“Your Arms Are Gonna Fall Off”

The First Lady of Fly Fishing turns 100 on October 18. A guide who followed her onto the water remembers a friendship that started with a put-down.

“When you get to be my age, your arms are gonna fall off.”

That was the first thing Joan Wulff ever said to Lori-Ann Murphy. Lori-Ann had wanted to meet her for years, and when she spotted Joan at a fly fishing show in Denver, she walked right up.

“I said, ‘Hi, Miss Wulff, I’m Lori-Ann. I’ve always wanted to meet you,'” Lori-Ann told me. “She said, ‘I know who you are. You’re a fishing guide out of Jackson Hole.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ And then she told me my arms were gonna fall off.”

Lori-Ann walked away and cried. She had heard Joan could be curt, and now she knew it firsthand.

A couple of years later, the two of them got stuck at the Salt Lake City airport. Joan turned to her and said, “Let’s go have lunch.”

“And that was really it,” Lori-Ann said.

Joan spent most of her career as the only woman in the room, and she liked it that way. “I had all these men to myself,” she told Lori-Ann more than once. Joan didn’t set out to lead anyone. She still became the first name nearly every woman in fly fishing learned, and the measuring stick for the ones who followed. Lori-Ann was one of them.

The Queen

Lori-Ann has called Joan “the Queen” for decades. Joan hates it.

The two found common ground fast. Joan had been a tap dancer before she was a casting champion, and she credited dance for the coordination distance casting takes. Lori-Ann grew up doing jazz and tap. In her prime, Joan stood 4-foot-11. Lori-Ann stands 6 feet.

“I’m a whole foot taller than her,” she said. “She’s a tiny little thing, but incredibly powerful.”

As their friendship developed, Lori-Ann wanted to audit Joan’s fly fishing school. Joan told her she couldn’t afford to do it just then, but a few years later, she called back with a yes. Lori-Ann flew into New York City, rented a car and showed up late.

“She said, ‘Well, you’re late. You missed lunch,'” Lori-Ann said. “She was always very to-the-point, and I love that about her.” The rest of the week they zipped around in Joan’s red MG and got lost more than once.

Joan later came west to fish an overnight trip on the South Fork of the Snake with Lori-Ann. She was a great guest, with one exception. She refused to drink water so she wouldn’t have to relieve herself in the woods.

“I kept telling her, ‘Joan, you have to drink water,'” Lori-Ann said. “She was all about lemon drops.”

Joan noticed the knots, too. “She said, ‘I see you tie a blood knot. Well, you know I prefer a blood knot too.’ I was like, it’s much sexier than a double surgeon’s knot.”

In the spring, Joan spent time at her place in the Keys. Lori-Ann would be in Islamorada visiting Capt. Rick Ruoff, and she, Joan and Diana Rudolph would get together for Easter parties and long afternoons at Stu Apte’s house. There’s a very famous photo of Joan casting in a formal evening gown down the middle of Highway 1 in the Keys. There was not as much traffic back then, and it made a clear road to cast, not to mention an unforgettable photograph.

The First Lady

Joan Salvato Wulff was born October 18, 1926, in Paterson, New Jersey, where her father, Jimmy, ran the Paterson Rod and Gun Store. She taught herself to cast at 10 by copying him. At 16 she won the first of 17 national casting titles, and in 1951 she beat a field of men for the national Fishermen’s Distance title.

Distance casting was a man’s event, and that was part of the fun. “Then, women didn’t do that, and I just loved it,” she told Garden & Gun.

In 1959 Garcia hired her, and she became the first woman paid as a spokesperson by a tackle company. She married Lee Wulff in 1967, and in 1979 the two of them opened the Wulff School of Fly Fishing on the Beaverkill in New York’s Catskills. Her books and her monthly Fly Rod & Reel column taught a generation how to cast, and she is widely credited as the developer of modern fly-casting mechanics.

Lori-Ann was a nurse when she caught her first steelhead on a fly. By 1989 she was the first woman guide endorsed by Orvis. In 1994 she and the late Christy Ball started Reel Women Fly Fishing Adventures, the first outfitter built around women-only trips. Today she specializes in women-only group trips and runs Reel Belize out of San Pedro. Back when she was first getting started in her guiding career, she read every book Joan wrote.

