Fishing vs. Catching

To the casual angler these concepts might be the same, so why an essay on fishing vs. catching? Because they are different. Fishing can be equated to a symphonic journey. There is the opening theme, explorations of the theme and digressions, building on the theme and tension and the final release of that tension at the end which leaves one feeling exhausted and fulfilled and refreshed all at the same time. Catching is just the final act. We miss the whole process, the whole experience. Only part of the music is heard.

 

But isn’t catching the ultimate aim? Isn’t that what the game is about? To answer that we might want to think about why we are standing in a river with a long pole in our hand fiddling with bait made of fur and feathers and not fishing with a net.

The act of fishing is a hope in itself. If the journey is long and obstacles are overcome and anticipation mixes with temporary defeats, oh how much joyous when we bring the fish to hand.

The little problems of fly-fishing constitute so much of that journey. How do we get a fly to that fish tucked under the tag alders? How can we make that cast across conflicting currents? Is this the right fly? Would an emerger be a better choice? Why didn’t that fish eat my fly? What kind of bird is that? These intensely absorbing little problems are the meat that makes the sip of wine at the end taste so much better. Enjoy the whole meal, not just the desert if you will.

What if we were fated like Theodore Castwell to catch a fish on every cast? We would be in hell much like old Ted.

Predictability is the enemy of variety, and variety is the spice of our angling. NOT knowing what is around that next bend of the river is as important as knowing what fly the fish are taking. The inability to predict results and the dilemmas that arise make us think and reason, speculate and form theories, which change every time the river bends again.

We are involved in the hope for a bright connection, not just connected without connection like Mr. Castwell. If the fishing is good, we need to judge how much is ‘Enough.’ If we don’t, we may become drunk with reward and no longer taste the wine.

I hooked my largest fish of the year on a bamboo fly rod resurrected from the dead by an expert restorer. It is a unique rod to say the least. It may be one of a kind and the maker was an eccentric genius. I fought the fish and got a jump out of it… enough to tell that it was a chrome female steelhead with just a hint of rose around the cheek. Then the fish got off. I smiled and walked off the run, leaving it to my two partners. I had sipped this exquisite wine and tasted enough. Another time I hooked and landed a beautiful fish in Idaho, and spent the rest of the time on the run eating wild blackberries at riverside.

Was I slowing down, or just sucking the marrow out of life without as the quote goes “Choking on the bone…?” Perhaps both, for they are related.

The anglers I enjoy fishing with the most appreciate time on the water without qualifications. A few fish may equate a great day, as does seeing an eagle, making a memorable cast and hooking an especially difficult trout of only 10 inches, enjoying a good apple and sandwich on the bank, or simply being happy for someone else to express joy at catching a fish.

The word ‘Memorable’ stands out to me here, for when I close my eyes and begin to drift off to sleep, I never see the fish, only the beautiful scenery and the water. Those memories are what we are out there for, not just numbers of fish.

But then there IS the catching element, and without it the journey would rather lack a conclusion, however scenic and memorable that journey is. If we got skunked all the time, we would be in a different little corner of hell than Mr. Castwell, but just as bothered. Getting skunked can also be a good thing, for it wets the appetite. We will get them ‘Next time!’ When that next time comes the wine tastes just a little bit sweeter.

So I will be fishing tomorrow. Catching? That remains to be seen… but I will savor the day nonetheless.

Trout are like a box of chocolates…

Trout are like a box of chocolates… you never know what you are going to get
Or…Dry fly fishing and the mysteries of probability.

Predictability…

 If this sport were entirely predictable, we wouldn’t enjoy it so much. The very unpredictability, and resulting challenges and on the water problem solving is what makes fly-fishing a thinking sport, and none more than fishing the dry-fly on a trout stream. Predicting bug hatches and a trout’s reaction or lack of reaction to them is an inexact science at best. Yes, we can hypothesize what SHOULD happen during a set period of time given the temperature of the water, cloud cover, the angles of the sun, water clarity, etc., but in reality, what should happen becomes more what  could not happen. Like predicting the weather. There might be a tornado forming in that storm, or not. The squall line might drift off and miss us entirely, or we might be caught under the bridge as hail falls dangerously around us. We just don’t know. Life and fishing are not an exact science. Laws are not always universal. Theories may or may not play out before our eyes.

We all know that Blue Wing Olive mayflies tend to like to hatch in overcast conditions. Cloud cover and a drizzle might be a good indicator of a likely BWO emergence, but then again, it might not. I have fished BWO hatches in a cloudless sky with the sun directly overhead. Puzzling through this, I surmised that the bugs wanted to hatch earlier in the day when the sky was cloudy, but the water temperature had taken a plunge with a chilly cold front that passed by in the night. The sun warmed the water by a few degrees, and the bugs that were ready to hatch made a brief appearance. The trout wouldn’t take a caddis anymore, but became briefly obsessed with sipping gray-green bonbons.

