Freestones

The Fish & Bugs Of Fishy, Buggy Places

With the sun sipping rays against the river, which by the way was roaring after significant rainfall, not a single person down there felt they had worn too few layers on the way in. If the sun was hitting you, you were more than warm enough.

That’s not always the case so early in the season, but nice steady weather had rolled in, despite the day before being borderline frigid. Too cold, I figured, for bugs to start coming off, but imagine my surprise while sitting on the bank after Cameron had just hooked and landed a beautiful rainbow trout, when a tiny little black stonefly perched itself on the knee pad of my waders.

We stared at one another for a few moment, though neither of us had much to say to the other, before finally parting ways.

From there, with the sun shining through the mostly bare limbs of the trees in the narrow valley, I looked downstream and could see plainly the hatch that was starting to come off. Here and there were a scant few more of those same tiny little stoneflies flying awkwardly overtop of the river, some barely keeping it together while others seemed to catch a breeze and glide from one bank to the other without much effort at all.

The river is sending itself out to bigger pastures, in a sense, and in an attempt to see just what’s going on beneath it, I set the 3wt down against a log and start turning over rocks. Most yield nothing at all, but a few reveal tiny caddis larvae, and a handful of mottled mayfly nymphs that squirm and wriggle when exposed to the air. They scurry for the underside of the stone before I place it back into the water and look upstream to where the rest of the guys are picking their way through pockets of trouty-looking froth.

Let’s say that, hypothetically, I had already fallen in love with this place before ever having dropped a heavily weighted nymph into it. It happened on the hike in, which was scenic, shaded and rocky. Parts of it involved trails, others not so much. We were maybe halfway to where we’d come to a mental crossroads, forcing us to make a decision to continue to our intended destination or start fishing, that way we would have more time to work our way back downstream, when I felt that subtle childish urge to wander and explore.

Maybe you know how that can be, maybe you don’t.

The hillsides have sporadic patches of Ramps growing, while the valley floor gives the hint that we’re perhaps a week too late for fiddle heads. No one is here. No anglers or casual hikers out for exercise in the spring heat. Just tumbling runoff and us.

And trout.

There’s plenty of potential here as things start to work themselves out in the story sort of way and friends start to get into fish. First one, then another, Rainbows mostly, but a Brook Trout, too. The story unfolds in its own way, organically ripe with a plump plot and a firm stem. Cameron says that the fishing can be fantastic later in the season when the water comes down and the trout have their situations figured out, but it’s pretty okay now, and even if it wasn’t, I have to figure that no one here cares with a scene like this.

But then that later potential of light rods, long leaders, delicate casts and floating dries for semi-picky trout starts to burrow into my thoughts, and I’m a goner, ya know? In fact, my imagination starts to run wild with how the river might look once the buds blossom and the canopy closes in, maybe this river appear more wild than it already does.

Now I’m downright infatuated by it.

Back home, we don’t have anything like that. The warm water fisheries are incredible, and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a solid tradeoff, but I’m also a massive sucker for a bumbling stream and bug-hungry trout that don’t mind looking upward for a couple of months out of the year, and I start to “want”.

So by now, having moved downriver a distance collectively, the water is saying all the right things to me. I keep an eye on the guys and they’re jump spotting the tastiest sections of water and working them over, rod tips held out and keeping eyes trained where the leader meets the water.

There’s no doubting that I’ll be back here, hopefully once again in good company because a place like this is usually best fished when shared with a friend or two. I can already see the Parachute Hare’s Ear missing the seam and getting hauled off in the current when I flop the first couple of casts. I can imagine that smaller fish smacking it, regardless of the errors. That’s what a stream like this does to people, especially people like me - it induces imagination and manic day dreaming, even when you’re knee deep in it.

Years ago, way the hell back, I knew a stream like this one. It flowed through a densely wooded valley, flanked on both banks by thick groves of ferns, and at the right time of the year, it fished well because it stayed cooler a little longer than its counterparts to the east and west. It’s also where I cut my teeth as a wannabe trout angler, mostly ignoring the migratory rainbow trout and salmon, and instead focusing on the few brown trout and even fewer brook trout that led mysterious lives in the hardest to reach places.

That stream from the past has undergone a lot of changes, most of which were terrible for the fish, and now runs much lower than it used to thanks to the toxic swell of development in and around it, which included the removal of much of the streamside vegetation in order to build a paved walking path that skirts alongside it.

The next morning I’m on the road early, avoiding traffic as best as I can and humming along into the town of Uxbridge just as the sun crests off of the horizon. There’s no music playing on the radio - I’ve shut it off - and I’m contemplating all of those years when I had waved off the notion of thinking more about trout and their pursuit. I think of all the Humpy’s, Adams’, CDC Caddis and Irresistibles’ that I’d chucked away, or given to others, thinking that I’d never need them again. Such a foolish notion always comes back to bite you in the ass time and time again.

I get home, get settled in, and immediately go downstairs to root through all of my fly boxes that sit collecting dust, with this urgency that would have you believe that I was going to drive right back to that river and give it another go. Glossing over my selection of dry flies, I realize that it’s slim pickings. The need for a few dedicated tying sessions, complete with a couple pints of wheat beer, are in order.

But then I start to look at what I’ve got for tying material, especially hooks smaller than a size 12, and realize that there is very little that I could spin up right now that would do any good later on when I return. Fourteens and sixteens seem, as Cameron has suggested, much more appropriate, and I’m completely out. So now there’s shopping to be done, too.

With this sort of thing, it truly is an unending decay of focus on more important things, as the thought of returning and doing whatever I can to match an actual hatch takes precedence. Or, I could run attractor patterns the way that I used to when I was in my teens and content to dick around with steelhead smolt, treating them like wary foes in some pressured stream closer to mountains with steep elevations.

Whatever the case may be, I do know that taking flies like this to a place like that can doom an angler forever, though it’s not necessarily a bad thing if the bugs are coming off.