Tag: Fly Shops

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Missouri Packing List

It’s been a few weeks and a trip to Cuba since we went to Missouri, but there are interesting things to add about Missouri, and by now the tornado is mostly forgotten.

Gear

We fished part of a day at Roaring River State Park. It’s a pretty Ozark mountain river, and it’s easy to wade. It was a bit crowded though. Why do I ever fish on a Saturday? Since Kris and I are both retired we don’t have to anymore, and having a place to ourselves is such a joy. Still, it was a pretty park, and we used typical trout set ups, 9′ 5-weight rods with floating lines. I caught two fish, both rainbow trout. We fished until the park trout permit pinned to my cap blew off and floated downriver.

The river is stocked from a nearby hatchery, and it was a mix of wild and stocked trout. For some folks stocked fish may seem like opportunity, but it’s always less desirable to fish for stocked fish than wild fish. I can’t usually catch much of either one, so I guess it’s not that one’s harder to catch than the other. Wild fish are just better.

I caught both trout on the Roaring River on a mop fly over a hare’s ear nymph, both fished under the surface. Mop flies are tied from one of those fuzzy mops, and are considered by some as a cheap trick. Don’t tell anyone that I used one.

I kinda like mop flies because you can get a lifetime supply of tying materials with a single trip to Walmart.

The next day we fished Crane Creek in Crane, Missouri, which is another pretty Ozark stream, and which is almost but not-quite famous. In the late 1800s, railroad workers dumped California McCloud River rainbow trout off of a railroad bridge into Crane Creek. Cane Creek hasn’t really been stocked much since, and the fish there today are the descendants of those original fish without significant interference. They may be the purest genetic strain of McCloud rainbows in the country, including those in the McCloud River.

Cane Creek

Stocking trout in rivers that support wild trout is controversial. It introduces non-native fish and diseases, and the stocked fish are just enough competition with the natives to hurt. The stockees don’t survive much either. The best-managed states, Montana for instance, have stopped stocking where there are wild trout, and a lot of the nation’s best rivers are never stocked. A creek that hasn’t been stocked, or a creek where stocking was abandoned, is a bit of a gem. That’s why a place like Crane Creek is someplace to look for.

We were there on a Sunday, and Crane Creek was also a little crowded, but I swear they were the nicest people I’ve ever come across on a river. We were at th park in the Town of Crane, population 1,495, and people invited me over to fish next to them. It was unnatural.

Crane Creek fish are small, and I fished with my tiniest rod. This is where I get goofy. Goofier. The truth is I buy fly rods and reels not because they’re better–almost every fly rod and reel is better than I am–but because they’re pretty. If I’m going to buy a reel, I don’t go in thinking that I want this reel because it has the very latest drag system and faster line retrieve, I buy it because I think it looks good. Of all the fly fishing gear I own–and I own a stupid amount of fly fishing gear–this is my prettiest rod and reel:

It’s an 8 1/2 foot Winston Boron IIIx 3-weight rod made in Montana, a rod that is way too lightweight for most of my fishing, and it’s just the loveliest shade of emerald green, with nickel silver fittings and a burled maple reel seat. The reel is a tiny Hardy Marquis 2/3 reel made in England. Are they appreciably better than any other 3-weight rod or reel? No. Could I have found a perfectly decent rod and reel for a third of the price? Absolutely. Are there any rods that look better? Well, maybe some custom classic bamboo. My goodness they’re pretty, and when the fish are small enough it just makes me idiotically happy to use them.

On Crane Creek I caught two small trout on a size 16 hare’s ear nymph under a size 14 royal Wulff, and Kris caught another. I picked the hare’s ear and royal Wulff because, well, they’re classic flies and I thought they matched that rod and reel. I’ve got standards, and I’m not fishing any mop flies with this rod.

Royal Wulff

Branson

I don’t like Branson. Am I being a snob? Of course. I have friends and family who love to go to Branson. I don’t.

There is a Trump Store, and there are shows.