Notice I used the word ‘Surmised’; for the truth is that I could be correct in my assumptions, or completely off base. Attempting to correlate the weather, stream entomology, and the behavioral psychology of a creature with a brain the size of a pea can leave you standing in the middle of the creek scratching your head with your waders around your ankles. The red-winged blackbird sitting on the branch above your head and squawking might be warning us of a nearby nest, or if we listen closely enough, might be saying “Hey you old fool with the goofy hat and long pole, don’t think about it too hard, shit just happens!”

Then we sit down on the bank and busy ourselves with searches through fly-boxes, looking for the answers to life, and quietly day-dreaming.

We think of that time on a spring-creek when the day was overcast and no bugs of notice were on the water and we had a ball catching and releasing thirty or more wild browns, finally losing count as our tattered caddis, now bereft of hackle and half the wing gets sucked under by yet another fish as we were standing on the bank swatting mosquitos, and our fly (now in name only) was dangling off the tip of our rod innocently and right at our feet. We recall we read extensively of the wise Marinaro and Flick that trout responded to hatches on the water, and that they were fussy and spooky creatures. We laugh and congratulate ourselves on our fishing prowess. We know what we are doing. We have it all figured out. The gods of fly-fishing are smiling on us.

Not so fast. He who chuckles and swells with pride and smiles should be prepared for the fickle nature of trout and bugs.

 The next piece of water on the same creek is a couple hundred yards upstream, but in the time it took you to walk there and eat a sandwich washed down with this morning’s stale and cold coffee, something karmic happened. You can’t see it. Wizened old anglers might just sense it. The sun peeked out just a tiny fraction from behind a cloud… just for a few seconds. Just enough to…
In the new water you work upstream with a fresh caddis fly, popping it under branches, hanging it over a blade of grass over the stream, twitching it over little buckets and current seams, silently amazed at your casting and presentation prowess. What happened to the fish? Did someone drop poison in the river? Is this section fishless? Then you spot a riseform in a tiny riffle. The caddis goes ignored three times through. Then another rise. You put the caddis over this fish and it stops rising altogether. The caddis just worked like a charm for the past four hours, how could this be happening? You can’t see anything hatching, so you surmise the trout must be eating small stuff. That catskill BWO in a size 20 stuck in your hat might work. Sure enough, you finally catch a small 8-inch fish on the BWO, right as the sun peeks out again. This makes no sense you exclaim while shaking your head in wonder and frustration. As you sit on a log midstream and try to figure out what to do next, a pod of big browns swims lazily by. You swear that the biggest one just winked at you.

It is at this moment of soul-searching in our attempts at a symbiosis of fly, nature, water and fish that madness can take hold. We all have been there. In times past we raged and swore. We told wives and fishing partners that we had a lousy fishing trip. We let it get to us. Somewhere in the progression from wanting to catch all the fish in the river and prove a point to ourselves that should never have needed to be proved, to a quiet and calm appreciative angler we learned to laugh at it all; to laugh at ourselves.

 Remember the guy we used to fish with ten years back? The guy who seemed possessed of an inner-fire to catch fish? The guy who always had an agenda? Who had no sense of proportion or humor? He doesn’t fly-fish for trout anymore.

We get up off the log, give a big hearty laugh, and walk the bank of the stream with our fly hooked to the keeper.

Don’t you just love it? What a sport!

Perhaps sometimes having no plan, other just to have fun and wet a line, may be a better approach than having an agenda set in stone. Sometimes we might have to just let go. I always try to ask an angler after they tell me a story of success or woe, “Well, did you have fun?” A goofy day fishing and learning the hard way the immensity of natural probability and Murphy’s law still beats a day at the office.

Given the fickle nature of trout and bugs, I like to be prepared. In my old waxed cotton stream bag nests seven or eight fly boxes jammed with imitations of every conceivable winged thing. They are all meticulously organized in rows like toy soldiers waiting for the call to arms. Crane fly hatch? Check. I got that covered. Caddis? Yes sir! I have Goddards, Henryvills, CDC, comparaduns, Elk hair, X-caddis etc. etc. Boxes of midges and blue-winged olives, march browns, hendricksons, etc. etc. etc.
Am I the over-prepared angler sinking into the creek bottom from the weight of all those tiny hooks? Do I look like the dungeons and dragons adventurer with an absurd collection of gear weighing me down? Remember this all fits neatly into a small stream bag.

 It always amazes me how anglers can approach a multiple day trip by going to a fly-shop and requesting “Three or four flies that are good now.” Three or four? I lose more than that in a day just to bushes, trees, and carelessly tied knots. What would happen if a major hatch occurs and you have only two flies matching the bug on the water? The answer is that you are screwed. Better hope that you don’t get bitten off by a big boy! Time now to go to a heavier tippet that may save your fly, but also brazenly advertise your presence to the fish. Let’s see, $600 in plane fare, $300 for the motel, $450 for the rental car….. and six dollars on flies.

