Standing in a River, Cursing at Fish

You want to give yourself some credit.  You have some semblance of intelligence, right?  I mean, you’re not an idiot.  Even if you are (pardon me) you have to be smarter than something that possesses a brain the size of a pea.  I am speaking of oncorhynchus mykiss irideus, the Coastal Rainbow Trout.

It’s basically Stu’s fault.  I like to blame things on Stu.  It’s easy.  We were partners when I was a reserve police officer.  He was a real police officer so he made the big decisions.  I basically followed his lead.  And to this day, he’s my best friend.  Now that he’s retired, we still hang out quite a bit.  Not enough to suit me, but probably sometimes more than he can stand.

In his retirement, he builds beautiful furniture.  He’s got a great shop in his garage.  The only thing that could actually make it better would be if he had more room.  It’s jammed with saws and drills and planers and sanders of every size and utility.  Then throw in clamps and routers and chisels and a zillion other things that I have no idea what you do with, and you’ve got Stu’s garage.  Plus there’s a vacuum system for drawing the sawdust from the air.  And wood.  There’s got to be wood when he’s working on a project.  The place is so jammed, that it’s hard for me to find a place to sit.  Either making it hard for me to find a place to sit is his actual plan, or he’s really figured out how to maximize his space.

Planning

I show up in the afternoons when I have no work—or I should be working but would rather interrupt his woodworking—with a few stogies, perhaps a large ice tea from the local drive thru and my camping chair.  See, I haven’t let him outsmart me.  The place is so crowded and uncomfortable, the only solution for me is to wedge my camping chair in a tight corner somewhere, fire up a stogie, and sit back and help him with his current project.

We’ve come to call these afternoon or evening sessions our planning meetings.  We used to get together to plan our trips and adventures.  In reality, it was just an excuse to sit around smoking cigars, so now we just use it as an excuse to sit around smoking cigars.  And we’ve progressed to the point where we now sometimes meet to plan on our next planning meeting.  Very complex stuff this

But back to fly-fishing…

Many years ago, when we were on patrol, we’d drive in circles, looking for bad guys and bad drivers, taking the occasional police call, and talking.  We talked about everything.  He had been an officer with the city for long enough to get five weeks vacation each year.  And each summer, when it was five hundred degrees in Palm Springs, he’d go up to Montana.

Upon his return, he’d tell me how much he thought I’d love it up there.  He talked about the pine and aspen trees, the lakes and rivers and fly-fishing.  I explained to him that I had bass fished in my younger (high school) days.  But I thought that all this waving a fly rod in the air and flipping the line back and forth would be too much for me to manage.  He assured me it wouldn’t.

One summer, about fifteen years ago, I went with him for a week; and I’ve been back every summer since.

So you see, it’s his fault.  Had he not invited me, I’d have never gotten myself into this…

For those of you who have never been fly-fishing, let me describe it here.  For those of you who do fly fish, tell me I’m wrong.

How to Begin Fly Fishing

The first thing any fly-fisherman must do is purchase fly-fishing gear.  Actually, that’s not correct.  First, take out a second on your home to pay for your fly-fishing gear.

To begin with, you’ll need some sort of protection against the cold water in which you will invariably find yourself plunging—I mean standing.  So you need some waders.  These come in various styles and uses, from the coldest/driest, to a simple pair of nylon pants to be worn in August for that three-day stretch of Summer when it is warm enough outside—and the water is also warm enough—to stand in the river, not caring if you are wet.  The other 362 days in Montana it’s a comfy 40 below.

Most waders come with only “soft” feet, meaning you must buy a pair of boots to wear over them in the water.  The best of these come with felt soles on them and are far superior to rubber soles as they help prevent slipping on the rocks that line the bottom of the river.

