Gerry Engel, creator of Bench Buddys talks timber, Danger Cove, Alaska and his small business built on salvaged wood
For a few good hours, I sat down with Gerry Engel and a tape recorder. Gerry owns Bench Buddys, a small Washington state company that turns reclaimed western woods into clever tools for fly anglers and fly tyers. It seemed I needed to preserve the words and designs of a man who loved his nearly forty years in some Alaskan woods, living and working amongst tall trees and cold creeks. He took up tying flies and working with wood and as luck would have it for us, joined both passions into a website and mail order business. In retirement, Gerry salvages Pacific coast timber like Western red and yellow cedar and Douglas fir, then draws out forms to hold flies, tools, bobbins or whatever an angler might need to secure. We sat together at his vice so I could learn more about how dark woods and clear waters helped him and his small company grow.
Gerry Engel begins a new trout pattern
“Everything I make is geared toward the fly fisherman and fly tyer, I make things to make their pursuit more enjoyable and a little more organized. I make tool caddies, display stands for finished flies, and the occasional cabinet, which will hold all of your crap.” Gerry has a casual cadence, rooted in his Chicago lineage, reflective of his time alone planting and tending trees in old growth forests. His sentences are rounded at the ends, with bits of inflection sprinkled on words deserving more consideration, all seasoned with a smokey laugh that starts small and grows contagiously. As an ardent tyer, he knows why anglers need his practical, natural art. Gerry Engel’s beautiful fly tying tools are unique and personal.
“I went up to Alaska in January of 1972, six months after college,” where he earned a degree in Forestry from Southern Illinois University. When asked why a kid from Chicago would move to the far north and west, he said, “I started out on Anchorage. I just heard the call of the wild.” Best answer ever. “I worked every facet of forest management you could imagine, from forest genetics to timber sale management and layout to administration. I’ve been a log buyer for saw mills, been in the log export market, and, well, all kinds of things, in both the governmental and private side of things.”
Gerry is the sole family angler. “Dad liked to panfish up in Wisconsin. It’s an extension of beer drinking, is what it is.” With a rough sandpaper snicker he added, “Which was his primary hobby.” With no fishermen or women in his house, he had to learn the basics of fishing and the art of fly casting on his own. He began buying flies to attract King and Coho salmon and rainbow trout and the number of patterns grew. “As you know, you can accumulate. It doesn’t take much, it starts out as a simple hobby with a shoebox full of roadkill and the next thing you know you’re building an addition on the house.”
Fly tying requires time and space
“I lived in Ketchikan, Petersburg, Haynes, Juneau. In southeast Alaska we were cutting Sitka spruce, Western hemlock, Western red cedar and Alaska yellow cedar.” The first place he fished was Deep Creek on the Kenai Peninsula, for Kings. He delivered his “creeks” as “cricks”, with no sense of pretention or affectation. Most stories began with a “Hmmm,” most ended with a slightly high pitched laugh which approached a childish chortle.
“If money was the reason then I would not be the same.” Guy Clark
We talked about a flat tool caddy he built for my mother in law. “Yeah, yeah. It came out of a railroad tie that came off the beach from a sunken ship in 1914.” He stopped there, looking at me through a pleasant absense of words, because history matters. His flat tool caddies are not massed produced in an overseas sweatshop to save money.
“If money was the reason then I would not be the same.” Guy Clark.
Each piece is unique. Some have live edges, some cracks and imperfections polished, with signs of rough lives and slow aging. He seems to love the wood, what’s inside it, where it’s been. That’s the beauty of Gerry’s craft. “And then it went into a house that had a roof blown off in a hurricane,” he continued, chuckling at the historical happenstance of a tree now perched in his sister’s hutch, 3000 miles from that beach.
A tool caddy for sale on the Bench Buddys website
In 1999 or 2000, he turned to fly fishing after purchasing a end-of-season 50% discounted rod/reel/line combo. And so it began. In 2004 he started tying flies because it made financial sense. He started with books, “Bobbin in one hand, flipping pages with the other. It was painful,” he said, without looking up from his vice. Gerry took a class in Bemidji, Minnesota, where he lived, “when the timber industry went bust in Alaska and I was still used to eating regularly.” In 2008, Gerry returned to Alaska, and stayed until he retired in 2014.
Building wood accessories was a natural progression from forestry and fishing. “The cedars are special wood in Southeast Alaska and coastal British Columbia. They sustained the native populations for ten thousand years.” The first piece he built was a cabinet. “Red and yellow cedar and of course, you got the color contrast which I thought was really great and went together well and from the scraps, I made a few, you know, I glued up the scraps back together, drilled a few holes in them to hold my tools and my bobbins,” he said. So the dye was cast, to create helpful creations with true respect for the wood itself. “Right now, I’m one hundred percent reclaimed wood. If I went to a lumber yard, I’d be in their Dumpster, I wouldn’t be in their office.”
