Troutsmith (10 page)

That was one fine day even for Castle Rock Creek, which is well known as a good place to catch a lunker trout on a fly. What still surprises me now as I look back on it is that so many big trout were taken on such small flies, a #14 scud and a #16 soft-hackled wet fly. I've had a few other days like this one on Castle Rock and a few other places around the Driftless Area in the years since, but on those occasions I fished big streamer flies. It took me thirteen years of fly fishing to crack the twenty-inch mark for an inland trout, a bright September brownie that rolled out from beneath a submerged branch and inhaled a floating #12 Letort Cricket. During those thirteen years I remember feeling pretty meek and inadequate when I talked to other fly fishers, many of whom seemed to catch twenty-inch trout almost every time out. One instance on Rowan Creek was typical. I met two anglers coming off the stream as I was walking down, and we chatted for a bit. When they found out that I lived nearby and fished the Rowan regularly, one of them said, “Boy, you must get a lot of twenty-inchers, huh?” “Uhhh, no,” I replied, “actually the biggest brown I've ever caught here was seventeen-and-a-half inches.” “You gotta' be kidding! The creek's full of 'em!” “No, that trout was the biggest.” After a few more pleasantries the two anglers sauntered off, but just before they were out of range a thought struck me and I called out to them. “Excuse me, but do you actually measure the big trout you catch?” There was a moment's pause. Then the answer floated downstream. “No. We just know!” With my background in the biological sciences I had naïvely assumed that when somebody told you they'd caught a twenty-inch trout, they'd measured it in centimeters too for the sake of accuracy and precision. But I'm telling you right now, one of the biggest secrets in fly fishing is that very few twenty-inch trout ever go up against the unforgiving reality of a fiberglass tape measure. The best way to catch a lunker of any species is simply to estimate things like length and weight. Peter Grimm is the only angler I know who routinely underestimates the true dimensions of his fish. Pete's a card player too though, and maybe he's smart not to tip his hand.

So there's one way to have a bad day on trout water. Even in the middle of winter back in 1992 we were seeing occasional days of angler saturation on the larger spring creeks, especially on weekends. This tends to happen because of the way fishing works on small Driftless Area trout streams compared to large western rivers like the Yellowstone or the Missouri. Large rivers have lots of fishy territory and can accommodate many wading anglers per mile of stream. If trout are feeding I can fish for hours on a large river and move only a few hundred yards during that time. But on a small spring creek that has comparatively little internal volume and area, I may cover two or more linear miles in five or six hours of fly fishing. When you have several anglers who don't know each other fishing this way, there can be conflicts on a small spring creek. I admit I'm looking forward to retirement so that I can take my fishing days during the week and do my bit to reduce the army of weekend anglers marching across the Wisconsin countryside. In recent years I've noticed that angler density is increasing on local lakes too. This season (2010), Teresa and I haven't been able to fish parts of nearby Devils Lake because some of the better places are dotted with boats every day of the week. Southern Wisconsin's lakes work hard, even during the winter. I think some species of fish, northern pike for instance, get more fishing pressure during the winter ice-fishing season than they do during the rest of the year.

I may lobby Teresa to retire to a place where there are fewer people per square mile; at any rate, I'm considering it now for the first time in my life. It's hard to say how much the Internet has affected this aspect of fishing. On the one hand a quantity of fishing information that used to be harder to obtain is readily available, but the
quality
of that information? Let's just say I'm getting wrinkles from smiling. I like the Internet for checking on weather, stream flows, et cetera, before I commit to fishing somewhere far from home, and I like to check Trout Unlimited websites so that I know when and where chapter campouts, state council meetings, and the like are being held. In that way a lot of angler congestion can be avoided. I call one other person fishing where I want to fish “angler congestion.” It's not that I don't like fishing with people, it's just that I really like fishing alone.

Here's one of the nifty things you can do with a fishing journal: keep track of phenology, or the seasonal timing of natural events. Anglers have long known that fly hatches can be roughly predicted by looking for connections to flowering times for common plants; dame's rocket and the sulphur hatch is just one example. Teresa works for the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo, and through the foundation we've met the surviving children of Aldo and Estella. Nina Leopold Bradley had phenology notes going back about seventy years, and she told us that events like the first frog choruses and the first pasqueflowers in spring are happening three to four weeks earlier today than they did in the 1940s.

As I said, all of us have some tough days on the water from time to time. But I think this last journal entry illustrates the true value of the Internet for the angler.

