Troutsmith (11 page)

For this season's first panfish outing, Teresa chose a small impoundment folded into the grassy uplands that rise sharply south of the Wisconsin River, toward the crest of Military Ridge. During the late 1950s a tall earthen dam was built across the upper reaches of a small trout stream. It flooded two narrow valleys and formed a handsome lake, well protected by ochre sandstone cliffs and tall white pines that whisper in the breeze. Today we question the wisdom of such a sizable alteration in the landscape, but at that time the change was seen as “progress.” Brown trout can still be found in the stream below the dam, and a very cosmopolitan fish population has grown up in the lake above. Surprisingly, and to my mind importantly, there are no carp. Since most of the watershed is within the boundaries of a state park, there is very little agricultural runoff into the lake. In its clear, carp-free water the spring fly fisher can enjoy high quality sport for panfish and bass as they spawn, forage, and protect their nests in plain view of anyone with polarized sunglasses.

On this day a stiff breeze out of the northeast surged down the length of the lake and pushed a lot of warm water into the bays on the western side. Since one of these was right near the boat landing we didn't have to paddle very far to find fish, and my job as guide was an easy one. For four hours we enjoyed rare sport, catching about a hundred fish between the two of us. Eighty percent of these were bluegills, with the rest about equally divided between largemouth bass and pumpkinseed sunfish, and all of them taken on top with our bluegill spiders. The fish of the day was a broad, deep, moss-backed specimen of a pumpkinseed sunfish that Teresa caught. It still ranks as the largest pumpkinseed we've ever seen and was pretty close to the Wisconsin state record at the time. The “pie-plate pumpkinseed” pushed the measuring tape a bit past eleven inches and weighed more than a pound. All the while we fished in water that was so shallow that I simply pushed my paddle deep into the soft muck of the bottom to hold the canoe in position. Many other anglers were on the lake with us, but they couldn't take their deep V-hulled bass boats, festooned with trolling motor(s) and assorted electronic aids, into the skinny water where the fish were.

So we sat together in the calm bay on a sunny May afternoon and fished, telling stories now and then as we recalled other days in other years. There was the time I was paddling my sister Jill and Teresa on this same lake, both women fly casting with the enthusiasm of the newly converted and completely focused on getting their bluegill spiders in front of actively feeding fish. I cinched up the croakie on my sunglasses, pulled the Australian bush hat down over my ears and hunched over in my seat while fly lines whistled past both sides of my head and flies bounced off the brim of my hat. The June sun was warm, and I waited patiently for a lull in the action to exchange my heavy fleece pullover for a T-shirt. Finally there was a pause while Jill and Teresa checked their knots and hooks. Taking advantage of the opportunity, I pulled off the fleece sweatshirt and dug around in my pack for the T-shirt. Precisely at that moment of greatest vulnerability, a nice-sized bass with a wicked sense of humor slashed at a dragonfly some thirty feet out from the canoe. Both women immediately raised their fly rods and tried to shoot thirty feet of line with no false casting. Slack line was whipping everywhere and before I could protest I found myself solidly hooked in both shoulders.

Then there was the young boy fishing from shore with his parents on a long, golden evening in early June. The little guy was quick to notice that Teresa and I were casting differently from everybody else on the lake, and he asked his mom what sort of fishing we were doing. Wise to the ways of anglers, she patiently explained that we were
fly fishing
, that flies were tiny lures traditionally made from fur and feathers to imitate insects that fly near the surface of the water. Since the flies are far too light to be cast with conventional tackle, the fly fisher casts the heavy line back and forth, gradually increasing the distance while the fly just goes along for the ride. When the distance is right, the angler stops casting and allows the fly to fall on the water in a good place. “Oh,” said the boy, and there followed a long silence while he pondered this brave new angling method. “But what are they fishing for? Frogs?”

