Eighty-seven and still fishing, John Sweeney of Middleville, New York, has lead the kind of fishing life most of us only dream about.
We’ve got some stories of incredible anglers in this most recent issue of The Road to Water, and we want to share them with as many of you as possible. We’d love to hear from you if you’ve got a story to tell, we think you’d love the whole issue, but in the interim we’ll bring you one story at a time to add some color and inspiration to your scrolling experience.
“You forget everything and just get into it,” John Sweeney says of the sport that he’s spent his life mastering. “You see so many beautiful places, and see the best in human nature. When I was growing up, I never in my life dreamed that I would see the places I’ve gotten to see. I’ve been so lucky. I know some people where nothing seems to go right for them and although some things in my life haven’t gone right, by and large, everything has fallen into place.”
Sweeney, 87, talks about things “falling into place,” while sitting at his living room table surrounded by photos of permit, tarpon, gigantic Montana brown trout, and enormous rainbow trout. He has fished Australia, Peru, Chile, Alaska, New Zealand, Argentina, Idaho, Utah and 22 years in Montana. It is an overwhelming amount of evidence of one of the most impressive fishing lives I’ve ever witnessed proof of. I’ve been lucky to visit with long-time, legendary Outdoor Life Fishing Editor Jerry Gibbs and iconic Field & Stream Fishing Editor John Merwin and Sweeney’s assembly of photos and his stories from around the globe put him right in that class of angler: The type we all dream of one day becoming.
But one look around the table should give you your first clue that things didn’t, just by happenstance, fall into place, for Sweeney, as he so humbly put it. As he opens a fly box he shows me compartments each of which contain several iterations of a given pattern, all of which he tied, for hours on end, as a professional tier for Hornbeck’s Sport Shop in famous Deposit, New York.
Sweeney, originally from Gloversville, N.Y., was a social studies teacher at Herkimer High School for 34 years until he retired in 1993. He then started John’s Guide Service, where he would guide clients on a selection of rivers and streams in the Upstate New York area, including the famous AuSable, the Delaware and his beloved West Canada.
Let’s reiterate that: A man who spent a career teaching high school students history, something that is challenging to say the least, started a guide service when he retired. Any type of guiding is a job where you’re overworked, underpaid and largely unappreciated by clients who almost always expect you to find them fish willing to eat, because… well, they paid for it right?
And not only did he start a guide service when he retired, he was a wading guide who would travel as far as two hours away to guide you on any given day, provided you called and gave him notice.
And while he’d travel as far as the Delaware or the AuSable to guide, he’s always considered the West Canada his home water.
You’ll cross a bridge when you’re driving to Sweeny’s Middleville home, where he resides in a well-kept, welcoming house full of more photos, fishing gear and even fish-inspired artwork, than you’d think might fit in the place looking at it from the outside in, that goes over the West Canada, a stream that taught John much of what he knows about fly fishing today.
“It was my first fly fishing stream and know every inch of it from Trenton Falls to Kast Bridge,” he says. Sweeney remembers a West Canada that few anglers today do, and talks about the fishing there in the 50s and 60s like something from a dream.
“I could catch a limit, 10 trout there, in 15 minutes with the right fly,” he recalls. Sometimes you’d catch 40 trout in a single evening.” Saying that Sweeney ‘wrote the book,’ on the West Canada isn’t even that much of an exaggeration. Pick up a copy of Trophy Trout Streams of the Northeast, flip to the West Canada Creek chapter, and take a guess who wrote it. You got it: John Sweeney.
He has his wife, Dawn, to thank for his first fly rod, a 7.5-foot, 5-weight Shakespeare Wonder Rod she bought him in 1957. And while Dawn Sweeney is not an angler, per se, John says that she’s been very supportive of his life spent on the water. Oh, and that first setup that came with a rod, reel, line and two flies? It cost five dollars, Sweeney remembers.
He thinks that first fiberglass rod and marvels at how innovations have changed our equipment. “You’d have to wait longer for the rod to load,” he says, and adds that fiberglass was nowhere near as forgiving as today’s graphite rods. Adjustable drag on the reels? That was unheard of at the time. Your hand was the adjustable drag.
The technological advances and the plethora of information that we have access to today have made it, “rather easy,” to become a fly fisherman now,” Sweeney says, and we don’t doubt him for a second.
And while Sweeney fished both conventionally and with fly gear for a short time after picking up the long rod, he’s fished almost exclusively with fly gear since 1958.
Now, in case you thought that a man who had the energy and passion to start a guiding service after retiring from teaching took a minute off in the winter, we’ll stop you right there. Up until about two years ago, when age-related pain finally caught up with him, he tied as many as 300 dozen flies per year for shops like the West Canada Sports Shop (since closed) and the Hornbeck Sports Shop in Deposit, an outfitter he supplied with as many as 300 dozen flies per year for 30 years. The man has tied and sold more than 70,000 flies, tying for as many as eight hours per day on some winter afternoons, as he recalls. That type of concentration, self-discipline and attention to detail almost ensures that you will have a life where “everything falls into place.”
The type of precise fascination with the mastery of a craft that made Sweeney’s flies so desirable in shops like Hornbeck’s also helped him target and land some incredible specimens in his years of traveling the world in pursuit of fish..
