine keegan corkern and i we uh we squashed the theory of bananas being unlucky in a boat and it's all on the video and you can watch it. And I'm not going to say any more other than you need to watch the two and a half minute video of why bananas can actually be very lucky for fishermen.

Marvin Cash (01:05:44-01:05:51): Yeah. You know what? I'll drop a link to that in the show notes along with all of your other contact details. And Henry, I appreciate you spending some time with me this evening. I really appreciate it.

Henry Cowen (01:05:52-01:06:07): Well, Marvin, I'm absolutely delighted that I've been waiting five years to get on your podcast. I'm glad you finally got down to the bottom of the barrel and invited me on. So thank you so much, buddy.

Marvin Cash (01:06:07-01:06:33): My pleasure. Have a great evening. You too, pal. Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Again, if you like the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on the podcatcher of your choice and tell a friend. It really helps us out. And again, a shout out to this episode's sponsor, our friends at the Bristol Bay Defense Fund. Go to www.bristolbaydefensefund.com and donate today. Tight lines, everybody.