She was waiting for me there, in the shade of a tall oak beside the river. I turned off the highway into the Ellsworth Rod and Gun Club and let the big green truck roll to a stop by a line of whitewashed posts at the brow of the slope leading down to Wisconsin's Rush River. I wasn't surprised to see her. I expected she would be there in the very heart of June, just as I expected the eternal river to be there, and the mayflies, and the trout. But catching her scent as I pulled on wading brogues and strung a long, willowy fly rod evoked a flood of memories, of other rivers and other years long past, and of other late spring days as perfect as this one. I went over to see her as soon as the leader was rigged with a pair of nymphs and I'd donned the trout fisher's uniform of burnt khaki, pale green, and nut brown that helped keep me invisible to the fish. By contrast she was dressed in a crown of vivid lavender petals atop tall green shoots, as befitted one whose name was
Hesperis matronalis
in the ancient tongue, “lady of the evening star” as near as I could make it in English. Dame's rocket is her common name, and the bloom of her presence by the waterside meant that large numbers of yellow mayflies, known as
sulphurs
, would dance over the broad riffles of the Rush at twilight.

The day was fine, the first clear morning after a series of overcast, showery days. Since the sulphurs weren't due until evening, I decided to spend the morning drifting deep nymphs through the big pools, fast runs, and pocket water where the Rush tumbles around the wide turn below the Rod and Gun Club. There was more fast water upstream. This stretch of the Rush was made for nymph fishing.

I cut through the woods so that I could enter the river at the very bottom of the stretch. The shadows beneath the trees were filled with signs that the long Wisconsin spring was finally giving way to high summer. False Solomon's seal, with its dark green oval leaves, was nearly bloomed out. Campion and oxeye daisies showed in patches where shafts of sunlight slipped through the boughs overhead. Cow parsnip towered over the path in places, and I glanced at old scars from parsnip burns on my forearms. Once at a seminar devoted to the problem of weedy, nonnative plants in the Badger State, I remarked to a fellow biologist that I'd been burned by wild parsnip many times over the years. “Slow learner!” she remarked. “No,” I replied quietly, “trout fisherman.” Send an angler and a nonangler on a walk beside a stretch of wild river and I'll wager that the angler is far better at interpreting and drawing inferences from what he or she has seen. The very act of fishing demands a keen eye for observation of fine details, so much so that anglers can suffer from perceptual blindness. Then we stumble into muskrat holes and get burned by wild parsnip for the dozenth time, to the amazement of our friends and colleagues.

The trees ended suddenly. I pushed through a dense stand of reed canary grass and stood on the edge of one of Wisconsin's finest trout rivers. The Rush has a distinctive fragrance in June, a unique blend of limestone, spring water, wildflowers, and trout. I took a moment to breathe deeply and savor this essence of June. Then I got down to business, unhooked the nymphs from the keeper ring, and began casting.

Upstream nymph fishing to invisible, nonrising trout is very effective, but it is also very demanding. One reason is that the angler must read the water to decide where an invisible trout is holding. A second reason is that nymph fishing is a game played in three spatial dimensions. The angler must cast the flies so that they have time to sink to the trout's depth as well as pass over the place where the trout is likely to be holding. Finally, the upstream nymph fisher is bedeviled by drag to an even greater degree than the dry fly angler, because water at the surface moves faster than water near the bottom of the river where trout usually hold.

I was standing at the edge of a shallow riffle and letting the flies drift through a deep run across from me. Here most of the Rush piled up against the opposite bank before sluicing off downstream. The current was fast and choppy against the bank on the outside edge of the turn, but nearer to me was a slow, deep eddy where the water actually spun around and flowed slowly upstream. Between the fast water racing down and the slow eddy moving up was a seam or current break, a vertical layer of water that separated the two opposing currents. The seam was my target. For flies I had a tandem rig with a #12 Gold-ribbed Hare's Ear Scud at the end of the 4x tippet and a #16 Sawyer Pheasant Tail Nymph trailing on a fifteen-inch piece of 5x. I cast the nymphs to the top of the seam and a bit to the right so they would drift downstream along the edge of the current break.