I can’t think of anything worse than going to a show, unless it’s going to a Trump Store. You say the word show to me, and I feel queasy. Las Vegas? Oh lord, don’t make me go. I don’t gamble, and in Las Vegas there are shows. My daughter says the shopping is great in Las Vegas, but how can that be? I don’t think there’s a single fly fishing shop. Las Vegas at least has a minor league baseball team. I don’t think there’s any baseball in Branson.

The last show I went to voluntarily was Cirque de Soleil some 15 years ago, and I know those performers were miraculous, and that there are otherwise rational people who think that Cirque de Soleil is the best thing going. I know in my heart of hearts that that very show I went to was in all ways wonderful, but me? I was bored out of my mind. I’m still bored just thinking about it.

Maybe I need to go to a show with some mostly-naked ladies. At least I’d like the costumes.

In Branson, there are shows a-plenty, and what’s worse they’re all shows that revel in clean living. There’s Dolly Parton’s Stampede Dinner and Show, Hamners’ Unbelievable Magic Variety Show, WhoDunnit Hoedown and Murder Mystery Show, the Grand Jubilee Show, All Hands on Deck Show, Legends in Concert Show, Shepherd of the Hills Outdoor Drama Show . . . The list just won’t stop. You think you’re on a river in the Ozark backcountry away from all the shows, and you come across a flier for the Amazing Acrobats of Shanghai Show.

I’ve got nothing against clean living, and I consider myself a reasonably clean liver. I know and love several devout Baptists, and even some vegetarians, but clean living commodified into a show? I can’t think of a less appealing combination. Branson is one of those rare places where a soupçon of depravity would improve the moral tone.

I guess they do fish with mop flies, and plenty of people consider that depraved.

Donuts

We found two donut shops, though I’m sure there were more.

Parlor Doughnuts was a bit off the beaten path in a strip center. They sold gourmet donuts,((I’ve created a donut shop classification system, and there are four categories. Traditional shops include Houston’s Shipley’s, Krispy Kreme’s, Dunkin’, or the very best donut shop in the world, Ocean Springs, Mississippi’s Tato-Nut Doughnut Shop. Parlor Doughnuts is a chain in the Gourmet Category, and gourmet donuts are a bit more creative, with upscale whatnots coming to the fore. Portland’s Blue Star or Albuquerque’s Rebel come to mind. Experiential donut shops have let creativity run amock, and they are my least favorite kind of donut shop–I’m talking to you, VooDoo. A Cambodian donut shop is a clean, well-lighted place that is almost certainly located in a strip center. Everything is basic but good enough, and the owners are at the counter. Cambodian donutries can have flashes of brilliance–the boudin kolache was invented in a Cambodian donut shop and that deserves a Michelin star, or at least a James Beard nomination. It’s fusion cuisine at its finest.)) and the donuts were a bit elaborate for my taste, but I’d go back. I’d certainly go back if the choice was the other place we tried, Hurts.

Hurts is experiential. It’s next door to the Trump Store on the main drag, and it’s huge for a donut shop. There was a long line for the donuts. There were flavors like cotton candy, and cookie monster, and dirt worms, and every donut seemed created for a 9-year old, which I’m not. When I got to the counter, they were out of plain glazed.

The donuts were cold and forgettable. Kris wanted to chuck them and go back to Parlor.

AirBnB

We stayed in a nice pet-friendly AirBnB on the lake on the edge of town. It was just far enough from Branson’s center to forget where we were, and the owner left us a plate of cookies. They were good home-made cookies, too. There was an old canoe and a beat up bamboo fly rod hung as decorations above the fireplace, and I took that as a good omen. I sat on the enclosed porch and read Huck Finn, and, notwithstanding the No Trespassing signs, took the dogs for walks down to the lake. I’m pretty certain those signs weren’t meant for me.

Fly Shops

There are at least a couple of fly shops in Branson, but we only went to one, River Run Outfitters. We were supposed to fish with guides from the shop, but they talked us out of going. It was cold, in the 40s, and all the floodgates on the dam were open. The wind was gusting up to 40 mph. It was dangerous, and what’s worse we weren’t likely to catch anything. They gave us free coffee and good advice on where to fish instead. I bought some mop flies.