Bench Buddys has a full line of accessories to help tyers of all levels
As we spoke, I saw a patient man in suspenders over a Cubs World Series t-shirt under a faded green visor, peering through dollar store clip-on cheaters above his every day readers. I suspected that if he had all the money in the world, he would look the same. Through my questions, his thin fingers wove slight lines around a miniscule trout hook secured in a dull metal vise. Gerry rolled thread from a bobbin over and over again, securing a secret layering of hackle and wings. He moved methodically while still chatting, too briskly for freshmen tyers to keep pace with a master. His fingers bore evidence of unfortunate tablesaw mistakes. He related those emergency room visits with slow reflection, remorse and a chuckle. One slip required sixteen stitches to stop his bleeding. “It’s kind of funky looking now. But it works.”
Gerry ties fresh and salt water patterns, without limiting his work to fish he can find where he lives in Washington. He joined the Clark-Skamania Flyfishers to help improve his tying and meet other people with similar passions and in some cases, obsessions. He loves the challenge of something new, like the Alaska Popsicle. He lays claim to a pattern he has yet to name but he knows it catches trout. “It’s like a swimming nymph,” he described, on a graceful hook he easily draws and when finished, looks like a small caterpillar.
Gerry had more to say about the tree, not his flat tool caddy, because trees have long stories worth telling. “The worst maritime disaster in Oregon history (the Francis H. Leggett). Yup, I bought a three foot chunk of 7”x9”, took it down to the Guild woodshop (The Guild of Oregon Woodworkers) and broke it down on a big band saw, on an inch and a half blade, big mother fucker, then got busy with my forstner bits.” He told me about years of finding parts and pieces, bits of pretty salvage from rotting Alaskan trawlers marooned on hard stone beaches, some gleaming with tight rows of turn of the century copper nails designed to protect and wood-boring toredo shipworms patiently devouring their hulls.
Throughout our conversation, Gerry conveyed a refreshing, almost childish joy of working and playing amongst trees, through all their stages of a shared life. When asked if his Bench Buddys website was growing, Gerry quickly said, “You bet. I have international customers. Quebec, Canada, oh and Martin Joergensen in Copenhagen. Actually, he didn’t buy anything. I donated, I gave him something. He is the maestro of a website called Global Fly Fisherman, and now he’s a Bench Buddy,” he said, with great pride. There is a dividing line, something margin-focused investors look for, that separates businessmen from lifestylers. Gerry runs a business but doesn’t allow it to run him. After a similar donation, Tom Bie at The Drake sent Gerry a note that read, “You’re shits a lot better than I thought it would be.” And so grows a business.
“I want to keep it personal,” Gerry said about his website and mailorder system, which are popular with woodworkers and anglers. He loves building pieces to ensure each customer has precicely what they need with as little wood waste as possible. He sees opportunity all around because the only thing larger than his love of trees is his respect for them.
There were several long pauses brightening our conversation. Around us, crickets called for lovers while small breezes brushed up against sheets of porch screens. I wrote while Gerry sat and thought. And chuckled. Any person who has lived decades among tall conifer canopies, whose roots secure their communal survival while intertwining with generations of offspring, even of other species, enjoys quiet moments between questions, memories and answers. When patient fly anglers stalk a stream and see a rise, they know to wait. There is no loss of time. Trout will rise again, on their schedule and the wise will cast then. Gerry speaks about his craft on his schedule, and it’s worth the wait. Mind the gap.
Gerry Engel on the right, consoling an inept fly tyer on the left.
Gerry Engel has the eye, the one that sees things inside yellow cedar or black walnut, waiting to be released. He creates and laughs, builds and sells through his website, Bench Buddys where he offers a discount to veterans in appreciation for their service and has donated his work to Trout Unlimited banquets, to help them preserve cold water fishes. “River fishing for Kings has been declining for thirty years,” he lamented. Finishing a final wrap on his impromptu fly, Gerry pushed his visor up a bit, clipped back his cheaters and smiled. We had covered a lot of ground. “I think we’re good,” I said. “Well, such is life, my friend,” he said.
“There are many days when I have to remind myself that having and making fly tying accessories is not my primary goal. In fact even the act of tying flies is not the primary goal. The primary goal, which I am sure you have guessed by now is to actually go fishing. Sometimes in this life we get our mixed priorities up all.” Gerry Engel
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