Following his successful memoir, Fish On, Fish Off, and the engaging account of streamside cabin life in the Catskills, A Cast in the Woods, Stephen Sautner’s Every Cast is a superb collection of short angling narratives adapted from his contributions to the New York Times, Anglers Journal, The Drake, The Flyfish Journal and other publications. One gets the sense that Sautner could write brilliantly on any subject, and his lifelong obsession with fishing furnishes him deep and varied experiences from which to draw these colorful vignettes.
Readers of the flyfishing genre will have suffered the irony that deep understanding of the sport can sometimes lead to pedantic, tedious writing. This is not the case with Sautner, an expert fly angler who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
In discussing summer stonefly hatches in upstate New York, he provides the plain-spoken formula for his favorite pattern, the “Hot Mess”:
I tie it on a size 2XL dry fly hook with a fuzzy body of either olive, cream, or yellow rabbit dubbing. Then I lock in a gob of stacked deer hair and pull it back to form a bullet head. But the last step is crucial: I literally crumple the fly in my hands like a scrap of paper you’re about to toss in the garbage. This splays, folds, and kinks the hair-wing making it look like something that splattered on your windshield.
In advising readers on how to fish the Hot Mess, he adds: “And dammit man, cast. A lot. Put the fly here. Then over there.” Sautner’s natural story telling voice and economical language, combined with his own enormous energy and desire to catch fish, propels Every Cast as piscatorial page turner.
Stephen Sautner. Photo: Jim Leedom
Humor is another distinct attribute of Sautner’s writing, beginning here with the epigraphs: “‘It’s all you ever think about!’–Unnamed girlfriend, 1985”; “‘So you’ll pretty much fish for anything’–My son, 2018”; “‘What does the tide have to do with missing your cousin’s wedding?’ –My mom, 1997.” These homey quotations satirize the overly serious inscriptions we too often find in the hallowed halls of angling literature.
The humor of Every Cast rings through some hilarious narratives. While trout fishing on a Pennsylvania spring creek, Sautner meets a life-size plywood clown “wedged in a logjam, with its bright polka-dot trousers and string of deflated balloons.” The clown and author share a productive pool where large brown trout rise to hatching mayflies.
When I landed a particularly nice trout, I would show the clown before I released it. If I missed a good rise, or piled a cast up in an overhanging branch, I would glance across the pool at the clown and chuckle. Week after week, it was always there, happily smiling, eyes shut as if basking in the summer sun.
Every Cast isn’t all fun and games, however. In the “Final Casts” section, Sautner memorializes angling friends, including Eric, who died of leukemia at the age of 38. The author and Eric enjoyed 10 years of friendship and fishing, including an unforgettable morning surfcasting for bluefish off Montauk Point.
He wore no waders or cleats, or even raingear, and positioned himself in a gap between two jetty rocks. There wave after wave pummeled him while he caught bluefish on nearly every cast. He whooped and hollered and looked like Poseidon . . .
Sautner visits his dying friend, and when it’s time to leave, he’s unsure of what to say.
I leaned over and hugged him hard.
“I’ll see you on the jetty,” I whispered.
He looked at me with a knowing smile and said: “I’ll be the big swirl.
Remembered friendships animate many of these stories, and the writer’s deft balance of honesty, detail, tenderness and humor help free the work of any cloying sentimentality. “The Neighborhood Brookie” is a terrific anecdote starring a boyhood stoner friend who convinces the teenage Sautner to ring the doorbell of a house wherein glows an old mount of a huge brook trout. Sautner had become obsessed with the mounted fish seen through the window, but he never dreamed he would learn its provenance.
Now in his early 60s, Sautner also reminisces about casting live eels and plugs to striped bass. He’s no purist. And though he extolls wild trout and practices catch and release, he releases stocked trout into his smoker. “Stocked trout—particularly when they are brined with kosher salt and brown sugar then smoked with applewood—are a downright delicious, guilt-free pleasure.”
Every Cast provides mouthwatering recipes for fish often rejected by conventional culinarians, including American shad, false albacore, Atlantic herring and bluefish. Sautner exemplifies today’s complete angler devoted to conservation, but also happy to keep and eat a legal fish. This complete angler flyfishes and spin fishes in both fresh and salt water; he loves his home streams in New Jersey and New York but also travels the world.
Like many of us, Sautner has witnessed the degradation of precious waterways, but he never abandons hope that habitats and fish may be restored. His respect for the tenacity of some fish may be the greatest source of his and our hope.
In my hand lay a fourteen-inch wild brown trout, an improbable fish born and bred in this improbable stream. How audacious that it lives here. How dare it. New Jersey has thrown everything at this fish: over-development, invasive species, climate change, and still it survives. And now it was glaring at me with its knowing eyes, the caddis hanging from its jaw, as if saying, That’s all you got?
Every Cast has got it all—great stories, beautifully written.