I never know what to say when I’m asked if one of the places I fish is as good as it was in the old days. Maybe I have a mental picture of pools with big wild trout stacked so thick I can’t see the bottom, but what is that, really? A single pool on a single, exceptional day in the 1980s, or three or four decades’ worth of accumulated recollections superimposed? For that matter, as far back as I can recall, there were codgers around who claimed that this same river or lake was only a shadow of what it used to be, while we younger guys had begun to suspect that things never really were the way they used to be.
The short answer is some places are better, some are worse, and others are about the same, but the biggest difference in most fisheries is that where the old-timers once told stories about trappers, floozies, and bootleggers, their replacements now reminisce about seeing Jimi Hendrix in concert.
I do clearly remember that fly-fishing was intimidating at first—an arcane business that looked like equal parts science and poetry—and all I hoped for on the technical side was simple competence. That seemed unattainable the first time I tried to cast a fly rod, but, lo and behold, simple competence is what I achieved. Now a guide I’m with might tell me it’s nice to have a decent fisherman in the boat for a change, but even if he’s trolling for a big tip, he won’t say I’m the best he’s ever seen.
Of course, any definition of “good fisherman” has to include the ability to actually catch fish. I still sometimes have to remind myself of that, since my first fly-fishing was done in the depths of the counterculture of the late 1960s, when some of us thought trout fishing was our ticket to enlightenment. That was a stretch even for a bunch of hippies, but we were young and impressionable, and there was that quote from Japanese literature about not lecturing woodcutters and fishermen about Zen because they already knew the score.
Anyway, I read the books and magazines (all of which promised me more and bigger fish) and talked to other fishermen (some of whom were more helpful than others), but what taught me to fish were the lakes, rivers, and streams near home, where I spent entire seasons with no pressure. I was in my twenties, on my own, and could spend my time however I saw fit. After seeing to the necessities of food, rent, and gas money, I saw fit to spend that time trying to catch trout. I thought I was onto something. My father thought I lacked ambition. Neither of us was entirely wrong.
Since then I’ve grown up and become a productive, tax-paying member of society. I’ve also traveled farther and caught more and bigger fish, although by temperament I’m still one of those anglers Thomas McGuane once described as “searching less for recreation than for a kind of stillness.” On the other hand, I do love to catch fish, and it’s on those waters where I have the home-court advantage that I’m most likely to do that.
One chilly day last spring, I was fishing a favorite trout lake with crawdad flies and doing pretty well. I’d been working my way up the east shore, and in the space of half an hour had landed five good-sized trout. That hadn’t escaped a couple of guys nearby, who were fishing from belly boats and not getting any takes. Fishermen on the water are always aware of how others are doing, even though we make a show of seeming not to notice. There are those who try to overcome that by yelling, “Fish on!” to no one in particular, but as a native midwesterner I’m too shy to call attention to myself that brazenly. Instead I use loud click and pawl reels that scream like sirens when a fish takes line.
Finally one of these guys kicked his way over and asked, “Okay, what are you doing?” I showed him my rig: a nine-foot rod, a line with a fifteen-foot sink-tip, four feet of eight-pound leader, and a large weighted fly. Then I demonstrated the retrieve. First there’s the wait for the sink-tip and fly to settle on the bottom, then the dead-slow hand-twist crawl, punctuated now and then with short strips. I explained that the take could be anything from a hard slam to a slow pull to a tap to a rubbery hesitation that feels like you’re hung up on a weed. “Set on anything,” I said. I was trying my best to be generous. I was also enjoying being the fisherman who’s doing so well a stranger asks him for advice. That doesn’t happen every day.
I’d worked out the crawdad business on this lake in fits and starts after I realized the place was lousy with these little freshwater lobsters. I’d find where raccoons had caught and eaten them, leaving piles of shells on the muddy bank along with their own eerily human-looking paw prints. Then I started spotting them in the water, squirting away from my boots when I was wading the shallows. Then a local guide said he thought it must be the crawdads that accounted for the large size of some of the trout here.
I fooled around with existing crawdad patterns until I convinced myself I could do better. First I readjusted my pattern along the lines of a Clouser Minnow so it rode with the hook inverted, making it more likely to hook fish and less likely to foul on the bottom. Then it occurred to me that trout probably weren’t seeing crawdads in all the painstaking detail some tiers tried to reproduce. In fact, these crustaceans are so well camouflaged the trout probably weren’t seeing them at all unless they moved. And when they did move, that’s all the fish were seeing: just motion and a vague impression of size.
With that in mind I gradually reduced my once-elaborate crawdad pattern to nothing but rabbit fur palmered onto the hook, along with heavy dumbbell eyes to sink it. I used brownish-gray fur that was as close as I could come to the color of the mud bottom of this lake, and it occurred to me only much later how weird it was to be designing a fly so that the fish couldn’t see it. The resulting pattern was unattractive by conventional standards—a friend described it as “a fly only its inventor could love”—and so awkward to cast that I ended up naming it the Blunt Force Trauma, but it was quick and painless to tie, thoughtlessly expendable, and the trout liked it better than anything else I’d ever tried.