Did Joan pave the way for Lori-Ann’s own firsts?

“Oh, absolutely,” she said. “She was a reference point for people.”

The power snap

What Lori-Ann took from Joan more than anything was how to cast without force.

“As women, it’s one thing we own, and it’s so wonderful,” she said. “You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to be super coordinated. You just have to relax.”

Her friends called Joan the queen of the power snap. She’d make a crisp stop, then follow through on the forward cast with her thumb. She was all about targets. In class, she had Lori-Ann cast a piece of yarn at the same leaf over and over.

Lori-Ann went on to open for Lefty Kreh, Mel Krieger and Steve and Tim Rajeff on the winter show circuit. At one of the last shows she and Joan worked together, Joan came up to her with a conspiratorial grin. “She said, ‘Let’s go get some free stuff,'” Lori-Ann said. “I still have all this great Icebreaker stuff we got. We scored.”

“I had all these men to myself”

Joan did not always welcome the wave of women who followed her.

“She really had a hard time when the women thing came on,” Lori-Ann said. “She said, ‘I had all these men to myself.’ She said that a lot.”

When the two first met, Lori-Ann thinks Joan was in a little shock to see another woman guide. Joan adjusted quickly. “She’s brilliant, a very smart woman with a sharp wit. She just rolled with it.”

She never minded the attention, either. Lori-Ann remembers an event in Manchester, Vermont, where Nick Lyons shared the stage with Joan and told her she was still the sexiest woman out there. “She really appreciated that.”

The women came anyway, and many of them came because of her. Women are now the fastest-growing group in fly fishing, Lori-Ann said, and dozens of them run their own trips, groups and schools. It still isn’t perfect. On a big-name river in Argentina last April, Lori-Ann got stared down by guides who weren’t used to seeing a woman on the water. She still walks into tackle shops where nobody asks if she needs help.

Her advice to women who feel like the only one on the river is the same one Joan lived by.

“How are you ever gonna learn if you don’t just jump in?” she said. “You can make it anything you want. We block ourselves before we even open the door.”

How to honor Joan at 100

It bothers Lori-Ann that many people new to fly fishing don’t know its history. On a recent Reel Women trip in Belize, her guests confessed they’d spent the morning looking up everyone from her campfire stories the night before.

“I said, ‘That’s great, because you need to know about these people,'” she said. “And Joan will be one of them.”

So how should women in the fishing industry honor Joan at 100? Read her books, Lori-Ann said. Start with Joan Wulff’s Fly-Casting Techniques, or Joan Wulff’s Fly Fishing: Expert Advice from a Woman’s Perspective. You may cast the way she teaches or you may not, but you should know her work. Joan would tell you the same thing herself.

“She’s really funny,” Lori-Ann said. “She’d say, ‘Well, did you read my book? It’s in my book.'”

We can also keep her name alive. Lori-Ann’s guests had to look Joan up, and plenty of women picking up a fly rod this year have never heard of her. Say her name. Tell the next woman you see learning to cast who Joan Wulff was, and keep telling it for as long as we’re on the water.

And we can join Women in Angling. Joan once liked having the men to herself, and she might raise an eyebrow at a whole organization of women anglers. Every one of us is out there in part because she was there first. If you’re not a member yet, her 100th birthday is a fine day to sign up at [WIA link].

Still casting

About 30 years ago, as Joan was about to turn 70, Lori-Ann asked her what she planned to do next.

“She said, ‘I’m gonna start taking care of myself,'” Lori-Ann said. “Now I find myself in her shoes. You think you’re supposed to give up the thing you love as you get older, and that just doesn’t work out. So you keep doing it because you love it. And she did.”

The two haven’t spoken in a couple of years. The last time they talked, Lori-Ann told Joan she loved her.

“She knows she’s loved,” Lori-Ann said. “What a wonderful thing that is.”

Lori-Ann is now about the age Joan was when they first met. She still spends her days on the water in Belize, teaching women to cast. Her arms haven’t fallen off yet.

Happy 100th birthday, Joan.