No trout fisherman that finds the time and wherewithal to travel can resist the pull of Montana, and Sweeney was no exception. In 1993 he made his first trip to the iconic Western trout paradise and he’d return for nearly two decades thereafter.
“Our first trip was to the Ruby Springs Lodge on the Ruby River near Carson City,” Sweeney remembers. He remembers mornings where it wasn’t uncommon to catch twenty 14-to-16-inch trout on dry flies. “That was fun,” the understated Sweeney says, glancing back at photos he’s collected on his dining room table to go through.
“After that we fished the Green River in Utah, and then we went for three years to the South fork of the Snake River in Idaho,” he says.
But he’d find his favorite trout water five thousand miles away. “Argentina has better fishing than anyone would expect,” he says of his favorite destination. “It’s the best I have found anywhere in the world.”
If he had one trip left to take, that’s absolutely where he’d return, he says without hesitation. Sweeney fished Lake Strobel and the Barrancoso River on his visits to the country, bodies of water where anglers can boast, regularly, about multiple 20-pound rainbow trout in a single trip.
The trout were put in the river system in 1994 with the aim of aquaculture. That’s right, the goal was fish farming. The trout predictably grew enormous on a plentiful food supply and it wasn’t long until anglers all over the world were discovering this paradise. The 65-acre Lake Strobel is loaded with scuds, and the trout that were dropped in (McCloud River rainbows) had only the Barrancoso River, the lake’s only outflow, to spawn in.
Without any type of predation or much competition for forage, the transplanted McCloud River rainbows grew to sizes that regularly exceeded 20 pounds, and once fishermen took notice, they began coming from all over the world to fish it. The ride in, which has been described as “the ride from Hell,” still takes upwards of five hours, and Sweeney remembers bouncing around the Jeep until his back was sore but he didn’t talk about it in the kind of way that made you think for a second it wasn’t worth it when you arrived.
He talked about double-digit rainbow trout cruising right at your feet near the lake’s shore, a site that’s hard for many of us to even imagine. “The lake is 160 feet deep but these fish will be cruising right by you, and it can be unnerving,” he said.
“I caught a 16-pound rainbow on a size-12 Prince Nymph,” he says, almost still in disbelief.
The rainbows in the river would run downstream once hooked, weaving around rocks and structure to break anglers off. Leaving the river each day was the hardest part for Sweeney, who says he couldn’t wait to get out the next morning on every one of his visits.
Back stateside, Sweeney’s son Sean picked the perfect place to follow in his father’s footsteps as a teacher: Key West. What loving father wouldn’t feel obligated to visit his son there, especially during tarpon season?
Tarpon would become Sweeney’s favorite Florida fish, because of the acrobatics they’ve become so famous for. “They’d run 100 yards and jump before you even knew where they were,” he says.
A close second when it comes to North American fish for Sweeney would be the False Albacore in Harkers Island, North Carolina that he chased for years during their fall run. He remembers catching more than 40 fish to 18 pounds in two days of on the water, and although he hasn’t been for the last five years, he talked about the run-and-gun fall fishing like a seasoned saltwater fisherman.
Of all the fish he’s caught, released and photographed, only a few mounts grace the walls of the Sweeney residence, but one is guaranteed to catch the eye of any angler. For three years Sweeney would return to Canada to fish with Wester’s Outfitters in Alberta, and a brook trout of five pounds that he landed on a dry is hanging on the wall right behind you if you find yourself as a guest in his home.
A five-pound brook trout takes a moment to register as ‘real,’ in an angler’s mind because, like a 20-pound mouse or a 3-pound elephant, its size just doesn’t equate with our understanding of its nature, at least at first. Once you take a moment to appreciate it, all the brook trout that you’ve caught, and were until now so proud of and grateful for, will seem just a little bit smaller by comparison.
Sweeney says that as soon as school let out in three separate years, 1963, 73 and 93, respectively, like a kid free for the summer, he’d head up to Canada. He talks about the green drake hatch with the same kid-out-of school excitement, and remembers fishing from six through dark to “Four, five-pound brook trout that were just boiling on the surface…”
And even when he returned in the fall, he didn’t leave his passion at the door when he entered the classroom. He orchestrated and ran a fly-fishing club with ten or twelve students every year, teaching them to tie flies and how to cast. Each school year would culminate with a trip to the Delaware.
Thinking about Sweeney’s life, it’s clear that although he might have started teaching students in 1961, and his walk-and-wade guide service wasn’t officially launched until 1993, it’s likely the man has been helping people of all ages, in some capacity, for almost his entire existence. Whether it was a student in Herkimer looking to get a grasp on some era of history to pass a Regents exam, a teenager looking to get into fly-fishing for the first time who happened to have a teacher who would start a club to that end, or a client on the West Canada looking for a memorable morning on the water, Sweeney has spent much of his life helping others.
Sitting across from a man who has responded to e-mailed questions with hand-written notes, and has already signed a copy of the book “Trophy Trout Streams of the Northeast,” (he wrote the West Canada Chapter) it’s evident that Sweeney goes out of his way to help anyone he can. If there’s a secret to finding a way to fish so many beautiful places in the world and land fish that most of us have only dreamt of, maybe it’s as simple as that.
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Catch A Cure 