Troutsmith (9 page)

Using second-degree time travel to reprise some of my fishing life has been interesting and a bit tricky. Tricky because so much of what fishing is about is connected to particular places, and some of the places that I fished as a youth have changed beyond recognition. Wisconsin's Mill Creek is one example. This Iowa County stream took me under her wing that rainy June day in 1977 and taught me how to catch trout from a small spring creek, an environment very different from the large eastern freestone streams where I caught my first trout on flies. A tail-water fishery below Twin Valley Dam, Mill Creek always had a diverse fish population. Along with brown trout I caught bluegill, crappie, largemouth bass, yellow perch, creek chub, common shiner, and several species of dace. Even my first two muskellunge on flies were caught in this stream, from the plunge pool at the foot of Twin Valley Dam in the early 1980s. Today there are many more homes along the stream, and the new landowners generally aren't as friendly to anglers as the old farmers used to be. The volume of water in the channel of Mill Creek seems to be significantly lower than it was years ago, but whatever the reasons, warm-water fish are still present in numbers but trout are few and far between.

Happily, streams like Wisconsin's Castle Rock Creek and Pennsylvania's Little Lehigh River are much the same today as they were a generation ago. Of course Thomas Wolfe was right; we can never really go home again because we're not the same people we were then. Casting is one example. In 1977 I couldn't cast a measured fifty feet, but today I can easily drill a three-inch target with a fly at sixty feet using my youth outfit. Reading water is another difference. My experiences with electro-shocking streams during my college years completely altered my understanding of where trout will hold in a river, to the point where today people accuse me of “conjuring trout” from empty water. I can easily catch more and larger trout today with my youth outfit than I could thirty-five years ago. Can the
magic
of those early days be recaptured? Again, just try it yourself and see; that's really the only way to learn anything about fishing.

Third-degree time travel happens when I fish historic water with classic tackle as well as classic methods. Now we're in dangerous territory. Third-degree time travel can suck you in and never let you go.

Like many anglers I've accumulated a thicket of fishing rods over the years, but one stands out as the queen of my collection. Unscrew the brass cap on the rod tube and you'll detect the ancient, unmistakable odor of tung-oil varnish as the nickel-silver ends of four sections of split cane fly rod come into view. Gently pull out the rod bag and you'll notice that the original label is still there, handwritten in India ink almost a century ago. The label identifies the vendor as William Mills & Sons of New York City, and the rod as an H. L. Leonard “Tournament,” model 51-H, 9 feet long, 5⅛ ounces, and two tips. The rod sections are in beautiful, lightly used original condition and everything is intact right down to the little nickel-silver caps fitted onto the female ferules. The William Mills label, the style of the Leonard logo stamped on the butt-cap, the agate stripping guide, and the lack of intermediate wraps on the rod sections show that the rod was probably built between 1915 and 1925.

This rod means a lot to me because Theodore Gordon had one just like it. Gordon is often called “the father of dry fly fishing in America,” and he was one of the founders of the Catskill School of dry fly fishing that evolved on rivers like the Beaverkill, Esopus, and Neversink. In the spring of 1912, a group of Gordon's friends got together with the goal of purchasing the “finest rod that could be bought” and presenting it to him. Gordon later recounted the event in a letter published in the British
Fishing Gazette
: “A number of delightful friends of mine got together recently and decided to send me a splendid ‘Leonard' rod, one of the ‘Tournament' class. . . . It is a very powerful rod, a duplicate, I understand, of Val Conson's ‘little Leonard.' What a lovely thing to do!” Val Conson was the pen name of British angler G. E. M. Skues, who has justly been called “the father of modern nymph fishing.” My goal is to take the Leonard on a fly-fishing pilgrimage to the Catskills, fish a Quill Gordon dry fly across the broad pools of the Beaverkill, and then travel to Winchester, England, and use the rod to fish nymphs in the classic style on the River Itchen, Skues's home river. That will be time travel indeed. And if I should not return, then so be it.

To novice anglers it must seem like the experienced people have all the answers, catch scads of fish every time out, and never have a bad day on the water. The truth is that anybody who claims never to have had a bad day on the water lies about other things too. We do tend to dwell on our successes, and so we should. Always make an effort to remember the good times. If you have a rough day fishing, the best thing to do is forget it and go fishing again tomorrow. To prove this in my own case, all I have to do is look through the pages of my journals.

I've kept a fishing journal every year since 1975. My first journals are handwritten, some in stylish cursive writing, but in 1994 I began using a computer to record data about specific fishing days and descriptions of my experiences. My journals now fill a couple of sagging shelves in the basement next to my fly-tying bench, and as you can imagine I have a small mountain of data and information that I can consult during the fishing season, and a treasure trove of memories I can browse through whenever I'm in a reflective mood. Never pass up an opportunity to look through the journals of an experienced angler or hunter. Such a chance doesn't happen very often, if ever. Since as a reader you've stayed with me this far, I've decided to open up Fort Knox and let you take at least a handful of gold dust. Here are a few selections from my journals, which describe many good days and some bad days. The entries may be condensed, but the journaling is copied faithfully with no editing.

I learned early on that crayfish, even large adult crayfish, are relished by trout in Wisconsin streams. Every season I catch trout, especially browns, whose abdomens are crunchy to the touch because of all the crayfish they've eaten. I also think that I had a better handle on what trout were really eating and why they took my flies in those early years, when I killed many more trout than I do now. I never killed a trout without dissecting their gut and carefully examining what I found there. The evidence about what they'd been eating when I caught them was right there in front of me with no guesswork. Now I release almost all of my trout, but sometimes I get a nagging feeling that I'm only making assumptions about why the fish take my flies. I construct nice, tidy, direct cause-and-effect stories that satisfy my analytical mind, but the stories are probably fiction more often than I'd like to believe.

From the autumn of 1982 through the summer of 1988 I lived close to several Lake Michigan tributary streams, and I could fish them whenever the water was right and I had the time. In contrast to the large rivers that flow in from the Michigan side of the big lake, Wisconsin's Lake Michigan tribs tend to be small and low-flow except after a rain. To fish many of them successfully at that time, an angler had to live close by or have a friend who could be contacted to see if the water levels were right for good fishing. When the water was high, especially if the stream was falling and clearing after a good rain, Teresa and I had some amazing days and gained lots of experience playing big migratory trout and Pacific salmon on fly rods. In looking over my journals from those years, I find that my most productive day of this kind of fishing was 1 November 1987, when I caught 40 Chinook salmon, 19 coho salmon, and 3 brown trout between 11 a.m. and 3:15 p.m. using traditional steelhead flies like those mentioned above. I quit at 3:15 because my wrists and forearms were worn out. In those years my largest steelhead was a polychrome 30-inch Skamania-strain that weighed 8 pounds (1987) and a 31-inch Chambers Creek–strain that weighed 12 pounds (1984). My largest Lake Michigan brown trout (1983) was 29 inches long and weighed 11 pounds. The Chinooks topped out around 40 inches and 25 pounds. It might surprise you, but I really don't miss this fishing too much. The problems were the setting and the amount of fishing pressure that I sometimes had to deal with on the larger streams that were more suited to fly fishing. I was catching Alaska-type fish, but eastern Wisconsin just wasn't Alaska. Then too, I didn't hunt in those years. Now I look forward to October and November as good months to chase a pointing dog through the woods and fields while carrying a racy 20-gauge double, and deer season in Wisconsin is for deer hunting.