Troutsmith (6 page)

I had the pond to myself that rainy Saturday morning, something unheard of nowadays. Square wooden cribs of crossed timbers had been placed in some of the deeper areas to provide structure for fish and homes for invertebrates. Scuds and sow bugs grazed in the weed beds, and once I saw several trout following a silver-coated muskrat as it swam through the weeds. The fish were snapping up crustaceans and olive mayfly nymphs dislodged by the muskrat. I stayed with the Hare's Ear Nymph, fishing it deeply with a slow, hand-twist retrieve, watching the line and feeling for strikes.

With Polaroids I was able to sight-fish, and all of my best trout were taken this way rather than fishing the water blindly. Once I cast the little nymph two feet to one side of a crib and watched intently as the fly sank toward the bottom. I quickly lost sight of it, but my eyes bored holes in the water where I knew the nymph must be, and that sixth sense common to all anglers warned me of impending drama. Sure enough, a dark form cruised out from the crib and stopped suddenly. I struck, and a moss-backed brook trout as large as any I'd ever seen writhed savagely in the green deeps, open mouthed, it's head shaking wildly from side to side. I gave a sigh of relief when it finally sagged into the net, fifteen inches and two fat pounds of stunning Wisconsin brook trout. Then I removed the fly, held the big brookie upright in the water, and admired it for several long seconds before it swam away and vanished into history. Lesson learned: when sight-fishing nymphs to trout in still water, watch the fish and not the fly. Strike hard and fast when the trout slows down or stops moving. This also illustrated the primary difference between fishing a stream versus fishing a pond for trout. In a stream, most trout stay in one place while the moving water brings food to them. In a spring pond, most water stays in one place while the trout move around to find food. If an angler can get into the right position on a pond or lake and stay there, cruising trout will swim past every few minutes for as long as the person wants to fish.

At that time the banks around the northeast side of Paradise Springs were reinforced with corrugated metal flashing wired to steel posts. There was a clear space between the flashing and the first weed beds about three feet out from shore, then more clear water on the farther side of the weed beds. Obviously trout should have been cruising and feeding along the outer edge of the weed beds, and I did catch several gorgeous brookies from the pond side of the weeds. But I had a nagging feeling that I ought to be fishing the bank side too, and finally I did send a cast about thirty feet ahead that settled the nymph within a foot of the metal flashing, in mere inches of water. For a moment I could see the dark Hare's Ear Nymph resting on a patch of sandy bottom. Then a sixteen-inch brown trout suddenly swam into view and vacuumed up the fly. I saw little puffs of sand and silt blow out of the trout's gills just before I set the hook. Minutes later, two pounds of copper-colored, red-spotted brown trout shook its head in a mixture of fright and indignation as it swam away after release. Lesson learned: Even in deep spring ponds, trout food is concentrated in the shallower areas not far from the bank. Go slowly, search the shallows intently, and don't be too surprised to see large trout foraging in water barely deep enough to cover their dorsal fins. My bird-hunting mentor Peter Grimm applied this lesson while fishing Paradise Springs in early March 2005. The brown trout that inhaled his #16 Pheasant Tail Nymph was twenty-five inches long. He laid it out on the snow and measured it.

That's the primary attraction of still-water trout fishing; trout in lakes and ponds commonly attain dimensions rarely seen in streams. And in ponds these giants are fishable and catchable during the day, while trophy trout in streams are often holed up beneath log jams where no fly, bait, or lure can reach them or they feed actively only in the middle of the night. Having read this far, you might think that every spring pond in Wisconsin must be dotted with anglers every day of the season. Not so, and I'll tell you why: spring ponds are notorious for their difficult fishing. Many expert trout anglers, especially fly fishers, have come away from a session on a pond or lake with deflated egos and humble hearts. I've even seen them look around self-consciously while walking out, to see if anybody was watching. One mild January morning this season I saw eight different anglers trudge down the snow-covered path to fish Paradise Springs. Two stayed for less than an hour; the others fished patiently for several hours in a stiff wind and temperatures well below freezing. A grand total of one trout was caught and released.

