only seen pictures of trout lying still! And so she put it in the creel and went running to her dad to get help. He showed her how to dispatch the fish humanely. It was a memorable day for 12-yearold Joan, in that she learned that “when you are fishing you are feeling the life force of another creature – you feel it through your hand… it is what has kept me in love with fly fishing.”
Learning to cast One of the providers of tackle to Jimmy Salvato’s Rod and Gun Store gave Joan a threepiece Shakespeare bamboo fly rod, which became her equipment. And, as Jimmy Salvato and his three children were members of the Paterson Casting Club, fellow member Bill Taylor, a distance caster, became Joan’s casting mentor. He made her a rod for distance casting, and spliced pieces of silk line together to make a full casting line tailored for Joan’s ability. She now realizes “I cast the way he cast. He gave me my style but never taught it to me. He’d just say ‘do it like this’ – he would show me and I’d try to copy it” and when she compared her style of casting to his, she realized it was one and the same. Joan was a natural in the sport, and went on to become a National Casting Champion from 1943–1960. She was a groundbreaker in the field of women’s distance casting, competing mostly with men. And in 1960, casting against an allmale field, she made a record-breaking cast of 161 feet with a fly-rod – which is still today the farthest cast ever made by a woman in the United States. Her proudest accomplishment, though, was pioneering the set of casting mechanics and “language” of casting: “Everyone wrote about fly fishing, but never how to do it exactly – they never described the parts of your arm and the parts of the cast.” At left, the cover of Joan Wulff’s book titled “Dynamics of Fly Casting.”
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
Lee and Joan Wulff opened their Wulff School of Fly Fishing along the banks of the Beaverkill in Lew Beach in 1979. The couple are pictured here in front of the entrance to their school.
Moving to Sullivan County
In 1967, Joan married legendary fly fisherman Lee Wulff. Ten years later the Wulffs were making plans to open a fishing school on the Battenkill River, on the New York/Vermont border, where Lee owned property. In June of that year, Lee was invited to be the main speaker for a Federation of Fly Fishers gathering in Roscoe. Neither had been to the Catskills in several years, and Joan remembers being overwhelmed by the sense of a fishing community. They saw someone on the street in waders, and found more than five miles of the Beaverkill designated “No Kill.” And after experiencing the clean, aquatic insect-producing waters of the Willowemoc and the East and West branches of the Delaware River and their tributaries, they realized “This is the place.” In addition to the rich history of fly-fishing in the area, including the wealth of literature and presence of the Catskill fly-tiers such as the Darbees and the Dettes, the Wulffs felt right at home in the heart of the fishing world. After visiting and fishing several rivers and streams, they found their perfect home on the banks of the upper Beaverkill in Lew Beach, and opened their school of fly fishing in 1979.
Teaching to cast
In order to communicate with her students in a manner that was concise and easy to understand, Joan pioneered a set of mechanics to creCONTINUED ON PAGE 14 CATSKILL-DELAWARE, SPRING 2015 • 11