UNDERCURRENTS: LEIGH PERKINS Tom Sutcliffe pays tribute to his friend Leigh Perkins, the

UNDERCURRENTS LEIGH PERKINS

A TRUE OUTDOORSMAN WHO LOVED FLY FISHING AND HUNTING AND WHO HAD A STRONG CONNECTION WITH SOUTH AFRICA, LEIGH PERKINS, THE PATRIARCH OF ORVIS, PASSED AWAY RECENTLY AT THE AGE OF 93. VIA AN EXCERPT FROM TOM SUTCLIFFE’S SHADOWS ON THE STREAMBED, AND TOM’S FRESH TRIBUTE TO LEIGH, WE PAY OUR RESPECTS TO A LIFE WELL SPENT.

Photos. c/o Orvis

The passing of Leigh Perkins, former President of Orvis; some random, joyful thoughts amid my sadness

What many outdoor fishing and hunting folk maybe don’t get about Orvis is that it is the genuine article. Let me explain. Since 1856 Orvis was, and still is, run by people who actually shoot and fish and totally get what drives us. Leigh Perkins, for example, hunted and fished around 250 days a year all his life into his 90s. And in 1965, when he bought Orvis, he was already a regular customer and wasn’t just looking to buy any business; he wanted a fishing outfit. Orvis was then a quasi-boutique, family-owned company founded in 1856 by Charles F. Orvis and later mainly known for its fly reels (CFOs from the 1890s) and bamboo rods (made by Wes Jordan from the 1940s). Over the next three decades Perkins transformed Orvis into a metaphor for ‘excellence’ and one of the biggest and most respected outdoor sporting and apparel companies in the world. His sons, Dave and ‘Perk’, have followed in their late father’s footsteps, both with a love of the outdoors as firmly embedded in their DNA as the oval tinsel on Goldribbed Hare’s Ears.

In 1975 Orvis was pivotal in developing the graphite fly rod, using unidirectional graphite with individual fibres travelling in the same direction to mimic the fibres in bamboo rods. Graphite was hugely expensive back then and only just emerging from its mantle as a highly classified military secret. Key companies were Shakespeare with their UGLY STIK, Fenwick with their High Modulus Graphite (HMG) and Orvis. Hardy Bros had seen the ‘graphite light’ before all of them, but dropped the ball on the try line, maybe one of the biggest corporate blunders of all time! Other Orvis graphite milestones were the first 2-weight, the Ultra Fine 7’9”, and, in 1988, the first 1-weight at 7’6”. But I think Leigh’s personal love of bamboo (certainly initially), defined Orvis’s approach to how a graphite rod should behave. On this score, Leigh told me the Orvis Far and Fine, a 7’ 9 “ 5-wt, first made in their Vermont factory in 1976, was the finest trout stream casting instrument they ever produced. Its subsequent seismic popularity speaks for itself. Orvis rod engineer Howard Steere, designed it with Leigh. Then in 1989, Tom Peters, author of the best-seller, In Search of Excellence, named Orvis graphite fly rods ‘one of the five best products ever made in the United States’. High praise. I One day, I mentioned to Steere that the boss seemed pretty keen on rod development and he said, “He’s not. He’s passionate, verging on crazy. And he only does perfection.” He then added a telling comment, “Leigh has a better feel for fly rods than anyone I know.” And Leigh was not just the titular president of the company; he was the totally involved owner, the marketing director and the art director. He oversaw every product the company made and he even personally vetted each item that went into their legendary catalogues. He was also behind a bunch of somewhat unusual Orvis products

that, in their subsequent histories, became as influential in people’s lives as the arrival of light bulbs or model Ts. These included the first fly-vest zingers, Gore-Tex rainwear, the world’s first fly-fishing school and the Dog Nest, a padded bed for pooches that took America by storm and said a lot about Leigh’s lifelong attachment to birddogs. On the matter of his dogs, I was in their home when Leigh’s wife, Romi, left on an errand. As soon as she had gone, Leigh opened a sash window in their graciously furnished lounge, gave a shrill two finger whistle, and all his gun dogs bounded through the open window to take up positions on various couches and chairs, nuzzling joyfully into the soft fabrics. Later, when we heard the distant rumble of Romi’s returning car, Leigh smartly opened the window and a cascade of guilty dogs leaped out, Leigh hastily straightening rumpled fabrics. Romi, carrying in a bag of groceries, suddenly stopped in the kitchen and said accusingly, ”Leigh this place smells of dog!” to which he replied, “It could smell of a lot worse.” I just looked the other way.

