Our first notable hatch of the season - the hendrickson hatch - seems to have ended more quickly than it began. Just a week or so ago, there were enough duns on the water to make henny stew if one was so inclined. This week, nothing.
For many bug chuckers - and I count myself as one of them - the hendrickson hatch reminds us of why we took up fly fishing. Hendrickson season is all about the dry fly and watching outsized fish come to the surface. Oftentimes, the hatch provides us with opportunities to catch our best fish of the year as the early season trout we encounter are both winter-hungry and winter-dumb. Fishing is easy; life is good.
And then the hatch ends, the world settles into its summer pace, and we're reminded that we're not river gods. We're mortal, and many of us are mediocre fishermen.
Truth be told, anyone can hendrickson. As the water warms and buds form on the trees, trout come out of their cold water lethargy and are almost always more eager than wary. They'll whack garish, articulated streamers. They'll swallow every pink worm and purple caddis in your box. They'll come up top to gulp hennies, ignore your flubbed casts, and eat your rusty spinner as it is dragged, cork screwing and rooster tailing across the pool. All that nonsense ends as the hatch wanes, and march browns and sulphurs take the stage.
It's hardly a coincidence that social media witnesses a marked decline in hero shots and keep 'em wet photos as May turns to June. Rivers drop and clear, trout aren't quite so famished or eager as they were only a month before, and the fishing is markedly more difficult. The only way to be successful is to change tactics, and bug chuckers can be awfully resistant to change.
In a way, I'm kind of glad to see the hennies come and go. I'm in the mood for a challenge, the kind that leaves me scratching my head, perhaps even leaves me without another amateurishly composed keep-em-wet photo. Hennies don't leave you scratching your head; they don't leave you without photos. Hendricksons leave you thinking you've got it all figured out,
Ben and I recently spent a day floating the river in hopes of finding a snout or two looking skyward. We weren't disappointed, but we were a little rusty. Of a half dozen opportunities, we converted on two. Such is fishing, and as you almost certainly know - the fish we miss are the ones that keep us coming back.
The two fish we brought to hand were not, however, the most notable part of the trip. Somewhere along those first few river miles, in between the boat launch and the first trout willing to take a swipe at my hendrickson, I had a thought - not a wholly unusual experience in and of itself, but strange given its context.
I wanted to hook a trout. I wanted the thrill of out-sized noses, tight to the bank or in a foamy seam, to materialize from the ether and swallow our poorly tied bugs. I wanted long casts and tight lines. I wanted some affirmation that after a combined four decades of near continual practice, Ben and I were competent bug chuckers, able to get the job done.
With as much in mind, we loaded the cars with one cooler, two boats, four oars, five rods, twelve beers, somewhere in the vicinity of 1500 flies (we fished five or six all day), and at least 6000 calories worth of roast beef and egg salad sandwiches. We actually took the time to wash thermal underwear and patch our leaking waders. We drove one hour to the take-out and another 15 minutes to the launch. We left business unattended and cashed in collateral with our wives. All that, and somewhere after we launched but before that first fish, I was struck by the notion that it wasn't the fish we were really after.
Read any book that touches on fly fishing, at least any older book that touches on fly fishing (which means no Kindle editions are likely available), and you're sure to see a similar thread woven into the fabric of the text. Fly fishing is so much more than hooking, playing, and landing a trout. As corny and hackneyed as it may sound, fly fishing is about the experience of a day spent riverside.
I remember once attending a lecture and slide show - on nymphing techniques, I think - given by Joe Humphreys. I was eager to hear what so talented and recognized an angler might have to say, but truth be told, so many years have passed between then and now that I remember nothing the noted bug chucker had to say about fishing a nymph. There is, however, one nugget that for whatever reason left an indelible impression. Humphreys implored his audience to "look up."
At the time, I either had no idea what Humphreys was talking about or I dismissed it as so much romantic nonsense, but nearly twenty years after the fact I am struck by his words. "Look up," he said. Look away from the water, and look to the trees. Look to the sky, to the birds, to the sunset or the sunrise. Look to the world around you, all those things that have become cliche in the sport's literature, and above all else - look to your friends and fishing partners. Take it in. Take it all in.
We were floating a beautiful piece of water on a genuinely beautiful spring day. If only for a moment, we were free of the stress and worry life often heaps on us in abundance. We were concerned, or rather unconcerned, with something that in the grand scheme is nothing but a trifle: finding a rising trout and coaxing it into taking one of our flies.
I don't know why, maybe it's a consequence of having caught my share of fish or the result of growing older and realizing I've more years behind me than are likely ahead, but somewhere after the boat launch and well before I hooked that first trout, I looked up from the water and realized my being there was enough. Sharing a river with my friend was enough. Sharing hope was enough.