Restaurants

Branson is not a restaurant town. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of restaurants, but they all seem to have names like Hungry Hunter or Pickin’ Porch Grill. There are lots of barbecue places, but I’ve made the mistake of eating Missouri barbecue once before, in Kansas City, and I won’t do that again. Those people eat melted cheese on brisket, which should only be done in leftover brisket enchiladas.

The Keeter Center at College of the Ozarks promised farm to table dining, and I guess it was, but mostly everything just seemed big. Big room, big appetizers, big iced tea. . . Big ideology. I don’t know, it just didn’t click.

See that dish right there? That’s the Brussels sprout nachos appetizer, which as i recall was a lot of chopped up Brussels sprouts and feta on a lot of fried wontons. Had they artfully arranged four or five of those on a plate and charged me $12, I would have eaten them and said that’s ok, but that pile of stuff for $12 was too daunting. All I could think was man-oh-man, that’s big.

All of the waiters at Keeter Center are students at College of the Ozarks, and the hostess told us all about it, and then the waiter told us all about it. It’s a free Christian college, well, free in exchange for work. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t have gone there without lots of conversations with a dean.

The next night we played it safe and went to two of Branson’s sushi joints, Mitsu Neko and Wakyoto. They were fine, and there were no Brussels sprouts. There was some kale, but I think it was purely decorative.

Playlist

Missouri has produced some magnificent music, and I’m still listening to that playlist. Josephine Baker was from St. Louis, and maybe I might have enjoyed one of her shows. From Wikipedia:

Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in [Paris]. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Now that’s a costume, and there are some fun recordings of her singing jazzy French stuff.

Missouri had great jazz. You wouldn’t think it, would you? But in the 1920s, Prohibition wasn’t really enforced there, and 18th and Vine in Kansas City was as lively as anyplace in the country. The Kansas City Big Bands had their own style, blusier than New York or Chicago, with a frantic quality that makes you drive just a little faster if your foot’s on the peddle. There are great black big bands, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, Andy Kirk, George E. Lee, Count Basie . . . Two of the great jazz saxophonists, Lester Young and Charlie Parker, both came out of Kansas City.

There’s rock ‘n roll, too. Big Joe Turner is a joy, then there’s Chuck Berry, Ike and Tina Turner, Sheryl Crow, Michael McDonald, and T Bone Burnett. The Beatles went to Kansas City, or at least they were going.

St. Louis Blues has been covered by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Louis Prima, Doc Watson, Herbie Hancock, Eartha Kitt, Art Tatum, and Ella Fitzgerald, and if your name is Louis, you can still meet Judy Garland there.

Ojon Mill, Photograph of Lester Young, 1944, Time Magazine, Volume 17, Number 13, Public Domain.

Guitar

I took my old Kohno classical, and spent some time at night playing. I don’t remember what, but I’ve been working on an arrangement of Gershwin’s Somebody Loves Me. That’s likely.

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The Wulff School of Fly Fishing Redux

We went to Connecticut and caught fish. It was our state number 30, but on the way to Connecticut we went to New York to the Wulff School of Flyfishing for a two-day casting clinic. We’d been to the Wulff School before, in 2019, and when we went we caught our New York fish in the Beaverkill. Before we took the trout class. The trout class includes things like “Knots You Can Tie” and “The Bugs We Like Best.” There was a lot of casting then, but this time it was all casting. A lot of casting. Then some more casting. And then we went out to the pond to cast.

I signed us up for the casting clinic for Kris’s January birthday because, unlike me, Kris’s fishing is limited by her casting. My fishing, on the other hand, is limited by my head. Maybe I’ve made some progress in my life-long battle against stupid, but  that correction is more than I could hope for from a casting clinic.

Joan Wulff wrote the book on fly casting; one of the good books anyway. If you want to learn to cast a fly rod, get Joan’s book. Then go take some lessons because, while it’s great for review, learning to fly cast from a book just ain’t likely.

I do have problems with my cast. If you imagine a fly cast, there are two parts to it: there’s the back cast, where the fly line rolls out beautifully behind you. I can’t see it while I do it, but I’ve been told I have a great back cast. I suspect this is a little like being told you have a great butt, not that I recall ever being told I have a great butt, but if I were so told I’d be flattered. On a day-to day basis though, in and of itself, it’s generally not very useful.

