It took planning, skill, and ruthless cunning to find that fish. What’s more, I didn’t just catch one fish in North Dakota, I caught two fish, which is as high as I can count when I go fishing. I may have them mounted if I can find the wall space.

Because we were fishing without a guide, I had three problems. In North Dakota, there are native walleye, northern pike, sunfish, bass, and catfish. There are invasive carp. There are stocked trout. I was desperate, and would have been happy to catch any of them, but that meant I had to prepare for all of them. I put together my fly box, then showed it to my friend Mark Marmon. I also told him that I was considering a children’s pond at a federal fish hatchery.

Like I said, ruthless cunning.

Mark asked if I had any coffee bean flies for the kid’s pond. Coffee bean flies are a coffee bean glued to a hook then covered with a UV curing resin. They’ve been around since the 30s, and were originally tied to imitate beetles. For hatchery fish they’re also are a good imitation of Purina fish chow, and for Houston bayou carp they also resemble escaped solids from a sewage treatment plant. At one time Mark would have had the fly rod world record for grass carp, except that the IGFA considered the coffee bean fly to be bait.

Me? I think it’s an artificial fly,. Fish don’t drink coffee. It’s not bait. I tied a dozen.

I had to decide what rod to take, and settled on a 7-weight. Rods run in weights from size 1 to 14, depending on the size of fish you’re catching. Trout are typically caught on a 4- or 5-weight, and biggish saltwater fish on an 8- or 9-weight. A 14 is basically an 8-foot 2×4 for marlin. You don’t so much fish with them as use them as clubs.

A 7-weight would be plenty to handle a 7-pound fish, and while I wasn’t likely to see any 7-pound fish in North Dakota it didn’t matter. I wasn’t fooling around. If I caught something big in North Dakota, a pike maybe, I wanted enough rod to handle it. Mark suggested that a 6-weight would be plenty. Deep in my heart of hearts I knew he was right, but I wasn’t taking chances.

Finally there was the question of where to go. The Red River of the North is praised for its excellent catfishing, but that’s kind of a random endeavor for a fly rod, and the photos of the river weren’t very inviting. As I’ve already explained, the big lakes and walleye weren’t an option. We couldn’t fish the Missouri again without a boat, and that hadn’t been successful for us anyway.

I found a list of community ponds stocked by North Dakota Game and Fish. We left the Fargo airport and drove straight to a park pond behind an elementary school in a Fargo subdivision. There was an 11-year old kid there gear fishing, and a younger girl, maybe nine, and her dad loading their cooler with a stringer of fish. They held the stringer up to show me.

Tiny fish. Little bitty fish. The biggest stringer of the smallest fish I’ve ever seen. I supposed they would take them home and fry them up, but they’d be most useful on crackers as hors d’oeuvres. They must have had five pounds of 30 fish that turned canned sardines into monsters.

I moved down the pond bank and tied on an olive wooly bugger, which is a fly you can use anywhere to catch anything, including tiny fish, but all I caught was pond scum. The little girl came over–one side of her head was shaved but she didn’t have any visible tattoos. She offered me a gruesome severed fish tail from one of her tiny fish. She said I’d never catch anything of any size in that pond without a fish tail. I thought about it but declined. Coffee beans are one thing, but I couldn’t convince myself that fish tails weren’t bait.

The girl told me that she and her dad had caught a bunch of bluegill, some bass, some catfish, and a piranha.

To keep out of the weeds I switched out the woolly bugger for a tiny blue surface popper, about as small as bass poppers get. There were dragon flies, and I like small poppers when there are dragon flies. I could see fish slap at my popper in the water, but even the piranhas were too small for the fly. I finally lipped that tiny bluegill–I didn’t actually set the hook, but I was fast enough on the set that the fish came flying out of the water past my ear and into the bankside grass. I didn’t have a stringer, or a cracker, so I released it back into the pond.

I had my North Dakota fish. Kris bird-watched.

The next day we drove west. We drove out of Fargo off the highway to the end of the pavement and down gravel roads. We never found Mirror Pond, even though it was explained to us that the Mirror Pond we wanted (not the one we were heading toward), was back the way we’d come, a left turn at the water plant, about four miles up the road, then another left turn. How could we miss it?

The Sheyenne River at Fort Ransom State Park had steep overgrown banks and it looked like I’d suffer some major damage climbing down to it, and I wasn’t real certain what I’d find if I got there. At the fish hatchery the children’s pond was covered with scum. To top off the day we had a remarkably bad hamburger in Valley City. How does someone make a bad hamburger? We never unpacked our fly rods. What did I care? I had my North Dakota fish.

The next day, our final day, we drove north from Fargo to Turtle River State Park, near Grand Forks. There was a park ranger at the desk, and she showed me on the park map where to fish. She said that in the spring North Dakota stocked the river–it’s not much as a river but it’s a pretty stream–with trout, but by July nothing would be left. They would stock it again in the fall. She said a lot of fly anglers came to the park just to stand in the stream and cast. I said fly anglers were stupid that way.

She agreed. She didn’t have to agree.

When we left Kris remarked about how cute the ranger was. She wasn’t that cute.

We drove to the stream and I went down to the dam to stupidly cast into the river–it’s a tiny dam built in the 30s by the CCC. I was fishing a pheasant tail nymph under a foam hopper imitation. Kris bird-watched.

I caught a fish on the pheasant tail. I hooked it and everything. I didn’t sling it past my ear. I think it was a creek chub, though it could have been a flathead chub, or it could have been a shiner. It was a perfect match to my park pond bluegill, almost too much fish for my 7-weight rod, and I’m going to get it mounted, too. My two North Dakota fish will look stunning together over the fireplace.