Bob Mollentze was owner and editor-at-large of the Barkly East Reporter when he arranged a day’s greywing shooting for us over pointers. Leigh dropped the first bird to get up and then, in honour of the event, ate the contents of its crop. Bob’s eyes stretched so wide they seemed ready to leap out of his head. “It’s just a tradition with Leigh,” Romi assured us. His other ‘tradition’ she said was to bring the first wild turkey he shot each hunting season back into their bed. I’m not making that up. Apparently wild turkeys are best shot at first light. On the matter of wild turkeys, I was at a formal dinner once at the Perkins’s home that, despite their unfailing hospitality, I still try to forget. The many guests that evening were seated around an elegantly decked, candle-lit dining room table and Romi, an accomplished hostess and author of Game in Season – The Orvis Cook Book, oversaw things. I helped Leigh prepare the turkey in a Weber outside and, after what seemed scarcely 30 minutes, he stuck a thermometer into the bird that to me seemed to hover around ‘lukewarm’ and certainly oozed purple blood, and announced, “About done”. The meat cut like an unripe pear so, under the cloistered cover of candlelight, I surreptitiously fed my portion, piece by secreted piece, to a grateful gundog that had conveniently chosen to rest his head on my shoe. On top of his ample successes, Leigh was a self-effacing man with a great sense of humour. Once asked by an interviewer what he’d like to be remembered for he replied, “My duck soup recipe.” That may be, but in my life, and in the lives of many anglers I know, Orvis was close to being the marrow in our fishing bones. It’s still a remarkable company, not only for its high quality products, but for its range of them. No single company has ever spanned such a cornucopia of desirable fishing tackle and apparel as Orvis and, in my view, no single person has ever been more influential in meeting the composite needs of outdoor converts than Leigh Perkins. It was to me as if Leigh, through Orvis, redefined the global fly-fishing landscape of the 70s and 80s. I must, though, say again, that he was the genuine article. He really did listen to anglers, read their letters, consulted them, fished widely with them, as if he realised that when a fishing company stops listening to its audience, stops being able to interpret what they are really trying to tell them, their days in business are numbered. Perhaps it’s all best summed up by a remark Leigh once made to me; “No good fly rod was ever designed in a boardroom. All the good ones are figured out by people standing in the water trying like hell to catch a fish.” Great friend. Great family. Great company. Great memories.

Tom Sutcliffe

Orvis President Simon Perkins with his grandfather, former Orvis President, Leigh Perkins

People said Colin Campbell didn’t so much ‘fly’ an aircraft, as ‘wear’ it. I know what they meant. He was that experienced, that confident, that cool, that skilled, to him flying was as straight forward as a stroll down a garden path. At least, that’s how it seemed. To us newly-hatched flyers, Colin Campbell was a living legend. The fact that he enjoyed fishing and shooting as much as flying was a bonus to me. In all the time I flew and fished and hunted with Colin we only had one other narrow shave. And it wasn’t something we could have foreseen, or for that matter, done much about. It began when Leigh and Romi Perkins arrived in Pietermaritzburg for a little sport. Leigh was then the President of the Orvis Company. It was late May and we decided to fly them into Barkly East for some greywing shooting. Romi had twisted her ankle in London on the way over and had her leg in a fiberglass cast. I asked Colin to join us so that the Perkins weren’t exposed to my flying skills alone. He agreed and we rented a powerful Cessna 210 airplane.

In May the weather in Natal is usually mild, but the day we left the skies were almost solid, thick with bruised clouds threatening rain. There was just one big hole, right over the airport. I called Bob Mollentze in Barkly East. He said the weather down his way was perfect. So we loaded the baggage – suitcases, guns and more Orvis fly rods than you’ll see in one place in your lifetime. Leigh and Romi sat behind with Romi’s outstretched fiberglass cast resting on the top of Colin’s seat. They weren’t the slightest worried about flying in a light aircraft, in fact seemed to enjoy the adventure. We climbed through the hole, popping out above a woolly blanket of clouds in bright sunshine at around eight thousand feet. Wispy strands of cloud spiralling up like smoky stalagmites whipped past the cockpit and gave a sense of speed to the flying. On our right the Drakensberg was decked in snow and I heard the Perkin’s cameras clicking. The landscape got more spectacular the closer we edged to the mountains, until eventually we were flying right alongside white peaks, heading south. We had the flight maps out, but we didn’t need them. It’s hard to miss something as obvious as the Drakensberg. At the end of the range, you turn right, pick up the road and fly into town. Naude’s Nek was clear and in the distance we could make out Rhodes and Barkly East. We throttled back, trimmed the plane and watched some of our favourite fly streams inch slowly by, at first thin, silver strands hemmed in tight valleys, later, as we lost altitude, bold rivers in rolling pasture country. Abeam the tar road from Elliot we went through the landing checklist – breaks, under carriage, mixture, pitch, fuel, flaps – dropped the wheels, fed in power, slowly adding more and more flap, until things felt just right as the fence around the golf course rushed up. The use of flaps is simple. They slide out of the wing, increase its area, and add lift at slower speeds. We touched down feather soft on the fairway and let the plane roll off its speed. As we passed by Bob, Ernie and Billy Mollentze who were waiting for us on the first tee, Romi suddenly shouted, “‘Shit, Leigh, we just landed on a f*&^%g golf course!” *

The shooting was good. Bob took us into some high-country with his pointers. The rivers were out with the snow, but the birds were on and the Perkins bagged plenty. We had around three days of shooting before Leigh and Romi had to leave for Bloemfontein to fly on to the Okavango. They donated a couple of fine fly rods and reels to the Mollentzes. The night they left it rained buckets. We went out to the golf course next morning, but the fairways were too spongy to take off. Two days later conditions were much the same despite sunshine, but on day three, the ground felt firm. Romi and Leigh had a flight to catch so they got a lift with a farmer to Bloemfontein. Yes, the president and owner of Orvis, with a local farmer in his bakkie, and they loved it.

UNDERCURRENTS SHADOWS ON THE STREAM BED

AN EXCERPT FROM TOM SUTCLIFFE’S BOOK SHADOWS ON THE STREAM BED, FIRST PUBLISHED BY PLATANNA PRESS IN 2009.