I first met Bernard “Lefty” Kreh at the Coastal Conservation Association’s (CCA) 16th annual Lefty Kreh TieFest back in February. I had heard stories about Lefty, how he had fished with Hemingway and Castro, Tom Brokaw, and even former President Jimmy Carter. So you can imagine my surprise when he took the time to meet me at TieFest, and then invited me to his home to regale me with stories of his amazing career. We talked about everything from his five great-grandkids to the story behind his famous Deceiver. I’ll let Lefty explain the rest.
K: Do you have a favorite place to fish?
L: I’ve fished in over 20 countries. If I’d have been paid by the mile I would’ve made a lot of money. But my favorite really was New Guinea. It’s a wilderness that’s never been touched. I hooked 20 species I’ve never seen before the first time I went to New Guinea. I’ve traveled all over the South Pacific and this is the clearest water; it’s a paradise.
Tell us about the Deceiver.
It used to be that Crisfield had a crab packing plant right at the end of the street, down to the water. Back then all the workers would get the crab meat out and put it in cans, and then at five o’clock they just took snow shovels and shoved off the pier everything they didn’t put in the cans. This was the biggest damn chum line you could ever imagine. Well five o’clock, my friend and I were in my little skiff when they start pushing all that, and of course all the stripers knew that this was the time to eat. So they show up too and if you threw a fly in there it was like throwing a wine bottle in a jail cell. Something was gonna grab it, you know. The only thing was if the fly got fouled somehow, that was it. So on that long drive home I told my friend ‘I’m going to invent a fly that has got a tail on it and has the shape of a fish, but won’t foul and you can make it different sizes and color combinations.’ The wing had always been put up on the front of the hook. I put the wing on the back then I put buck tail back on the collar to make a fish shape but also to keep this thing from coming around. The first ones were made out of just white feather and calf tail and/or buck tail and they just worked perfect. That was sometime in the late 50s.
Have you made any other lure designs?
I made a bug, which I’ve never really advertised much, called Lefty’s Bug. It took 20 years to do that. And when you twitch it, it works every time. Most people think you gotta adorn it with all kinds of stuff but that’s just the opposite of what you want to do. You want it sleek so it casts well.
What do you think about all of the technology that’s hitting the market?
I think a lot of it is not for the best. Years ago, before you had side-scanning and cameras you could lower to the bottom, you had to figure this stuff out for yourself. We had some sort of crude GPSs that could tell you where the wreck was, but it wouldn’t tell you the exact shape. And it wouldn’t tell you where the fish live on the wreck. And you had to spend a lot of time finding that wreck. Now, a guy just motors along with all the electronics and he doesn’t have to learn anything to benefit from that particular thing. And if he can do that, so can a thousand other people. So I think we’re going to overuse or overfish a lot of places that were protected or unknown. The other thing is it takes a lot of skill out of it. For me, one of the things that makes fishing interesting is learning to master the sport. And a whole lot of that anymore is not mastering the sport; it’s just buying a lot of equipment. And I think it’s less pleasurable for the people that are using it.
So how did you develop your skill?
The first thing is I’ve assumed that every person I go with has some things that they could teach me that I don’t know, no matter what the subject is. And I had started developing all these techniques, and I was doing stuff on fly casting with different people; so I started making slideshows. I put this stuff together in talks and clinics. I started going all over the United States, and I got to fish. I got a little bit of money to do it, I got expenses, and most important, I would stay over a day or two and fish with the best fishermen in the area. And so then I got to doing that all over the world. It did more to help me promote my career probably than anything else. You can be the greatest artist in the world, but if you live on an island in the South Pacific and nobody sees your paintings, you ain’t selling nothing!
Tell us about your new DVD, The Complete Cast.
I started teaching fly casting about the middle of the 1950s. By the 1970s I had fished much of the world and learned a lot about fishing in a lot of places besides right in Maryland, and I realized that there is no one way to cast but people will teach you one way. Eventually I realized that there are four principles of fly casting. And they’re all simple. The first one is that you can’t cast a fly line until you move the end of the line. The second thing is the stroke. The third thing is that the line is going to go in the direction the tip stops. If the tip stops going down your lines gonna go down. And finally, I don’t cast any harder at 80 feet than I do at 20. I just lengthen the stroke because it’s the length of the stroke and how fast you start during that stroke that stores energy in the rod to make the cast. Then I teamed up with Ed Jaworowski. We spent three years on this DVD and both of us learned a whole lot from it. For example, the engineers said when your bent rod straightens, the lines are going to go in the direction the rod straightens. And I said, ‘well that ain’t where the fly goes.’ We start talking about it, and we realized that the line near the rod goes straight, but the aftershock I did here (flicking his wrist), running up behind that made a shockwave run down the fly line, turns the fly left. Lots of this stuff that’s in that film is revolutionary, never been done before.
How old were you when you started fly fishing?
It was 1947, so I was 25.
If you were given this DVD when you were 25 do you think you would be as good as you are now?
I think I’d be better. We have lots of photographs solving casting problems: how to throw around a tree, how to skip a fly underneath a limb, all kinds of stuff. There’s nothing that’s ever been done like this. It’s the best thing that I’ve ever done in fly fishing.
by Kaylie Jasinski
Lefty Kreh Video Interviews:
We asked Lefty about some of the famous people he has fished with, and one of the nicest, he told us, was legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus.
Fly fishing vs. bass fishing according to Lefty Kreh.
The most interesting man Lefty ever met: This story involves Alaskan fishing and a man who survived a brutal bear attack against all odds.
Lefty Kreh talks fishing with Hemingway and Castro.