Let me back up.
I left the house this morning with a 4 weight, and though I packed spools of 5x, 6x and 7x tippet, this early trout season sends me down the same path every time. Every winter, and especially this one, seems to make me a little barbaric. Despite spending my winter slumbers dreaming of dry flies settling like thistledown, when the season finally opens, I want to pound 4" streamers into dark inky water and move something with mass.
The 7x stayed buried deep in my Simms roll top waterproof bag (it's 10 years+ ? old and still working great by the way), and I peeled off 20" of 3x. I had hastily assembled a hodge-podge of small and dainty along with big and nasty. What I affixed to my 3x was actually a marabou tailed, rubber legged contraption that I tied for carp but that I figured would sink fast and tempt perfectly.
It was big and heavy and ugly...no thistledown here.
I fish the same beat every opener on this creek. It seems that I can't forget the year that I finally went downstream beyond my previous (self imposed) boundary and an 18" brown trout was landed on a leech pattern. Since then, this has become the early season drill. A number of years later, during one of my early season forays on this same stretch, I landed 3 fish in quick succession, all in the high teens. I think that fisherman must drink themselves into remembering ONLY the successes and completely forget the years when the "magic beat" failed to cough up anything worth mentioning.
So I was back. The tradition or the ritual, or perhaps, the bad habit.
I pitched the 4 wt hard into the gale that was blowing across the fields. The big fly plopped, dropped and swung. I twitched, retrieved and prayed. After fishing through the spot that yielded the 18" fish without a response, I moved down and got a grab that came up short. It hit hard in a plucky kind of way and I'd bet my rod and reel that it was a 10-12" fish that was as tired of winter as I am and was ready to settle into a spring and summer of fine dining.
A few hundred feet downstream and I was still blank. This is the moment that the doubts sets in and you thing of sections of this flow, upstream, where a scud pattern should be outlawed and the trees block the wind.
I looked downstream to the water that gave up the 3 nice trout a few season back and that's all it took to compel the next cast and the next. Stepping down between swings and strips, I was kneeling now because standing on the deep snow not only exposed me to the trout but also the wind. Always the wind.
Into the straight stretch with the deep outside slot, pitching into the shallow side and swinging into the deep side, stripping the fly back. The fly get hammered and I feel the thrum and the weight and I am warm and I stop thinking about the wind. I have to work the fish back upstream because the snow bank along the river's edge is too deep and tall to reach down and land the fish. It's a respectable, 14 maybe 15. It's the first fish of the year on this water for me and it's also the first fish of the day. I take that as a double.
It was only a little further downstream that the "take" happened.
It feels like nothing really. The fly stops and you can feel resistance but not urgency. This fish wasn't afraid that my fly, its meal, was going to escape. It seems to always catch me off guard. I feel the slightest pull as I tighten my line. What happens next is one of two things, the fly pops free, or I'm into a big trout. Today I set, the fly pulled free, I cursed into the wind...and then the same thoughts that I think every other time this has happened goes through my brain:
"He was tasting it...I wonder if I can get him to come back? What kind of fish slides over, inhales and tastes a big fly? Why didn't the hook stick??? He was just toying with it...no urgency...no pluck, no grab...just tasting it!"
And I curse again.
I stayed put and cast the same fly over that fish again and again. I've never had them hit twice on this water. I changed flies and double hauled into the wind and still, nothing.
What troubles me is that, in the past, I've connected with fish that have "taken" like this. They've ALL been big fish.
I want do-overs, a mulligan. I want them to hit twice...and then I realize that I don't play golf and that this, after all, is what fishing is.
So I'll go back.
(What I refuse to tell you is that the "take" happened again...a little further down stream.)
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| Brown bunny trumps Groundhog...welcome spring |
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| Trout |
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| Release |
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| Fish food (on ice) |
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| Winter's grip |
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