I arrived at the retrieve by imagining the day-to-day life of a crawdad creeping stiffly along the bottom on its bony legs, hoping not to be noticed by a big, hungry trout but inadvertently giving itself away. I added the occasional abrupt scoot, because that’s what they do when they’re startled. I thought that sudden motion was something a trout might notice from farther away and maybe come to investigate. Judging from the timing of some strikes, a few of them did.
Being able to picture this seemed important. It gave me faith in what I was doing and kept my mind from wandering to my dwindling bank account and the blinking light on my answering machine. (It’s in that distracted moment that I’ll sleepwalk through the first strike I’ve gotten in fifteen minutes.) Groping around on the bottom with an unseen fly lacks the visual pizzazz that first attracted me to fly-fishing, so it’s nothing more than purity of intent that allows me to occasionally set the hook on the barest intuition of a take and feel the sudden live weight of a trout on the line. If I can perceive this level of subtlety in the natural world, why can’t I figure out the stock market?
It turned out that the same slow-motion retrieve worked for just about everything on this rich, spring-fed lake; possibly because the trout are too well fed and lazy to feel they have to chase anything. There’s plenty of violence here (every transaction is a matter of life and death), but the pace is more like that of dairy cows grazing in a pasture. So the trick with sunken flies is a hand-twist retrieve so glacial that someone standing right next to you might ask, “Are you just lettin’ it sit out there?”
Some people who fish here will do just that with a brace of nymphs dangled under a strike indicator, letting natural wind drift provide all the movement that’s necessary. I’ve tried that, and it works—especially on slow days when nothing much seems to be going on—but I can’t stay with it for long. It’s possible that I’d had enough of staring at bobbers by the time I was twelve.
The trout here have earned a reputation for being selective about fly patterns, but the regulars fish an odd assortment of favorite flies that all work in the right hands, although never quite all the time. I try to keep things simple. When trout are eating mayfly duns off the surface, I like a sparsely tied Hare’s Ear Parachute, although when a hatch of pale olive Callibaetis mayflies is on I’ll often use the Olive Quill Parachute my friend A. K. Best invented back in the late ’80s. He and I have had a long-running, half-serious argument over how much difference realistic color makes when imitating specific insects—he says a lot; I say not that much—but this fly is so effective that A.K. feels it wins the argument for him. I refuse to concede the point, but I have tied and fished the pattern for over twenty years.
But as a rule, the trout here like nymphs better than dry flies, at least up till the inevitable ten or fifteen minutes at the end of every hatch when there are still a few winged adults floating on the surface but no more emerging nymphs or pupae in the water. Maybe that’s because so many fishermen tied on a dry fly the moment they saw a winged insect that over time they trained these fish to be wary of floating patterns. The intelligence of trout is overrated, but once they’ve been caught and released often enough, it must start to dawn on them that their once-carefree lives are now plagued by booby traps. Even when you end up hooking a confidently feeding trout, you can’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t entirely fooled by your fly. You’ll see the fish slow down, rise cautiously, hesitate, and then nail the fly as if he were trying to snatch something out of a fire without getting burned.
You arrive at this lake by driving slowly up a hill on a rutted two-track road that looks like it could have been made by covered wagons, and your first view of it is cinematic. You top the rise and there it is, puddled in the bottom of a shallow foothills valley with open, grassy banks, a thin stand of willows on the west side and one large, lone cottonwood that shades the universal lunch spot. On windless mornings you can make out the rings of rising trout from four hundred yards.
I can’t say why I became so fond of this lake or have been back so often while in the same years I’ve fished it I’ve let other new places become pleasant but vague memories. Maybe it’s because I can drive there in a little over half an hour, or because it can be so generous one day and so stingy the next. More likely it’s because it’s located at a low elevation, so you can fish it early and late in the year when the higher mountain lakes are iced up. I can’t remember what I thought when I first saw it, but it quickly got under my skin, which is my only explanation for how this kind of thing happens. I once lived for over two decades within sight of a small river that was nothing special, but it regularly lured me away from my livelihood for hours at a time. It didn’t help that I have poor work habits and could see the water from my office window.
I do remember that when I first fished this lake, I was no longer a kid at loose ends eager to learn but a fisherman in middle age, with the usual complicated life; still eager enough to learn, but calmer by then, and with a more or less complete skill set. Where I was once the crazy nephew relatives wondered and worried about, I’d finally settled into the role of the Fisherman in the Family, which among non-anglers is affectionate code for “simpleminded but harmless.” I knew this had happened when someone stumped for a gift bought me a necktie that looked like a fish. Never mind that I wear ties only to funerals, the one occasion where no one but a fool would wear a tie that looks like a fish.