Fly Fishing is Really Quite Simple

Remember all of the times in your life when you walked on moss-covered bowling balls while rapidly surging water swirled around your feet trying to suck you under, and while you tried in vain to keep your balance, flying insects swarmed around your eyes and into your ears and mouth and down the back of your collar?  This is exactly like that; only here you also have to balance a fly-rod and reel in your non-insect-swatting hand while wearing a fly-fishing vest which is filled with six hundred pounds of fly boxes and fly-floatant and split shot weights and strike indicators and extra leaders and spools of tippet in countless sizes and anti-itch bug gel (called After-Bite, so you know you’re already going to lose to the bugs) and on the front, from cool little retractable hooks, dangle nippers and surgical clamps and fly driers and there’s a large sheep-skin patch on the left front pocket for hanging used flies so they can dry before you put them back into one of your fly boxes and from the back of the vest hangs a fishing net which you must remember to wet in the river each time you go out so it begins to show use so the other fly-fisherman in the camp think you’re catching fish; all the while trying strike a balance between your innate aversion to drowning and trying not to flail around too desperately lest you wrench your back or dislocate a hip, but more importantly not frighten any fish which aren’t already in hysterics over watching you try and progress a measly three more feet up the river.

And a hat is a good idea.

Fishing hats come in many styles and shapes.  You can simply wear a baseball cap, or you can get a lightweight hat with a brim all the way around to help protect you from the sun and rain.  Some come with a flap that hangs from the back to help protect you from sunburn on your neck.  The flap also covers the back or your ears to protect them from a fly hook zipping past at 250 miles-per-hour and lodging, quite deeply and with searing pain, into the back of your ear.

The hospital in Ennis, Montana has more than one display board filled with flies and lures the ER doctors have removed from various body parts of fishermen.  Many an argument has ensued when a fisherman is unwilling to part with his lucky fly.  So what if it was lodged in my left nad!  They’ve been hitting it!  I want it back! The doctors will, I’ve heard, give the fly back to the fisherman, but the fisherman must first decide if he wants to leave the doc with his new souvenir, or have the doc put the fly back from whence he removed it.  Doctors: 13,548 Fly-fishermen: 0.

But lets get back to the river.

Once you become more skilled in negotiating the slick rocks and boulders (and sticks and logs and underwater weeds and moss), and you can begin to move about with a bit more confidence (and any gashes have been sutured, broken bones set and contusions sufficiently iced), you try to spot fish rising in the river above where you now teeter—I mean stand—and try to catch a wild trout!

Fish face upriver and swim, usually in place, waiting for food to float with the current to them.  Ninety percent of the time, trout eat bugs under the water.  The other ten percent of the time, they rise to the surface and go after bugs that are returning to the river to lay their eggs or emerging from their larval state.

Entomology 101

Most water born insects incubate in eggs attached to rocks at the bottom of a river.  They hatch and come out of the egg and begin to rise to the surface of the river.  At the surface, they emerge from their larval shuck and wait for their wings to dry before flying from the water.  Once free of the water, they have a glass of chardonnay, mate, and then return to the river, landing on the surface to lay their eggs.  The eggs float down and stick to the rocks at the bottom and the insects, having laid their eggs, die on the water and float away.  It is exactly the same mating ritual as your average accountant.

Wild trout and other species of fish, eat these bugs at most stages in their life cycle.

Fly-fishermen have an assortment of names for the varying stages of the life cycle of insects on the river; and you will learn them after only a few decades.  But to simplify here, when you are fly-fishing; you are either dry fly-fishing or wet fly-fishing (also called nymphing).

The dry flies imitate a fly on the top of the water and the wet fly, or nymph, imitates a fly that is in the underwater cycle of its life.

There are those purists who will never fish anything but dry flies.  And it is a lot more fun.  But on a recent trip to Montana I met a few guys who never fish anything but nymphs and they still have a great time, enjoy nature, and come back year after year.  Nymph fishing is a lot easier and will catch many more fish.  The wet fly is tied onto your line.  A split-shot weight or two is pinched onto your line a foot of more above the fly.  And several feet above that, depending on the depth of the water, a floating strike indicator is attached.  Then, to nymph, you flip your line into the river above you and watch the strike indicator float down river until it drags across the current or reaches the end of the length of your line.  Then you repeat.

I heard a comedian once talk about the instructions on the back of shampoo bottles.  Wet hair.  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.  His joke was that, in following these directions, you would stay there until the bottle is empty and you’ve gone through all of your hot water.