Back to the chocolates…

I finished a recent trip to the driftless area of southwest Wisconsin by half-heatedly fishing my way more or less in the direction of home. I had to leave by four P.M. in order to get back in time for life. The day was bright and sunny without a cloud in the sky. After driving around for an hour looking for a half-remembered piece of water, becoming lost, and having my car attacked by a stray dog, I found myself on a stretch of a creek I had never fished before. Another angler had just left the pull-out. Looking at my watch I realized that this would be my last fishing of the trip. I put on a caddis fly and hoped for the best. I call this prospecting for trout. Exploring and snooping being as important as the fishing. Poking and sniffing at the chocolates to try to guess if I would get a mint crème or a cocoanut filling. Looking at the water from a crouch behind the tall grass I noticed the lack of insects other than the ever-present deer-flies and gnats. No trout were rising.

One of my eccentric faults is to fish the dry over the wet under any condition if possible. Yes, it is my own choice, and not an affectation. I just love the visual senses involved, and the challenge. Under that bright sky with no bugs on the water I had a ball finding the one or two (or none) fish in each pool or run that would rise. Caught or just raised and missed, it didn’t matter. Getting back to the car in time for the three-hour drive back, I watched as a car slowed up and stopped. It was the other angler wanting to know how I did. When I told him he was filled with wonder. He had used a nymph with an indicator and had caught a few fish too, but he was amazed that I had used a dry in those conditions. The only reason I caught fish on a dry was because I was using a dry. You never know what you are going to get when you reach into that box of chocolates.

Be prepared though for anything to happen, and just have fun. Be dogmatic or pragmatic. Fish the same fly stubbornly or switch flies until something works. Spend more time watching the river than fishing, or shotgun the water placing your fly in probable spots and moving on. It is all good. Just remember that you are not in charge here. The trout are…
And anything can happen…

Faith

Faith...

No, not that kind.

The other day, when giving a seminar on dry fly fishing, I was taking questions, and attempting, poorly as it was, to describe a feeling I sometimes get when on the stream that comes deep from the river or my soul that whispers “There, put your fly there.”

I had to close my eyes and pause for a moment to see in my mind’s eye the symbiosis of water knowledge and feeling which leads the fly angler to that simple confidence of ‘just knowing.’

The spring creek bubbled, projected on the back of my closed eyes, and I saw not the water, but the spaces in-between. Not the obvious riffle, but the soft spot just past the protruding stick.

This little spring creek had beaten up on me so many times that I started doubting my own quixotic self-torture at fishing it at all. I would place my fly where I knew in my mind that there would be a fish, but my sense of feeling was seldom rewarded. Was it the creek? Was it me? What was I doing wrong?

What this one special day portended was a glorious proof-positive that indeed, where I thought there should be a brown trout lurking, there would be.

There were no hatches to speak of. The sky was cloudy, but no more than other days. Thinking back, I could not put my finger on what was different that day, but it was different, very different. As I made my up the pools and leapfrogged the riffles, I stubbornly used my little 7’ rod to place a caddis dry with precision in areas I had cast to a hundred times before with little or no success. Sometimes things actually do go right in fly-fishing. These days are the ones you hear about in stories and tales. Let me be the first to admit that for every tale of heroism and leaping trout, there are ten untold tales of defeat, frustration and humility, but not that day.

The first cast brought up a beautiful 10” brown who ate the caddis with sloppy abandon. The second cast went to the opposite side of the riffle against a root ball. A 12” brown sipped the fly in. For the rest of the afternoon the trout played out a concerto of affirmation, as everywhere I placed my fly, where previously there was an unanswered offering, now there were fish intoxicated with life and vitality. Like late-night diners at the last-chance café’, they ate whatever was placed before them. Upside down caddis, easy over caddis, caddis with gravy, blue-light special caddis, caddis with meatballs: it just didn’t matter.

The next week, in the same conditions on the same creek, I met with mixed results. The fish were not as glad-happy and reckless, but I found them in the same places. My mistrusted instinct had proved right all along.

This was what I was trying to put into words that day at the seminar. Sometimes, we just have to trust. Trust that after all the hours reading water, and saying to ourselves, “There just has to be a fish in that corner pocket,” that there is. We just have to trust. We have to have faith in our instincts. If we pass the spot up, we will never know…

Every year I fish slower and slower, and it has nothing to do with age. It has to do with thinking, with sitting and observing, and then trusting. The creek still beats up on me from time to time, but as I catch its rhythms and place myself in harmony, with no pressure to catch a fish. It rewards me. All it took was a little faith.