John Gierach, a fly fisherman who was as skilled with a rod and reel as he was with words, producing hundreds of articles and more than 20 books, including “Even Brook Trout Get the Blues” and “Sex, Death and Fly-Fishing,” died on Oct. 3 in Longmont, Colo. He was 77.
His wife, Susan de Castro Gierach, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by cardiac arrest.
Avuncular and white-whiskered, Mr. Gierach celebrated the everyday foibles and frustrations that make up the fly-fishing life, as well as the occasional triumph over an aggravating trout.
In a sport often considered a pastime for the well-to-do, he spoke to fly fishing’s everyman appeal. He was, as one of his book titles suggested, a “trout bum.” The expensive outfitters, private rivers and $700-a-day guides? Not for him. To have a good day in the stream, all he needed was a decent rod, the right fly and a strong cup of coffee.
When he began writing, in the 1970s, the voluminous literature around fly fishing tended to the self-serious, reverent and snobbish. Mr. Gierach brought something different: humor, irony and self-awareness.
“Trout are wonderfully hydrodynamic creatures who can dart and hover in currents in which we humans have trouble just keeping our footing,” he wrote in “Trout Bum” (1986), his third book. “They are torpedo shaped, designed for moving water, and behave like eyewitnesses say U.F.O.s do.”
Although he wrote the occasional technical article or book, most of his work was reflective, experiential and broadly accessible. He was an inveterate storyteller; many of his best articles seem at first to be rangy shaggy-dog tales about a recent fishing trip, only to reveal, upon further examination, a piquant life lesson poking through the fish tales.