My son is a behemoth of a boy. He weighed 65 pounds when he started kindergarten back in September; now he tips the scales at just a few ounces under 80. That kind of growth - 15 pounds in roughly nine months - is difficult for my wife to abide. She wants her baby back, but we won't be seeing him again. Baby boy has left the building. Little man has taken his place.
For my part, I enjoy watching my children grow. Sometimes the process is slow and subtle; so slow and subtle in fact that I hardly recognize it for what it is. Still other times the changes are so enormous that they seem surreal - if not unreal - simply because of the scope of their enormity. These moments sometimes bring a tear to my eye, but more often than not they make me laugh. The things kids do - the things they say ...
One night, after corraling the triplets into the tub for baths, my daughter Emma screamed at her sister, "Get the F
out of the Tub!" When I ran into the bathroom - all full of daddy fury - to chastise my daughter for her language, I discovered there was a foam letter "F" floating in
the water.
Another evening I walked into the house to find my
girls sitting on the couch and singing, "I've got the moves like
Jagger, I've got the moves like Jagger" over and over again. While
the girls sang, my son - naked as the day he was born - was doing
his best imitation of Mick Jagger, shaking hismoney maker across the expanse of the living room ... in front of an open window.
My children's frequent growth-spurts have forced my wife and I to adopt a semi-seasonal ritual. Most parents likely do the same. As summer turns to autumn, autumn to winter and winter to spring we rummage through closets, dresser drawers, and laundry baskets for the sake of removing from the daily rotation those items of clothing that are just too worn or too small to keep their places in the lineup. Denim jeans, dresses, tee shirts, hoodies, and even socks and underwear are sorted into piles for donation (to either family, friends, or The Salvation Army).
This year, we'll be donating the kids' winter coats. We somehow managed to get two years use out of them, but there's just no way we'll make three. The triplets have sprouted, and the coats that were once so roomy are now nearly too tight to zip. I suppose it's a good thing that the days have grown decidedly warmer; unless the weather gods fancy themselves comedians, we won't be needing parkas and mittens for a while.
And last night - as I folded the coats and put them into a box with other items slated for donation - I had something of an epiphany. I realized that we bug chuckers mark time by the seasons. As removed as we sometimes are from the natural world we cannot escape its cycles; the end of one cycle generally marks the beginning of another. For the next several months, I'll be counting time by hatching mayflies, but in that moment my mind drifted off to steelhead. Packing those coats away - one atop another - I realized that in many ways steelhead fishing is for me a kind of winter coat.
When my corner of the world wraps itself in a swaddling of snow and most anglers go into hibernation, I turn to Lake Ontario and its tributaries. The annual run of winter steelhead insulates me from what would otherwise be a bitter, fallow season. Sometimes I swing streamers or spey flies, but more often I'll dredge the bottom with ridiculously simple and ugly nymphs. Each method pleases me in its way, but ultimately the method does not matter as it is the fish themselves that sustain me.
And now it's time to fold that coat and put it away for the season. I had hoped for one more trip, but hope is never enough to keep the days from turning. After a long and especially tenacious northeastern winter there is now warmth beneath the clods. Herds of deer and rafters of turkey have moved out of the thickets and into open ground. Trees are budding in pastel greens and yellows, and hendricksons hatch in earnest. Brown and rainbow trout are rising from the miasma to gorge on the first course served at Spring's table.
Still, it pains me to have to box up a season of chasing steelhead and place it on a shelf. I'm sad to see the winter go in much the same way I'm sentimental about my children growing out of their clothes - each box donated or stowed is full of moments we'll never again experience. Squeezed in between the folds of those moments, however, is also a hopeful anticipation of what's to come. As I shelve this most recent winter, I look forward to seasons still before me, and I take some solace in the fact that while I may have to set steelhead aside, I'll never outgrow them.
Thinking about fishing seasons past - and about changing the look of the blog - so I thought I'd share the fish and photos that inspired and eventually became the current Rusty Spinner banner ...
The rod is a Montague Manitou - one hell of a dry fly stick - matched with a Hardy LRH.
This is the photo that eventually became our current banner.
The same fish caught a week or so later on a little 7' 4# quad matched with a Peerless 1A.
Maybe the most beautiful brown trout I ever caught.
As much as I enjoy steelhead, I can't help but think that the hendricksons will be back soon.
There's a nondescript span of river that has been something of a fish factory for as long as we've waded its currents. It's a genuinely special run that rarely sees a bug chucker; in all the years I've fished the Flat (yes ... capitalized, proper noun ... she's special enough to be given a name) I've only ever met one other angler there, and he was using spinning gear and moving too quickly to be particularly effective. The Flat is like the very ordinary friend of the most attractive woman at the party in that she's often ignored in favor of water that appears more promising. Like that plain looking woman, however, the Flat will pay off in droves if you just give her a little of the attention she so deserves.