Nymphing is a lot like this.  You flip your line up river, watch your indicator float to the end of your line, and repeat.  If the indicator dips or zigs, maybe on rare occasion even zags, you lift the tip of your rod and hook your fish.  Easy!

Beautiful Scenery

On my first few trips to Montana, my buddy had me nymphing.  He wanted to encourage me by having me catch some fish.  And I am proud to say that within only a few short summers I caught a fish!  When I returned from my vacation, friends and family would invariably ask about my trip; how was the scenery near West Yellowstone?  All I could tell them was that Montana looks like a little orange ball floating down a river a billion times.

But what about Old Faithful and Gibbons Falls and the upper and lower Yellowstone Falls and the Lamar Valley and Hebgen Lake and the Madison River Valley and the wild moose and bear and bison?  Nope.  Montana looks like a little orange ball floating repeatedly down a river about 10 to 20 feet away from me.

Then I finally graduated to dry fly fishing.  It is more difficult but much more fun.  As I said, wild trout eat underwater ninety percent of the time.  But the other ten percent of the time they rise to pluck flies from the top of the water.  There is something primal about hunting these wild trout.  It taps into our genetic memory of when ancestors past had to go out and hunt in order to survive.  Much the same as you hunt for a Starbucks every morning in order to survive.

When you see a trout working his “lane” in a river, and you delicately land your fly a few feet above him and let it drift to him, and he sees it and thinks it is a real fly and leaps from the water to take it and confers upon you a heart-pounding, adrenalin-filled five-minutes of excitement as he runs and leaps and dances across the top of the water, it will be just about as rewarding as that “special” event your wife saves for your birthday each year (or decade).

Now all you need to know is when to switch from nymphing to dry fly-fishing; when this glorious window-of-opportunity to cast to rising trout and experience this thrill-of-a-lifetime will occur.

Get Some Help at Your Local Fly Shop

There are those who have lived for decades—some, a lifetime—in the mountains above six thousand feet along the Continental Divide.  And if you are lucky enough to be in a small, local fly shop when they decide to impart their decades of fly-fishing wisdom to a novice, you will hear of everything from time-of-day and delicately-drifting-cloud-cover to matching-the-hatch and lunar gravitational consequence to the mating cycle of the callibeatis and tectonic drift to wild fish vs. hatchery fish vs. hydro-colon therapy.  And more.  And more and more and more.

But this is your lucky day.  I will now save you years of time and herein impart to you my secret of when to switch from nymphing to dry flies.  At this writing, I have only been fly-fishing for 15 years.  And that’s not really accurate because I have only been fly-fishing for 15 summers.  If you figure two to three weeks vacation, each summer for 15 years—I’ll say about 40 weeks—at seven days per week, that’s 280 days of vacation in the last 15 years.  Let’s say I fished half of those days (because with stogies and sitting in a camp chair and napping, there are clearly other things to do) for an average of say three hours per day, that’s 420 hours of fishing (or 17.5 days of non-stop, round-the-clock fishing).

With that limited amount of experience I can still tell you exactly when to switch from nymphs to dry fly-fishing.  It is when you have dry fly-fished for hour after hour and your shoulder is begging you for Naproxin and you haven’t seen a fish rise in all that time and are beginning to think there are no fish in the entire river.  So, to prove there are some fish, you fumble and fiddle with tying a nymph onto your line.  And that means trying to put a .004 inch piece of monofilament through a hole the size of a gnat’s sphincter while the wind whips the line all over the place.  After you drop three of those wet flies into the river then finally get the little piece of tippet through the eye hole of your last wet fly. And after 25 attempts, finally tie a correct knot that doesn’t slip through when you snug it tight and after, instead of clipping the dangling end of the tippet, you clip the fly off the line and have to begin the process all over.  When you finally get the wet fly on the line and you pinch on a slip-shot weight or two and loop a neon indicator onto the line and finally cast up-river for your first drift to under-water-feeding trout; that’s when the fish will start rising.  Simple really.

One of My Typical Evenings of Fishing

Let me take you with me on one of my recent outings.

