WOLCOTT — Cam Chioffi’s eyes dart like those of a predator on the prowl as he flicks a finger toward a small seam of current flowing just a few feet from the edge of the Eagle River.
“Look at the size of that fish right there,” he says, pointing to an aquatic apparition in shimmering green water. As mortal eyes strain to make out the shape of a fish, Chioffi’s hands spread nearly a foot-and-a-half apart to emphasize his point. “A rainbow trout this big just sitting right there. There’s so many fish in this river.”
Chioffi, the 2013 FIPS-Mouche Youth World Fly Fishing Championships individual gold medalist and 2014 runner-up, sees fish where others don’t. He sets the hook on subtle strikes that don’t even register in the minds of other fishermen. As a result, the teenager catches more fish than most anglers consider possible.
In the three hours before pointing out the big rainbow, before the competition buzzer had sounded on the second-to-last round of the 2015 Youth World Fly Fishing Championships in Vail on Friday, the tally was 21 fish in Chioffi’s net. Counting the ones that wiggled off his hook — although no one else does — the total should have been 30 trout, he says. In that time, he never ventured more than about 100 yards upstream from where he started.
“I had a good enough beat that I could have won it,” Chioffi said, unable to mask the frustration of a fishing day almost any angler would measure a success. “I don’t know how everybody else did, but I dropped a lot of fish that I had on the hook. That will hurt me.”
More significant, the competitor says, it may hurt his team. And that would sting far worse.
“I don’t put pressure on myself individually,” Chioffi said. “But as far as my performance, hurting the team or helping the team is what I’m more concerned about. The Youth USA team, we strive for team medals. That’s our goal. And the individual medals have come with it naturally.”
The mature philosophy is a product of the system instituted by U.S. Youth Fly Fishing Team head coach Paul Bourcq and assistant Chris Smith. Their secret to success lies in the conviction that the team medal mentality trumps individual achievements, proven by the age-restricted team’s continued ability to haul in the hardware with new competitors every year.
Entering the 2015 Youth World Championships this week in Vail, Team USA Youth was the two-time defending world champion and had won three of the past four championships, finishing second in the one it didn’t win.
By Friday night, the Americans had added another gold medal to their trophy case, edging Poland in a final-round, come-from-behind victory after five days of competition against more than 50 anglers from 10 countries. The Czech Republic finished third.
“When I took over as head coach in 2012, we won the silver medal and people were looking at us and asking if we were for real. When we won both team gold and individual gold in Ireland the next year, it basically proved that we are players in this game that we haven’t really been players in for the 25 years previous,” Bourcq said. “We fish better than any six-man unit in the world, and everything we do is about team medals. Having six boys all on the same page like that is very difficult to beat.”
The 2015 world championship is especially sweet for anglers such as Chioffi and his “senior” counterparts, 2014 U.S. national champion Hunter Hoffler and Andrew Brown, silver medalist at U.S. Nationals. Hoffler wound up winning the individual world title in Vail, followed by teammate Mason Sims in second, as all five American competitors finished in the top 12. With an 18-year-old age limit, Hoffler, Chioffi and Brown will all age out of competition next year, making the championship here in their home nation a coveted feather in their collective caps.
The 2015 Youth Worlds produced by John Knight’s Vail-based America Cup organization, which has hosted World Cup contests in the valley for the past several years, serves as a dress rehearsal of sorts for the larger 2016 FIPS-Mouche Fly Fishing World Championships expected to draw competitors from 25-30 nations on Sept. 11-18, 2016.
“Our goal this week was to put on such a great event that the countries trying to decide whether to come back next year can’t wait to return,” Knight said.
