22

Thinkin’ Mean

A late-May evening at the Powerline Pool on the Willowemoc. I was blowing on my fly after releasing another nice 16-inch brown when a nearby angler reeled up and waded over towards me. He was a lanky middle-aged guy, salt-and-pepper stubble, shapeless felt hat. I’d noticed his casting stroke. Smooth. I’d also noticed that he wasn’t catching any fish.

“Hey, fella,” he said. “You got the secret fly, I can see that. Mind telling me what you’re using?”

My first thought was: “Figure it out for yourself, fella. It’s taken me years of aggravation to understand this hatch and find the right flies for it. Why should I make it easy for you?”

* * *

Pale Evening Duns. Little sulphurs. Ephemerella dorothea. They are lovely mayflies, delicate, pale yellow, size 18 or 20. In certain pools on the Willowemoc, in the heart of the Catskills on a soft evening in late May or early June, the little sulphurs begin to pop about two hours before sunset.

It’s my favorite hatch. It’s predictable, it’s lavish, and it brings every trout in the pool to the surface.

For several seasons the Catskill sulphur hatch frustrated me. All around me trout would be gobbling mayflies. I’d isolate a little yellow natural, watch it drift down, see a brownish-gold shadow lift under it, watch a nose tilt up, a white mouth open, the bug disappear. I’d float an identical (to my eye) imitation down the same current, over the same fish, see his shadow materialize and drift under it . . . and then he’d sink back out of sight.

Frustrating, yeah. But fascinating, mesmerizing, and exciting, too. The first few times I found myself surrounded by tiny yellow sailboats and gorging trout I behaved badly. Once I realized that I wasn’t going to catch every rising fish I covered—wasn’t, maybe, going to catch any of them—I cursed the fish and the bugs and the river. I spent more time rummaging in my fly box, changing flies, lengthening leaders, moving around to see if I could find just one stupid trout, than I did casting. If there were other anglers nearby (and on the Willowemoc in May there are almost always other anglers nearby) I spied on them, hoping they were as frustrated and unsuccessful as I was. Mostly they were.

Between seasons I scoured my fly-tying books. I found new sulphur patterns and tied ’em all. I invented a few variations of my own, too, and the following May I showed them all to those Willowemoc trout. Once in a while I caught a couple of fish, and I thought, Aha. But then would come the refusals, and I realized I had not found any magic fly. Mostly the trout greeted them all with a sneer.

My only consolation during those several seasons of aggravation was the fact that nobody else seemed to have any better luck with the sulphur hatch than I did.

When I figured it out, it was by slow uncertain increments, not in one great burst of insight. First, I noticed that the riseforms in the early stages of the hatch did not break the surface. I guessed that they were eating emergers just under the surface. A little experimentation (well, a lot) led me to discover that a size 18 pheasant-tail flashback nymph dangled on six inches of 6X tippet from the bend of an unobtrusive dry fly would take some of those early fish. Casting down and across and twitching the nymph as it drifted into a feeding trout’s sight windows would take more of them.

Their riseforms changed in subtle ways when they switched from subsurface nymphs to half-hatched emergers drifting in the film. Then I clipped off the nymph rig and tied on an emerger pattern similar to a fly that a guide showed me one day on Nelson’s spring creek in Montana. This mongrel had a short, brown marabou shuck, a bi-colored body (brown for the abdomen, sulphur yellow for the thorax) with sparse thorax-tied ginger hackle, and a stubby gray cul-de-canard wing. This fly drifted low, halfsunk in the film. It would usually take some fish during the transition, and it was the nearest thing I found to a Magic Fly. In fact, even when their riseforms indicated that the fish had begun eating off the surface, my brown-and-yellow emerger would continue to catch an occasional trout, whereas no dun imitation I could find would elicit anything more than a half-hearted follow.

But, as the hatch progressed, the trout would begin to snub even my magic bi-colored emerger. Mayflies would continue to blanket the water, and the fish would continue to eat, and nothing in my fly box would entice them . . . and my frustration would return.

Then one evening—why hadn’t I noticed this years ago?—I saw a dun pop to the surface and instantly take flight. As I watched, I observed that this happened consistently, and I thought: These bugs didn’t spend enough time on the water to get eaten.

In a flash of inspiration, I tore my gaze away from the water’s surface and looked up into the twilight sky. First I saw the swallows and martins and waxwings, a frantic chaos of birds darting and swooping over the river. Then I saw the clouds of insects. Swarms of swirling bugs. Spinners . . . and, yes, they were falling onto the water.

About then it dawned on me that these fish weren’t even trying to eat the jittery newly-hatched duns. They were gobbling the vulnerable spinners. When they first lit, exhausted, on the water, the spinners’ wings were still upright, and in the fading early-evening light they looked like duns. But when I looked closer, I could see that the spinners’ wings were glassier, their tails longer, and their bodies rustier than the duns. And then I saw that amid those with upright wings, the water’s surface was littered with spent-winged spinners.

The spinners were falling while the duns were hatching, and once the spinners started to hit the water, that’s all the fish wanted.

Aha.

I got a lot of satisfaction from figuring all this out. I loved knowing what I was doing, approaching this lovely hatch with confidence, and catching trout on a fairly regular basis.

I’d worked hard for this understanding. It felt valuable and important to me. When I shared my Willowemoc pools with other anglers during the sulphur hatch, it was hard not to notice that I was catching more trout than most of them were. I was aware of the fact that sometimes other fishermen stopped to watch me hook and land a trout. I heard them muttering to each other, and I imagined they were saying: “That man must be one helluva good angler.”

I confess I liked it, that feeling of superiority. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

* * *

Now, as this guy on the Willowemoc was asking me to give away my hard-earned secrets, I remembered a July evening a few years earlier at the notorious Y Pool on the Swift River. Big trout were cruising the deadwater under the spillway, humping their heads and shoulders, eating . . . something. Midges, I thought, but I tried a dozen different patterns—various pupae, emergers, and adults—without a single take.

Meanwhile, the fisherman directly across from me kept catching them. Finally, I couldn’t stand it. When he hooked, landed, and released yet another fat rainbow, I said, “Nice fish. What’d he eat?”

“Cigarette fly,” he said.

Right, I thought. Thanks a lot. Cigarette fly. Sure.

“Never mind,” I muttered.

“No, really,” he said. “Dumb name for a fly, but that’s what they call it. Here.” He cast across the deadwater. His fly landed at my feet. “Cut it off and try it,” he said. “I got plenty.”

“Hey, thanks,” I said.

I tried it. It worked. And I thought: Not only is that guy a good angler; he’s also a good man.

The fragment of a poem by Edgar Guest called “Gone Fishin’” ran around in my head. My father had framed the poem and hung it on my bedroom wall when I was a kid. Back then, decades ago, I’d memorized all three or four verses, but now I remembered only the first:

A feller isn’t thinkin’ mean

Out fishin’;

His thoughts are mostly good an’ clean Out fishin’;

He doesn’t knock his fellow man

Or harbor any grudges then;

A feller’s at his finest, when

Out fishin’.

I knew what my father would do if somebody asked him for advice. Dad never thought mean when he was out fishin’.

I opened my flybox and plucked out a couple of rusty spinners. “They’re eating spinners,” I said to the man on the Willowemoc. I dropped the flies into his hand. “Take a couple of these, too,” I said, adding a few of my magic bi-colored emergers. “For next time, early in the hatch.”

“Hey, thanks, man.” He gave me a big grin. “Appreciate it.”

A few minutes later his rod arced, and when he laughed into the gathering darkness, I found myself smiling.