Spring officially begins when Teresa and I hitch the long canoe trailer to the truck and drive off into the hill country of southwest Wisconsin in pursuit of sunfish. Bluegills, crappies, rock bass, pumpkinseed sunfish, and sometimes green sunfish are the usual targets on these trips, but we get enough surprises in the form of bass, trout, pike, or even the occasional muskellunge to keep us happy. Neither of us can resist “road birding” as we drive along quiet country roads to the lake, veering first to one side and then the other as we point out favorites like indigo buntings, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and American goldfinches. Neighbors say they can tell it's the Searocks rolling past by the sinuous trail of dust we leave behind as we corkscrew down the gravel byways. Teresa counters that a zigzag path was used successfully by our navy in WWII as a defense against submarines. It still works; we haven't had a single problem with a sub or a torpedo while on a fishing trip.

Upon reaching the lake Teresa takes her customary seat in the bow of the canoe while yours truly is demoted to a secondary role as guide/trolling-motor/fish-unhooker in the stern. Experience has taught me to wear a broad-brimmed Australian bush hat and a tough denim shirt while guiding fly fishers in a canoe. Hardly a day goes by without my getting ticked in the hat by the rubber-legged bluegill spiders that Teresa sends artfully across the still waters. Her targets are the bedding areas which in spring are constantly patrolled by protective panfish and bass; if I get in the way of her back-cast, that's my problem. Of course I wouldn't have it any other way. We both learned to fly fish on panfish and bass, and I still think it's one of the best ways to introduce a beginner to the sport. Many seasons have come and gone since those days, but Teresa and I still get the same kick out of quality bluegill and bass fishing as we did when we were kids.

If bluegills and other sunfish commonly reached the twelve-to-fifteen-inch mark, we might give up trout entirely and spend the rest of our days in happy pursuit of these disc-shaped natives of the still ponds, river backwaters, and slow-moving streams. About the time when lilacs and flowering crabapples reach full bloom in Wisconsin, sunfish hit surface bugs and flies with more gusto than any other freshwater fish. It's common to see a hole in the water a yard long as they take the bug with a distinctive
smack
that sounds like over-amped teenagers on their first kiss. It's a surprise to bring in a fish that's much smaller than the amount of water it displaced when it hit. Bass run bigger but strike much more delicately; often the bug simply disappears as it is sucked below the surface by a hungry bigmouth.

A distinct hierarchy exists among the warm-water game fish and panfish. The pumpkinseed sunfish takes top honors in our well-ordered universe; both of us consider the pumpkinseed to be the golden trout of the sunfish family. Pumpkinseed sunfish are much less common than bluegills in the places we fish, and the vibrant colors of the males during the breeding season must be seen to be appreciated. Male pumpkinseeds in full spawning dress rival even the most colorful denizens of tropical reefs. Bluegills occupy a close second place in the hierarchy. Again the males wear the brightest orange bellies, which is why bluegills are called “sunnies” in the eastern USA. Light blue highlights darken to cobalt blue or green across the back of the male bluegill. Females are olive green above and yellow below. There's nothing quite like the stout resistance of a bull bluegill on the end of a line, the little fish turning in tight circles as it tries to set the full width of its round body perpendicular to the canoe. Bass, both largemouth and smallmouth, occupy the final place on the podium, and we commonly take fish up to three pounds on our homemade bluegill spiders. Crappies, rock bass, and green sunfish round out our catch for a typical day on the lake. On rare occasions we catch pike or muskies that attack our panfish as we're bringing them into the canoe.

As in trout fishing, sunken flies can be deadly, but surface flies and bugs are much more fun to fish. I tie our famous bluegill spiders on long-shanked #10 hooks (TMC-200R). The body is a simple prefab foam body sold by many fly shops and mail-order catalogs; green, black, gray, brown, and yellow are all effective. Precut bulk rubber legs are the only other material in the pattern. I prefer white or yellow legs on a gray body, while Teresa routinely outfishes me using a yellow-bodied bug with black legs. In making the bug, we start by lashing two rubber legs lengthwise along the hook, so that one inch extends forward of the eye (antennae) and two or three inches hang off the end of the hook in back. Then the body is lashed to the hook in two places in an attempt to emphasize the three-segmented body plan of dragonflies, damselflies, wasps, bees, and other tasty, crunchable insects that fish commonly eat. Last to go on are two pairs of transverse rubber legs, one pair tied into each body constriction, the legs extending outward an inch or so to either side. These bugs are light, trim, and easy to cast even with a three-weight line, but the rubber legs sticking out in all directions give an impression of much larger bulk and mass when floating on the water. The bluegill spider has the same silhouette, shadow, and surface impression as a bass bug but much less air resistance. We favor largesized bodies and relatively large hooks, since they weed out the troublesome silver dollar–sized panfish in favor of big “bulls” in the eight-to-eleven-inch class.