The difficulties begin with access. Most anglers who attempt to wade a Wisconsin spring pond vanish without a trace into the light calcareous ooze, called
marl
, that covers the bottom. I sometimes think that archeologists of the future will scratch their heads and wonder what led us to sacrifice so many fly flingers in the style of the Mayan cenotes. Float tubes are another potential death trap. Rhinelander's Jon Kort, widely acknowledged as the “Lefty Kreh of the spring ponds,” once had to rescue an angler whose legs became stuck in a mixture of marl and weeds. Sunk deep in the frigid water in light, breathable waders, unable to move legs numbed by cold, the trapped fly fisher was lucky he didn't die of hypothermia before Jon found him. Use a pontoon boat, kayak, or a canoe to fish a spring pond in style and safety. It's a good idea to fish a remote spring pond with a buddy.

Trout in still waters generally have plenty of food, so they're in no rush to commit fishy suicide by taking your fly. Exasperatingly picky trout that sometimes look closely at
natural
flies before taking them are the norm. It gets even worse on catch-and-release ponds like Paradise Springs, or ponds that hold mostly brown trout. Be patient and persevere or skedaddle to the nearest golf course. Heck, I'd be a lot happier if more anglers
would
stop cluttering up the trout waters in my bailiwick and take up golf instead! Bridge is a lot of fun too, so you might try that as an alternative to not catching trout in spring ponds.

The golden sun of a late August afternoon is slanting through the tall hardwoods and pines on the west side of our property as I pull my fly vest out of the truck. The long meadow stretches of the Big Green River are on my mind for tomorrow. The Big Green runs ice-cold even during late summer heat waves, and it's been awhile since I've fished over that way. One by one the fly boxes come out, are examined, and then put away again once I've made mental notes about what patterns and sizes I'll be likely to need for this trip. August is cricket time in Wisconsin and September is grasshopper time. I'm happy to see plenty of these big terrestrial dry flies lined up in rows and ready to be knotted to the end of a stout leader. The lid of my main dry fly box closes with a satisfying snap and I zip it back inside its pocket. But when I look over my nymph box I find that the ranks of flies have thinned quite a bit since the beginning of the season. Some patterns are represented by just a couple of well-chewed, scruffy characters. I'll have some work to do this evening.

Once back inside the house I head downstairs to the familiar corner of our basement that is devoted to fly making. This corner gets thoroughly cleaned about once a year, in October or November once the trout season is over and hunting is in full swing. There's so much involved with getting ready to hunt, hunting, and the aftermath that I don't usually start tying flies again until late December or early January. Then the clutter gradually builds in that special corner of the basement until a seasonal peak is reached in late August or early September. By then it is what Teresa calls “a sight,” as in “Don't you dare let anyone see our basement—it is
a sight
!” I switch on the fluorescent light over the fly-tying desk and a pleasant confusion of feathers, fur, hair, synthetics, hooks, tools, boxes, and other paraphernalia of the fly tier's craft comes into view.

I started making my own flies at about the same time I started fly fishing in the mid-1970s. In the beginning it was a question of economy. There was no way I could afford to buy enough flies on an allowance and paper route money. Prices for flies in the 1977 Orvis catalog ranged from seventy cents apiece for traditional wet flies to more than two dollars each for some Atlantic salmon patterns. Standard dry flies were ninety cents each, and nymphs cost eighty cents each. Converting these prices into today's dollars using the Consumer Price Index shows what I was up against. That #16 Adams dry fly that sold for ninety cents in 1977 would be like paying more than three dollars today. Amazingly, the math shows that flies were a lot more expensive in the 1970s than they are now.

Fly acquisition was one thing; fly attrition was, and still is, another. If the fate of most flies was to be cut to ribbons by trout teeth, none of us would complain. But the hard truth is that most flies used on Wisconsin's trout streams end up in trees—fly-eating trees. Some fly-eating trees on our larger spring creeks have become famous among anglers. These foul, despicable, evil dendrites are cunningly placed just where one's last false cast needs to go in order to land the fly on the sweet spot of a particular pool or run. The demise of many small dairy farms, with their herds of tree-eating heifers, has led to good times for fly-eating trees and shrubs along Wisconsin's trout streams.

Trees may be the biggest offenders but there are many other ways to lose flies. Ever drop your last #28 Trico Spinner or Griffith's Gnat while the trout were slurping midges all around you? I recall a day on the west fork of the Kickapoo when I saw Peter Grimm apparently kneeling in prayer behind the tailgate of my truck. Knowing Pete to be a devout soul, I wondered if it was a holy day of obligation. But no; when I reached the truck I learned that he'd dropped his last Pheasant Tail Nymph right there along the shoulder of the road. Both of us bored holes in two square feet of gravel with our eyes for ten minutes without finding it. Now I carry a small but powerful shop magnet mounted on a telescoping handle for use in these situations. If the fly is in anything from bare ground to low grass, a few sweeps with the magnet usually recover it. Sometimes the magnet comes back with several flies, only one of which is mine.