The Flat is about as long as a soccer field, which - for those uninitiated heathens amongst us - stretches roughly 20 yards farther than an American football field. At the head is a short but powerful riffle; above that riffle is a very deep pool. Below the flat is another large pool, this one shallower and longer than its big brother at the head. We've caught fish - big fish - in both of these pools, but our efforts have always focused on the the flat water in between the two.
Imprinted on the parchment of my memory is the indelible impression of the first trout I ever saw rise on the Flat: a brown of some twenty-two inches. The fish first appeared in the pool below the run, but with relative quickness he worked his way to the tail end of the Flat, slurping hendrickson spinners as he went. Perched on a bank high above the water, I watched until I could no longer play the part of spectator. The fish swallowed my spent wing pattern on the first cast, and fifteen years later I still frequent the run looking for rising fish.
And even though the Flat's fish will crush stripped streamers - and I don't use the word "crush" euphemistically, the strikes are decidedly vicious - it is the dry fly fishing that brings us back. The best of the Flat's fish rise like they do nowhere else on the river, which means the Flat may be the river's best dry fly water.
The dance begins with the emergence of the season's first hendricksons, and generally continues unabated until the sulphurs begin to thin. I spend the better part of the winter chasing steelhead if only to help me get through to the spring and rising fish on the Flat. It is amazing - simply amazing - to think that I can be completely isolated from the world, and casting parachute emergers to large, wild brown trout, less than one hour from the capitol city of New York State.
That's the thing about the river, and perhaps it's the same for any river. Each run is a galaxy, vast in its way but still only a very small part of the much greater universe. The Flat, the Falls, Converse, the Bends, Betsy's Run, Confluence, the Bridge, the Pullout, and Ballpark ... each run and pool, each riffle and each flat, has its own particular charm. We fish them all in their respective seasons because we've spent a lifetime learning those seasons.
And as the Flat's season reaches its height and hendricksons give way to sulphurs, I find myself thinking that there are much worse ways to spend a lifetime than by wrapping bits of fur onto bits of wire, standing waist deep in icy water flowing through a river bed that was carved by the last ice age, and watching fish rise out of their element and enter ours, to feast - however briefly - on the bounty provided by a river that so nourishes us both.
Ten or twelve years ago, fly fishing - like much of the rest of the world - began with earnest to feel the impact of the internet. Data driven bug chucking started with message and bulletin boards, those online forums that allow bug chuckers to connect with folks of a similar mind, swap ideas, and - more often than not - degrade each other. These boards are ubiquitous, and continue here and there with varying degrees of success.
Fly fishing retailers were quick to recognize the potential of the internet for reaching customers and expanding business. Today, a fly shop cannot be truly competitive if it fails to present itself to digital anglers - as eager for online shopping as they are for an evening spinner fall. This phenomena has proven problematic for the local fly-shop that caters to a relatively small group of semi-loyal, resident bug chuckers. Unfortunately, loyalty does not pay the bills, and oftentimes it is a quality that lasts only so long as the span between discount rod sales on Cabelas.com.
Perhaps the greatest impact of the Web on bug chucking has been in its unique ability to connect people who may not otherwise meet, and allow them to share not only their ideas, but also their water. I must admit that I am extremely reluctant to share my rivers and streams (mine in the sense that their meandering currents are as much a part of me as is my too thick mid-section or too thin hair) with people I haven't known but through an online forum or social media. I am suspicious by nature, and I do not trust relative strangers to respect or appreciate the water as I do. If I am honest with you (and with myself), there is also a certain degree of selfishness at work. This may be one of the great failings of my character, but each of us knows that there's just no changing a bug chucker's nature.
I mention all of this by way of illustrating just how significant is the moment when I ask you - my cybernetically connected brother of the angle - to join me for a day on the water. Understand that on those first few outings, I will not take you to my favorite water. I may not even take you to one of the rivers I fish with both enthusiasm and regularity. What manner of fly flinger would I be if I simply handed the grail to someone who may be - regardless of appearances or reputation - a non believing heathen? I need to get to know you beyond the limits of email, Facebook, or this blog. I need to trust your character the way I trust in the morning's hatch or an afternoon spinner fall. That is to say that I need to know - with absolute and crystalline certainty - exactly what is happening even when I am not on the water.
A large part of that trust comes from your willingness to reciprocate kindness with kindness. An invitation to fish with me should be matched by an invitation to fish with you. This is more than simple courtesy (although it certainly is that). This is and has been protocol ever since we bug chuckers first began to compete for dwindling resources, ever since we began to keep secrets from each other. Quid pro quo. If I risk a revelation, will you do the same?
Know that if and when you do take that risk and invite me to fish with you, I will understand the import of that invitation. I will treat your secret as if it were my own secret, and I will never betray your confidence. I will never betray your water.