This was the last night of vacation for my nephew, Geoffrey.  My sister, Maria (his mother), told me the other day that she was recently looking at pictures of me, some years ago, showing a much younger Geoffrey how to cast a fly line at this very campground.  Geoff loves to fish and has become quite an accomplished fisherman.  He fishes year round in Southern California, mostly for bass.  He has gotten into tying most of his own flies and even fly-fishes for bass in some of the So. Cal. lakes.  But this is the Madison River in Western Montana.  Can’t get much better in the United States.

After a family dinner at one of the campsites, we suited up and walked the few hundred yards down to a favorite spot on the river, between Hebgen Lake Dam and Earthquake Lake.  It was a beautiful night and the fish were already rising when we arrived about 7:00 p.m.

There was no need to cast very far.  Fish were rising less than ten feet away and all around.  Fishing has been very good this August and I’ve had great luck with a Parachute Adams and a Sparkle Dun.  I could already see this was going to be an epic evening as there were, no exaggeration, a billion fish rising.  I cast and recast.  I cast and mended and retrieved and recast.  I made darn near perfect floats right over their heads; right over the head of each and every fish within 30 feet of me.  I got nothing.  Bupkiss.  Oogatz.  I tied on different flies.  I went through my previously successful Adams and Sparkle Dun.  I tied on an Elk Hair Caddis, an Elk Hair Caddis with some flash in it.  I tried Sparkle Duns in Epeorus, Callibaetis, Caddis Green, Pale Yellow, Medium-Pale Yellow, Sort-of Pale Yellow, Pale Yellow that wasn’t so pale, off-Pale Yellow, Lemon-pale Yellow, Pale Yellow with a hint of Lime and even Peach.  Nothing.  Not a strike, not even a look from the voracious fish.

This is a creature with a brain the size of a pea.  I am a creature with a much larger brain.  Really.  Yet there was nothing I could do to get these fish to bite.  As the evening grew darker I even went with the traditional Here fishy fishy fishy! call.  In not much time at all, I noticed that my fish call had progressed to You stupid F&^&%^ing sons-of-*&^%^$#s I swear I’m going to come over there and $%^# your &^%$ing heads in!

OK, Bill.  You are a full-grown adult and you are standing in a river, cursing at fish.  What a relaxing vacation you’re having…

Lightening Striking Again….

To add to my enjoyment of this particular evening, it began raining; lightly at first, but it steadily grew heavier.  Luckily for me, I had planned ahead and was wearing nylon fishing pants and a shirt that only allows the rain to penetrate as far as your skin.  With water dripping from the bill of my hat and running icy rivulets down the middle of my back, I cast and cast.  I tried fly after fly in the darkening evening.  When I began to see fish nosing my flies aside to get to others, I began to lose hope.

Then I heard thunder in the (not too) distance, which could only mean lightening.  And I am standing knee-deep in water, drenched to the bone from rain, waiving a nine-foot fiberglass-lightening rod.  Plus I had, within the past few moments, released a very loud, borderline-blasphemous tirade against some of His gentle creatures.

But more and more fish were rising, some only a few feet away!

As rain fell more heavily and thunder rumbled closer, I cast to several more rising fish.  They snapped at flies on either side and in front and back of my drifts.  Then it came time for the final straw.  As it rained harder and harder, a beautiful Rainbow Trout came up, gently took my fly in its fin and swam over to me, and let it drop with a look of, “Have you considered bowling?”  As he swan away, I thought that he was, perhaps, right.  Not only am I talking to fish, I am agreeing with them…  And hallucinating that fish are talking to me…

Now all I have to do to complete this evening will be to slog back across the creek and through the campground and answer every inquiry about my luck with, “No.  I didn’t catch anything!”

Then I saw some flashes of lightening in the clouds and, using the old for-every-four-Mississippi’s-you-count-before-you-hear-the-thunder technique, I calculated the lightening was less than a mile away.  OK, I had to go in.  Sure I was brainless enough to stand in a driving rain and curse at fish, but what kind of dimwit would stay out in lightening?!  Please don’t e-mail me your responses to that question.