I've lost several fly boxes over the years, and each and every one was a heart-breaker if not a wallet-breaker. The first fly box I lost was a Perrine aluminum box stuffed to the gills with dozens of flies that Granddad gave me once he realized that my passion for trout fishing wasn't going to fade away. It bounced out of a bicycle pannier that I'd forgotten to zip shut during a long summer ride to an Illinois pond. I searched the shoulder of that road in the hot sun for several days trying to recover it, but to no avail. And just this season I lost my main nymph box somewhere along the Rush River during my annual trip to fish the sulphur hatch. It made me sick to think of the hours and days of work that went into filling that box with enough flies to get me through most of the season. The memory of seeing my vest pocket yawning empty and unzipped is still crystal clear and pathetically sad. What's more, I guarantee that it will happen again. When fishing, the excitement and thrill of the moment are just as intense for me now as they were when I was a kid, and in that excitement I can forget a lot of mundane things such as making sure that zippered pockets are zipped shut.

Given the twin challenges of fly acquisition and attrition, it was clear to me that I was going to have to be able to make my own flies if I wanted to fly fish at all. When I saw a generic fly tying kit for sale at a local sporting goods store for about ten dollars, I bought it as soon as I could scrape up the cash. The materials in the kit were short on quality but long on bright colors. There were several dyed chicken necks, chenille, tinsel, hooks, a couple of spools of tying thread, a cake of wax, several squares of various animal hides, and a little vise made from two pieces of tool steel and two screws—one large screw to hold the vise to the tying desk or table and another, smaller screw to hold the hook between the jaws of the vise.

No one we knew tied flies, so I learned from books. Jim Quick's
Trout Fishing and Trout Flies
(Countryman Press, 1957) was one reference I consulted often. The Orvis catalog was another. I wondered why the folks at Orvis would print such detailed photos of flies they were trying to sell. It seemed to me that people would just sit down at their tying benches and make copies of the flies that they wanted rather than pay top dollar for them. When I sat down at my own bench to do just that, I soon decided that no one who could afford to buy flies would ever submit to the torture of making his own.

Just getting my vise to hold the hook firmly was a major issue, and I had to use pliers to solve the problem. I didn't have a bobbin, so I used a long piece of thread and tied a half-hitch after every tying operation. I still use half-hitches even though it's something many tiers disapprove of. With today's tying threads,
one
half-hitch after every step in the tying process doesn't visibly increase the bulk of a fly and it greatly increases durability. For some reason I found dubbed fur bodies to be especially difficult when I was learning to tie flies, and it was years before I could spin a decent body of fox, muskrat, or hare's mask on a trout fly.

Fortunately the bass, sunfish, and crappies in Illinois farm ponds weren't very selective, and my cobbled-together flies caught a lot of fish. Usually I didn't fish for trout more than fifteen days a season, so I could buy a few bona fide trout flies occasionally and save them for days when I was actually trout fishing. Looking back over my journals, I find that it took about ten years before I was confident that the trout flies I made myself were as good as or better than those I bought in sporting goods stores, or from the Orvis and Herter's catalogs.

Having to work from pictures and never having set foot in a bona fide fly shop, I usually just tried to make a fly that resembled what I saw in the picture. Stacking, spinning, and clipping deer hair was far beyond my skill level in those first few years, and anyway I didn't have the faintest notion that was how flies like the famous Muddler Minnow were tied. My faux Muddler Minnows had heads built up with layers of light brown chenille instead. These faux Muddlers did yeoman service on many a hot summer evening on the big Delaware in Pennsylvania. I have great memories of chunky bronze-backs hammering the flies and tail-walking across the darkening rapids as the sun set behind the Delaware Water Gap and the mist began to rise. Then again the neat, aesthetically built Muddler Minnows in the Dan Bailey catalogs were really quite different from the original pattern. Canadian Don Gapen's first edition of the Muddler was rough and unprofessional by today's standards, but there was no doubt about its ability to catch fish from the very beginning. Smallmouth bass still can't resist one if it comes swinging along the bottom of a riffle or run.