I used a strike indicator pegged in place about four feet above the lead fly, but even with an indicator many strikes went undetected. It's rare for the indicator to be pulled under by a trout. Anybody can see that. Most of the time I strike to small bumps or hops, or to slight rocking motions of the indicator as it drifts downstream. Less experienced fly fishers are often mystified as to how I know when to set the hook. To be honest, much of this has become ingrained and automatic after so many years of fly fishing. As in any athletic sport, with long practice and countless repetitions, fundamental skills become unconscious. We no longer have to think about them. They simply happen, just as when typing we don't consciously think about what our fingers are doing; our thoughts simply appear in print as if by magic.

So I cast the team of nymphs up to the top of the seam, and as they drifted back I stared at the orange indicator with the single-minded intensity of an osprey. It took several casts, but finally the indicator made a little downstream hop and I struck the solid weight of a good fish. Trout in swift, cool water and fat from feeding in a productive stream fight like mad, and this particular trout was no exception. The rod bent in a satisfying arc and vibrated from tip to butt as the fish bored deep among the rocks in an effort to hide beneath them, rub out the fly, or cut the leader on a sharp edge. Failing in this, the trout writhed to the surface and somersaulted over the river. With a barbless hook, a jumping, head-shaking trout has a better than even chance of throwing the fly. And so it proved; the little scud came free and the whole business pinballed back over my shoulder into the wicked clutches of a six-foot cow parsnip. Leader, tippet, and flies were tangled in a hopeless mess that took ten or fifteen minutes to extract and sort out. Such is fly fishing.

When I got back in action the nymphs proved their worth by taking a beautifully marked fifteen-inch brown trout from fast, broken water at the top of the run. By the time I reached the big, slow corner-bend below the Rod and Gun Club I'd taken several good browns and many smaller trout. But when I rounded the corner and looked upstream toward the fast runs at the head of the pool, I saw it was time to change tactics.

It was almost noon. The sun was high and bright, a good hatch of tan caddis flies was in progress, and trout were rising in bunches, feeding aggressively. Off came the nymphs and the indicator. On went a couple of feet of 5x tippet and a dark tan #16 CDC Caddis that I'd bought at Lund's Hardware in nearby River Falls.

Rise after rise showed quickly and repeatedly in the run about thirty feet upstream from where I stood. From the quick cadence of the rises I knew the trout would give me instant feedback about my choice of flies. The first cast dropped the fly just in the center of a feeding lane occupied by a good fish. The fly drifted back. Time stood still. Suddenly the trout took it with a popping rise, just as he'd taken the naturals. Business was very brisk for the next hour and a half as I was constantly casting, playing fish, releasing fish, or cleaning off the slime and drying the fly for another go. I took fat, hard-fighting trout with the clockwork regularity that only comes with a good hatch and the right fly. There were no refusals, and every trout took the fly
with the same rise form that was seen when it took the naturals
. This is how to judge whether a trout takes the fly for the natural insect, or out of aggression, competition, or for some other reason.

By one o'clock the caddis hatch had petered out and the morning rise was over. Both the trout and I needed a midday siesta. I drove up to Ellsworth for lunch and spent a quiet afternoon tying flies on a picnic table in a city park. It was cooler beneath the spreading shade of two large maple trees, although the breeze played merry hell with my tying materials.

At four thirty I was back on the Rush, scanning the water from a high vantage point on top of a concrete bridge. Upstream from the bridge a set of riffles extended to the junction with Lost Creek, after which the big river turned away from the road. Below the bridge was a smooth, gravelly flat of shin-deep water where the banks retreated to either side and the river spread out.

Unlike many anglers I was attracted to the thin water on the long flat, perhaps because such “waste water” was common on the eastern rivers I fished as a teenager decades ago. On those hard-fished trout streams, flats were attractive because hardly anybody fished for the selective, easily frightened trout that lived in them.

As I watched intently from my perch on the bridge, one trout after another revealed itself with quiet rises here and there across the wide flat. In one place a fat brook trout sipped something invisible from a bubble line. Several yards away a good-sized brown occupied a choice lie beside a fallen tree, and divided its time between feeding and running off two or three other brown trout that occasionally drifted too close to its place near the log. After twenty minutes of watching from the bridge, I was surprised at the number of trout that were holding and actively feeding in what looked like barren water at first glance.