The school’s founder, Joan Wulff, is a great caster. She won the National Fisherman’s Distance Fly title in 1951 with a cast of 131 feet. Between 1943 and 1960, she won 17 national titles–not the women’s title, mind, but the all of ’em, men-can-compete-too-if-they-can-just-keep-up title. In 1960 she took the New Jersey distance casting competition with a winning cast of 161 feet. That’s more than half a football field, and about 101 feet further than I can cast on a really good day.  She was a pretty, petite woman in 1960, and that hasn’t changed.

Joan married Lee Wulff in 1967. Lee Wulff was the sort of famous angler who, as a kid back in the 60s, I watched on Sunday afternoon fishing shows after football was over. If you didn’t watch famous anglers on Sunday afternoon fishing shows back in the 60s, you really missed out–it was a lot better than football. Lee created a whole series of flies, the most famous being the Royal Wulff. it’s certainly as pretty as a fly can be. He popularized catch and release fishing. He died in an airplane crash in 1991.

Mike Cline, Royal Wulff, Wikipedia, 2008

In 2002, Joan married Ted Rogowski, a Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft patent attorney, which, in the legal vernacular, is an elite lawyer at a white shoe law firm. He was a friend and fishing companion of Lee. He was a co-founder of the Theodore Gordon Flyfishers in New York, and, according to the patent lawyer board member I talked to at the Beaverkill Valley Inn (they were there for their annual dinner), Rogowski was an author of the Clean Water Act and one of the folk responsible for founding the EPA. At 93 he was featured on the cover of Fly Tyer magazine with his article “A Better Way to Tie Mayfly Wings.” It’s a good article, though not having tied a lot of mayfly wings, I can’t vouch for it being better.

Rogowski also represented Ted Williams during Williams’s Sears days. The guy knew Ted Williams.

Joan is now 95. She was around for most of our class and made sure the instructors remembered everything. There were four instructors,** and Kris and I had met all of them before–there’s a lot of consistency at the Wulff School. We had caught our New York fish with Craig Buckbee on the Beaverkill. He seemed happy enough to see us.  He must not have remembered my casting.

Anyway, there are two parts to the cast, the back cast where the line rolls out beautifully behind you, and then the forward cast where the line rolls out beautifully in front of you. To each of the back cast and the forward cast, there are three parts to create that roll: the loading move, the power snap, and the follow-through. The instructors drill this in the class, explain it, demonstrate it, hold your hand to show you how it feels, yell it across the pond, and whisper it in your ear while you sleep.

What a forward cast is supposed to look like.

What’s great at the school is the consistency of the message. They’ve been teaching the same thing over and over and over for 40 years, and there’s real value in that consistency. If anybody deviates, Joan’s there to pull them back into line.

And the casting instruction works. At least it works if you can do it: there’s no magic cure for ineptitude. My problem is that I’ve got this cute butt on the backside and a mess on the front. There’s the loading move, the power snap, and the drift that perfectly rolls out the line behind me, and then on the forward cast I skip the loading move and move straight to the power. Wham.

A tailing loop. How my cast looks way too often.

It’s not that maybe 70% of the time through long adjustment to bad habits I can’t get the line to go more or less where I want it to go. I can cast well enough using my sloppy ways to catch fish and maybe even fool some people some of the time, but it’s not good. About every fifth or sixth cast my line is going to cross itself (there’s a name for what happens, a tailing loop), and the line is going to puddle 30 feet out and tie itself into knots. It’s ugly. It’s inefficient. It’s frustrating. It’s all my fault.

A common result of my lousy forward cast.

It’s what I’ve learned.  I know it, my muscles remember it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. It’s certainly mild as bad habits go, a lot milder than stupid, but it’s a mess.

Sometimes I just cast backwards.  I’ve got a really cute butt.

** Sheila Hassan from Boston, Mark Wilde from Vermont, Dennis Charney from State College, Pa., and Craig Buckbee from Livingston Manor, New York. These are great people. Each of them separately guides and gives casting lessons, and Dennis is associated with a fly shop we visited in State College, Pennsylvania. State College is mostly known for its fly fishing and its ice cream.

