Early May we fished the Housatonic River with Bert Ouellette. We booked two days , but after 20 minutes we’d landed matched rainbow trout, and then one or the other of us really never stopped catching fish. It was dandy fishing both days.
We found Bert through Orvis, which makes finding guides easy. Deciding on the Housatonic in the first place was harder. The Farmington River is the best known Connecticut river, and while we were at the Wulff School our fellow students from Connecticut–just about every third citizen of Connecticut was at the Wulff School for casting lessons–insisted that the Farmington was the very place to fish. I started having buyer’s remorse for booking the Housatonic.
Now mind, I don’t know much about Connecticut rivers, but I’ve been looking at Connecticut as a fishing destination off and on now for three years. The impression I have–almost certainly wrong–is that the Farmington is smaller, wadeable, and very pretty, but it’s also more crowded. The upstate Housatonic, more remote and harder to fish without a boat, is less crowded. We saw some anglers wading, but it didn’t look easy. We only saw two other boats, and one of those was a couple of UConn graduate students counting radio-tagged fish.
We fished out of Bert’s ClackaCraft drift boat. Drift boats are funny looking row boats, usually around 16 feet long, 6 feet wide at the beam, and pointed at the bow and stern to move forward or backward in current. Drift boats are best known for their radical, rocking-horse rocker that lets the rower maneuver through rapids. All things being equal, if given a choice between a rubber raft and a drift boat, I’d get in the drift boat every time.
Bert was good company . . . On the other hand Kris and I badly misled Bert. By the time we got to Connecticut, we’d been practicing casting for two solid days. We will probably never be better casters than we were for the two days we fished with Bert. Bert thought we were pretty good casters, though I disabused him as quickly as I could by catching my fly in every other tree along the bank, and tangling my line into implausible knot combinations just to prove it could be done. It wouldn’t be a fishing trip without that sort of thing.
Bert rowed the drift boat, changed out flies, told stories, told us which side of the boat to fish on and how, and untangled my tangles. He tried to teach me some stuff about downstream drifts, and why I was tangling my line so often–apparently when something happened in the water, when either I caught a snag or I had a tug from a fish, I’d jerk the rod up and then suddenly stop, so that the line met itself coming and going. I did manage some world-class tangles.
The upper Housatonic is pretty big, perhaps 150 feet across, tree-lined with hardwoods, hemlock, and pine, and protected from development along one bank by a railroad right-of-way. It falls out of the Berkshire Mountains and deeper, slower water and shallow riffles break up long stretches of steady current. There are rocks everywhere, ancient metamorphic gneiss I think, pushed up along the continental plates to form the Berkshires and the rest of the Appalachians. In fast water the rock gardens jut out of the river to challenge the rower, and in the longer deeper drifts they lurk underwater to snag flies. Particularly my flies.
The weather in early May was just like fish like it, cloudy and drizzly and a bit cold. On sunny days fish are more visible to overhead predators and can be even more skittish than their norm. Overcast makes them happy. Even with the cloud cover we watched a bald eagle dive to catch a fish, and then bicker over its catch with an osprey. The eagle kept the fish. Usually it’s the other way around, and I suspect before we saw it that the eagle had already forced the osprey to drop the osprey’s fish. I think we only saw the second part of the drama.
Upstate Connecticut is second-home country, and the bank without the railroad is dotted with interesting houses. It gave us something to talk about between fish, but the houses, even the uglier houses, were surprisingly unobtrusive. Everything is tempered by the woods.
Over our two days we caught rainbow trout, brown trout, smallmouth bass, and one native yellow perch. I’d never seen a yellow perch, and it was in full spawning colors and full of eggs. Kris wanted to rush it to the maternity ward. Bert noted that it was funny that the one native fish we caught was the most tropical-looking of the bunch.
Nothing was happening on the surface of the river, so I fished with nymphs some of the time, and some of the time with streamers. Kris fished with streamers, sometimes with two on her line at once. A nymph is supposed to imitate bug life underwater, and Bert set up a drop-weight rig with clinch weights at the bottom underneath a surface bobber, so that the flies floated in the current close to river bottom and the bobber would indicate a take. Streamers usually imitate underwater baitfish, or sometimes crawfish (or in saltwater, shrimp or even crabs), and are what I’m most used to fishing. You have to let the nymphs float along with the current, and in my ideal world they would float along at the same speed as the boat. All I’d have to do is relax and watch the bobber, and that’s a job I’m probably competent to do. Of course the world doesn’t much pander to me, so nymphing usually consists of mending and adjusting the line until it drifts too far and you have to start over. It can be a lot of work.
Streamers meanwhile are retrieved across the current. Bert had us do something odd with the streamers. If you think about retrieving with a conventional rod and reel, you retrieve by cranking the reel, and unless you do something with the rod the retrieve tends to be steady. To give the lure action, you twitch the rod and hesitate or speed up during the retrieve. With a fly rod, the reel ain’t in it, and all the retrieval is done with your line hand, usually your left hand if you’re right-handed. The streamer always has a bit of up and down action because the retrieve has built-in stops and starts.
That wasn’t enough for Bert. He had us twitch the rod to impart even more motion to the streamers. No one had ever told me to twitch the rod tip on a streamer before, but it worked. It was kind of fun, too–I felt just like a real fisherman. We caught a lot of fish. Now I’m going to try it on my favorite bass pond.
Trout love mayflies of all things, and trout anglers love it when trout feed on the surface on rising mayflies. Not all mayflies are the same, and not all mayflies rise at the same time–different species will rise over the course of the spring and summer from April to October. Still, all mayflies of the same species do rise more or less together, otherwise they’d be coming off the river randomly and never hook up to party and reproduce the species. They have to plan ahead. Girl mayfly can’t text boy mayfly and say let’s us hook up on Tuesday in a couple of weeks.
Mayflies live most of their lives underwater as hideously ugly nymphs, and then emerge from the surface as pretty and delicate duns that mate, lay their eggs back in the water, and then die. Their out-of-water lives are so short that they don’t have mouths. There’s no drinkin’ at mayfly parties, though they do kinda dance. The emergence of those duns kicks off the prettiest (and most fun) kind of fly fishing, dry fly fishing, culminating during each hatch with the evening spinner fall when the spent mayflies fall dead back into the river en masse. When you talk to trout anglers, they talk a lot about which hatch is going to rise when, and what time to be on the river for the spinner fall.
Meanwhile, here in Texas, about as close as I get to fishing hatches is switching to bass popping bugs when the dragonflies show up on the bass ponds. I prefer blue for early season, and yellow as things get hot. Hotter.
The Hendrickson mayfly hatch is supposed to be the first major hatch on the Housatonic, but at least for now it’s apparently disappeared. I saw two lonely Hendricksons rising from the river in what should have been the heart of the Hendrickson season. Other mayflies will certainly hatch later, but it’s something you hear through the grapevine, that major hatches on major rivers, because of drought, climate change, whatever, are disappearing. It’s an odd thing to be worried about in these later times, but there you are.
So we fished nymphs and streamers, caught fish, and talked with Bert. What good company he was, what good fishing it was. By the end of the second day, I was worn out, and was sitting quiet at the back of the boat, watching Bert row and Kris fish. And fish. And keep fishing. Bert said that he’d never had a woman fish so hard from his boat, and I suspect Kris will think for all time that Bert says the sweetest things. Meanwhile back in Houston I reported Bert’s line to our kids and they laughed. When could Mom ever do anything she’d latched onto in moderation?
