Wulff gave new meanings to fly-fishing, sportsman

BUSH PILOT ANGLER: A MEMOIR, by Lee Wulff, Down East Books, Camden, 2000, 228 pages, $24.95.

Although he died at 86 a decade ago, from a heart attack while piloting his Piper Super Cub, Lee Wulff is still the unchallenged supreme being of the fly-fishing world – and with good reason. Flies of his design remain eternally popular; his books about Atlantic salmon and trout set the standard. He is a fly-fishing icon and will doubtless remain so for the foreseeable future.

But few of his countless legions of admirers know him as a pilot of small, light aircraft, a pilot who pioneered fly-in fishing to the remote, wilderness lakes, rivers and streams of Newfoundland and Labrador before those locations showed up on anyone’s fly-fishing itineraries. In his artless, almost naive style, Wulff tells of his early

adventures and the marvelous fishing he encountered in what, in those days, were indeed virgin waters.

If you had any doubts about this man’s unique qualities – the character traits that entitle him to immortality – this affable journal of those flying-fishing days will dispel every one. “I wanted to become the All-American angler,” he wrote of his high school aspirations, “even though I knew such a classification could never be recognized.”

It was that same total commitment that energized his determination to acquire a plane and learn to fly it once he discovered the untapped riches of Newfoundland’s salmon and trout waters – places that could only be reached by a small plane fitted with pontoons.

So he made a deal with the Piper Cub people: He would make a promotional film for them in return for a plane of his own. The reality that Lee Wulff had zero training or experience as a pilot never slowed him for a moment. On the morning of May 2, 1947, he received a phone call: His new Piper Cub awaited him at the Round Lake Seaplane Base near Wulff’s home in upstate New York.

“I had to learn to fly and be ready to take off for Newfoundland in just five weeks,” he wrote with disarming innocence. “There wasn’t a minute to waste.”

There were few men then, and just as few today, who would make that statement as confidently. Flying single-engine, light aircraft over uncharted, northern wilderness, often out of radio contact, is a test of skills, luck and a certain bravado not many would choose, and surely not with Wulff’s unbridled enthusiasm.

But it is precisely that rare and unconditional zest for his flying-fishing life that makes Lee Wulff the exception, that provides the undisputed lifetime credentials for his elevation to icon status among fly-fishers. And it shows through on almost every page of this remarkably illuminating, first-person journal.

Sometimes it’s there quite unintentionally. Ponder this anecdote, which I’m certain Wulff considered an aside. It pops up in one of his many tales of life in the Newfoundland fishing camps he operated, and it concerns one angler’s outrageous salmon fly which, in spite of every criticism, did catch a salmon.

“The man who said he’d eat the fly (if it proved successful) weaseled out,” Wulff wrote. “He paid OK, ten bucks instead. He was, I felt, a poor sport. He could have filed the hook into fine steel dust and chopped the bucktail into little bran-sized chips and eaten it mixed with Cornflakes, covered with sugar and cream. I’m sure I’ve had worse things pass through my stomach.”

Even a casual reader of this guileless journal knows Wulff means precisely what he says. He would have kept his word. He would have eaten that fly. This was a man who always meant what he said. And this is a man with exceptional confidence in himself. It’s that self-reliance, more than anything, that carries him safely through his dozen-plus years of wilderness flying: a remarkable saga, when you remember just how alone he was on so many of those flights.

The saga ended in 1960 when Wulff’s role as producer of outdoor films began taking him around the globe. But, as he tells us, by then the land of his adventures had changed.

“My wild northern world was no longer wild. It was being tamed, never to be the same again. Yet the memories of the Yellow Bird and the era of my life she ushered in will always be with me, for it was a time when that plane and I were one, when the world I flew over seemed to belong to me.”

And, in a sense, it did. The risks he took gave him the right of possession. Of course, there were the wild salmon, great silver shoals of them. Alone on a bright morning, Wulff caught more than 50, on light tackle, on a tiny artificial fly. He released all but one “for the camp.” In addition to his flying and his fishing, Wulff pioneered hook-and-release fishing in times when it was not even a conservation concept. Reading this exuberant book, one wonders how long Lee Wulff would have tolerated the bureaucracy that presides so clumsily over the Atlantic salmon’s current disastrous decline.

Not long, methinks. Not long at all.

John N. Cole founded the Maine Times. He served as that newspaper’s editor from 1968 to 1978. He has written numerous books including “Stripper.”