It took me dozens of return trips to work out the precise shape of the bottom, the location of snags, springs, and weed beds, the seasonal progression of hatches, and some inkling of the logic the fish use to turn all that to their advantage. Not to mention more granular details such as how to get around the spring seeps without sinking into black muck that smells like goose crap and won’t rinse off. There are more similarities than differences among trout waters, and I had experience to draw on, but even if you’ve seen it all before, every body of water has its idiosyncrasies. Learning them takes time and attentiveness, but finally leads to the rare and useful sense of knowing where you are and what you’re doing.
The lake is shaped like an irregular, shallow bowl, tipped slightly, with the deep end facing north down the valley. I’m not good at guessing surface acreage, but it isn’t large. You could walk around it easily in twenty-five minutes, although I’ve never made the complete circuit without stopping to cast. The springs that feed it dribble in along the west shore, culminating in the big spring in the southwest corner that gushes so strongly that it has created an alluvial fan of hard sand where you can wade out to cast, although not quite far enough to keep your fly out of the big, loopy willow that stands right where your back-cast has to go.
This spot affords the best view of the valley. There’s an expanse of round-shouldered hills and hogbacks to the north, and to the east a ridge of tawny sandstone rimrock capping a boulder-strewn slope that’s green, gold, or brown according to the season and either velvety or bristly looking depending on the light. Deer and elk sometimes graze there, and coyotes hunt rabbits among the rocks. I’ve never seen one, but I’ve heard them in the evenings. Trout often live in beautiful places, and if you feel like stopping to look, you should. It’s not like you’re wasting time. And anyway, soon enough you’ll be back to scanning the surface of the lake the way a general surveys a battlefield.
Some days this spring hole is the center of the action. Many of the midge hatches are at their thickest here, gradually petering out along the shallow, muddy flats off the south shore, where trout feeding close in are easy to spook, and the ones feeding farther out are hard to reach. That includes the elusive Big Midge, a whopping size-14 maroon-colored chironomid pupa the trout are especially fond of. The Callibaetis mayfly hatch stretches from the spring hole down the weedy west shore, where hooked fish will dive into the vegetation and either break you off or come to the net dragging half a pound of salad.
On sultry summer afternoons the biggest trout in the lake will ease in here to lie with their faces in the cool current from the springs. They’re not actively feeding, but a perfectly placed weighted nymph can sometimes tempt them. I’ve noddled a few exceptionally large rainbows out of here, but I’ve always felt guilty about it, as if I’d mugged an old lady who was just sitting peacefully in front of her fan on a hot day.
In mid to late May the damselfly nymphs begin to migrate to shore, where they’ll crawl up on the weeds to hatch into winged adults. These nymphs are the color of a cooked green bean and smaller than most, and the trout key so specifically on size that a number-16 fly on a 3x long hook is about right, but a slightly larger size-14 can be too big. When they’re coming off well it’s easy to crouch in the shallows and watch them. They tuck their legs along their sides and wiggle furiously and inefficiently from side to side without making much forward headway, turning themselves into obvious targets. All that effort must tire them out, because now and then they’ll stop to rest, splaying their legs out to the side and sinking ever so slowly. I fish the usual slow retrieve with periodic rests while I count to ten as the fly sinks, waiting for the leader to go slack on the surface and then slowly tighten as a cruising trout picks up the fly without leaving so much as a ripple on the surface.
By early June of most years the adult damselflies have hatched and begun their mating swarms. The females are pale olive with clear wings. On sunny days the males look like “iridescent blue needles,” just like novelist Craig Nova said. By the time you start flushing these flies out of the tall grass on shore, at least some fish have begun to recognize them as good to eat but hard to catch.
The best tactic is to gently place the fly at the precise point ahead of a cruising fish that’s not so close that he’ll spook, but not so far away that he’ll have too much time to think it over. Exactly how close that is depends on how fast the fish is swimming and its mood, which you tell yourself you can determine from the fish’s body language. That guy out there looks bored, but this big boy cruising in from the left is clearly on the prowl. You’re trying to create a false first impression that makes the fish lunge and eat the fly on instinct in the same instant it lands on the water.
This takes time, patience, some intuition, good eyes, accurate casting, and a tender hook set, since strikes can be violent enough to snap off the fly. Cruising trout are easier to spot in bright light and glassy water, but they’re also more skittish. Cloudy light and a little chop will cover your cast nicely, but can make the fish all but invisible. Every advantage has a corresponding disadvantage, and there are few prolonged flawless performances in fishing, but a handful of trout caught in the same careful way are enough. They make up for a whole day’s worth of blown casts and flushed fish, and maybe even for a lifetime spent chasing trout. After all, that’s why we fish: for those days when it goes right and you think, This is all I could have hoped for.