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I had to have been to Indiana once before, when my parents drove from Texas to Fremont, Michigan, to see my namesake Uncle Neil. They would have clipped the northwest corner, around South Bend. I was only one, so my memory of the trip is pretty hazy. I’m reasonably certain I wasn’t driving.

Whatever happened on that first trip, my memory from last week is mostly reliable. Indiana is a pretty place, particularly if you like fields of corn offset by fields of soybeans. It is green, and everywhere in August there are cornfields, scattered silos, picturesque barns, and stands of oaks and maples. It’s green. I like green.

Where we fished, Sugar Creek, was just a bit south and an hour or so west of Indianapolis. In the south the landscape starts to vary more than northern Indiana, with more rise and fall. On Sugar Creek there was heavy riverside growth and intermittent limestone bluffs. The water in Sugar Creek was low, but clear and like everything else tinged green. It was lovely.

We found Sugar Creek on the internet, searching best places to fly fish in Indiana. I had first contacted a guide on the Tippecanoe, which is a river further north and east, but more famous than Sugar Creek for its role in presidential politics. “Sugar Creek and Tyler Too!” was never going to be a thing in any election. When we asked the Tippecanoe guide about a Saturday though, he said there were too many inner-tubers on the weekends. We decided to go it on our own. We did take his advice and skipped the weekend.

There were a couple of canoe liveries on Sugar Creek, and we rented a canoe from Clements, who couldn’t have been nicer. I had emailed them about a ten mile trip, but they said because of low water they were only doing five miles. They weren’t kidding. Because of the low water we frequently had to get out of the canoe to drag it through low water riffles. It took much more effort than I would have expected.

I was glad Kris was there to do all the work.

Sometimes the front of the boat with Kris floated fine, and only my fat butt would drag. I could stand and put one leg in the water to push the boat forward, like I was skateboarding the river. It was kinda fun.

It took us roughly five hours to go five miles from the put-in back to the canoe livery, which even allowing time for fishing was pretty slow. At that rate we wouldn’t have finished the ten-mile trip until some time next week. Some of that time was fishing, some of it canoeing, some of it dragging. By the time we were done I had a blister on my little toe from scuffling through river rocks, and I was pretty certain I was going to wake up sore tomorrow. We’d both had enough. We decided that since we’d caught fish, one day’s Indiana fishing was plenty.

We fished on a Monday, and with all the Indiana kids back in school we had the river pretty much to ourselves. There were two gear fishers in another canoe, and we shared the shuttle with them to the put-in and then leapfrogged canoes a good bit of the morning. One of the gear fishers told us that the river was so low because it was already dry, but that an abnormal heat wave the week before had sucked out more water. I don’t know whether he was right or not, but it was such a vivid image that it was hard not to admire the description.

Late in the day we were passed by three kayakers. Then we leapfrogged them for a while. That was it for river traffic.

We caught fish early, we caught fish late. We both caught a rock bass, which I’d never seen before. I thought they were crappie, but Kris did an INaturalist identification. There’s nothing like wilderness internet.

I caught some pretty small smallmouth, and I also caught some mighty small smallmouth. Kris got the best hit of the day from a biggish smallmouth, but it let us go our way without having to land it. That’s a win all around.

Evermann, B.W., Hildebrand, S.F, common white sucker, Notes onf the Fishes of East Tennessee, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Fishes vol. 34, 1914, Washington, D.C., Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

In the river there were hundreds of suckers, lined nose to tail and moving sedately out of our way when the canoe drifted through. Many of them were 20 inches or more, and all of them seemed to be looking for something. Kris couldn’t believe it wasn’t us. It wasn’t. She had to cast to them though because, well, fish.

We fished some from the boat, and some wading, mostly casting towards the shore into the deepest water we could find. We had relatively big rods, 7 weights, which were certainly big for what we actually caught. Still, we could hope. I’m sure that there are big fish in Sugar Creek that aren’t suckers. Everybody says so, and everybody in Indiana is honest.

Small creek, small fish, small flies. It was perfect weather with just enough work to tire us and enough fish and scenery to keep us entertained. If it hadn’t been for the blister, it couldn’t have been a gentler day. I don’t recall ever getting tangled, or casting into a tree, or losing a fly. I fished the same two flies all day, either a stylish blue popper or a variation on a bluegill fly called a BBB. The fish took both.

This is going to get down in the weeds, but bear with me. A week before a casting instructor had filmed my cast at a Texas Fly Fishers event. I think he said “damn,” but I suspect it wasn’t in a good way. Mostly my cast was ok, except for the strangest glitch. On a short cast I picked up the line from the water too early, and the early pick-up caused my backcast to go straight up, which isn’t exactly the very thing. It wasn’t the worst thing I ever did, casting or otherwise, but it did create all sorts of short cast problems.

Like I said, way down in the weeds, but every now and then fishing on Sugar Creek I’d think I ought to correct it. Naw. It was too nice a day to think.