The story I’m about to tell goes back to Bob and Judy Kline, who built Nez Perce Ranch on the Nez Perce Fork of the Bitterroot. They both worked at the Berkeley Manufacturing Company in Spirit Lake, Iowa in the mid-1970s, best known for their monofilament fishing lines.
Judy worked in advertising at Berkeley when she met Doug Swisher. The Klines and Doug became fast friends.
Doug’s groundbreaking books, co-authored with Carl Richards, were changing the face of fly fishing. The first book, “Selective Trout,” coined the phrase of its title. Today we talk all the time, especially when the fishing is tough, about trout being selective.
Doug and Carl’s work brought new thinking to fly design. Today we fish emergers and low-profile dries that evolved from flies introduced in that book. Dr. Carl Richards, DDS, was the entomologist. Dental plastics rep Doug Swisher was the fly designer.
It followed that Doug would catch on with a tackle company that could utilize his design sense to develop new products. Berkeley was a natural fit. At Berkeley Doug developed the first affordable lightweight synthetic spool fly reel, innovative lines and leaders and consumables that gave Berkeley a presence in the market.
This was before the fly fishing industry got a boost from the 1980s Silicon Valley explosion. The sport caught on with the nouveau riche tech crowd as something chic to do. Doug positioned Berkeley to ride that wave before it hit.
His flies, including No-Hackle dries, were being produced by Orvis and he was knocking down royalty money from his books and Orvis fly sales. He could run small group clinics, make tackle sales that equipped his student-clients with state-of-the-art gear, guide a little, stay on the show circuit as much as he wanted, and continue to write, develop flies and be a strong voice for conservation.
The Klines, meanwhile, had left Berkeley and invited Doug to visit.
Things moved fast from there. He pulled up stakes, left Berkeley, and headed for the Bitterroot to join his friends.
He developed a mail-order (eventually online) product line featuring the flies of some of the best-known fly tyers of the 20th century. He enjoyed discovering new talent, and gave many tackle developers and fly tyers an initial break into the then-small fly fishing market. The fly tyers included Pennsylvania-based photographers, authors and fly fishing instructors, Barry and Cathy Beck who were just beginning their fly fishing careers.
When he came to the Bitterroot, Doug got to know the work of several local fly tyers, supported them financially and gave them full credit in his catalog, the same boost and national exposure he gave early-on to the Becks.
He abandoned his Water Wagon, a plywood-coated foam pontoon boat, in favor of local part-time inventor Darryl Osborne’s inflatable pontoon single-angler craft. Today there are many single angler float-boats on the market, some pontoons, like Doug’s first one and then Darryl’s, and some donuts. The idea was spawned by Doug and Darryl.
During the 1970s, Doug was one of the first high-profile fly fishers to be a strong advocate for barbless hooks. Catch-and-release fly fishing for wild native trout was just catching on as a management practice then, and the early reviews were mixed.
Doug campaigned against the grain for barbless hook regulations, citing studies he conducted with dental plastics (he was a dental lab factory rep before becoming a full-time fly fisherman) demonstrating that a sharp, barbless hook penetrates deeper, holds better and causes less tissue damage than a barb.
He told me of his studies when we were eating ice cream one hot summer afternoon in 1980 on the porch of my shop, Hat Creek Anglers, in northern California.
California’s Hat Creek became America’s model trout stream for wild trout management. I saw the barbless hook reg go into effect on Hat when Doug and I fished it during the early ‘80s. Fish survival went up, damage from hooking went down, while angler numbers exploded.
Commercial floating was limited on nearby Fall River, and eliminated entirely on the smaller, more vulnerable Hat Creek. We lobbied for those changes, too.
In his later years, Doug was hit by a stroke but never lost his passion for fishing, fly tying, or conservation. He didn’t get out much, then, but he and his wife Sharon continued to be regular and welcome visitors at my shop in Hamilton into the 2020s.
We talked about the old days, people we knew, shared stories. We’d also touch on the overfished state of the West Fork and Montana’s failure, in the face of overwhelming public support, to adopt barbless hook regs to accompany catch-and-release fishing for wild trout.
Doug was into his 90s when he died last year to little recognition or fanfare. A short announcement of his passing was posted in local papers, accompanied by a photo of Doug kissing a big trout before its release.
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