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I Got Speyed, Redux

Lately I’ve had rod fever. This happens from time to time. I convince myself that there’s a hole in the universe that can only be filled by possession of. . . some rod, some rod that is newer and niftier and pretty as a happy child hunting Easter eggs on a bright spring morning and that will make me a better caster and a better catcher and a better husband and father and human being. Rod fever may happen to me more than most, but I doubt it. And it never quite works out the way I think. I’m always still just me.

Last year I got rod fever bad for Spey rods, which is a peculiar thing for a Houstonian since there’s no real Spey fishing for at least a thousand miles. Still. I bought a Spey rod, and in 2018 we fished four days for steelhead on the Deschutes River in Oregon. We swung flies with long 13-foot Spey rods, about four feet longer than normal rods, and tried to learn Spey casts, or at least enough to get through four days’ fishing.

To most fly fishers, Spey casting is exotic and mysterious. It’s not like the standard overhead cast. It’s done with two hands, not one. There is no backcast; the line never lays out behind the angler, instead there’s some flippy dippy stuff that eyesight and brain can’t quite follow. After a couple of incantations and some pyrotechnics the caster shoots the line forward, as much as twice the length of a normal cast. It is a lovely, magical thing to see, baffling and irresistible.

Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, J. Cary, Detail from a new map of Scotland, from the latest authorities, 1801, London.

The River Spey is in northeast Scotland, and the long rods and the two-handed casts originated on Scottish Atlantic salmon rivers. Speyside single malt Scotch is also from the region of the River Spey, Glenfiddich and Macallan being the best known, so there are many good things from thereabouts. What could better define a day of manly sport than putting on a bit of tweed, spending a day casting a Spey rod, and following it all with a wee or not-so-wee dram of rich and smoky Speyside? What man or woman could want more?

The long rods have advantages. They don’t require a backcast, so you can stand by a bank in a river and cast without hanging up in the branches behind you. They cast far, so you can cover lots of ground on big water, and the rod length better manipulates the line once it’s on the water. After four days of fishing I could cast 50 or 60 feet with the spey rod, but I fished near a good caster, Louis Cahill of Gink and Gasoline. He consistently shot line twice the distance I could manage, and it was beautiful.

Spey rods have some disadvantages. They’re not particularly accurate, and casting that far usually isn’t necessary. They’re made to swing flies, and swinging flies, isn’t common. Swinging flies lets the line pull the fly down and across in an arc, with the angler as the pivot point. It’s an old method of fly fishing, arcane even, with plenty of modern arcana pitched in to make the whole business obscure and esoteric, but except in the Pacific Northwest and maybe Scotland swinging flies isn’t common. Instead we let flies drift naturally with the current, or retrieve streamers. We don’t let flies swing.

I hadn’t seriously touched my Spey rod since our trip to Oregon, but we need to catch a fish in Washington State, and the obvious play, the right color of fish, is Olympic Peninsula winter steelhead. Kris didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she said. “Let’s go,” she said. “And bring along some whisky.” Ok, she didn’t say that last, and she didn’t spell whiskey like a Scot when she didn’t say it, but sometimes one needs to extrapolate.

So I emailed Jason Osborn at The Portland Fly Shop and asked Jason who we should fish with in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Jason said he was guiding in southern Washington, but that the Olympic Peninsula was a good idea. He said that for February we should check with Jack Mitchell’s The Evening Hatch.

But I also had rod fever, I wanted–no, I needed–another Spey rod, so I asked Jason to send along a 3-weight rod and a matching line because suddenly Spey fishing for trout is all the rage, and like I said, I had rod fever. This 3-weight business takes a bit of explanation. Fly rods are in weights, higher weight rods are used for bigger fish. If you want to catch a 200 pound marlin, a 14-weight would do the job. If you want to catch a bluegill, a 3-weight would be the very thing. For steelhead, the usual weight is somewhere around a 7- to 9-weight. A 3-weight is built for smaller fish.

Jason made a couple of suggestions and I took the cheapest, a Redington Hydrogen trout Spey made in China. I should say it wasn’t cheap, but for a Spey rod it was pretty reasonable. It’s a rather homely fella, with none of the design flourishes that would come with a high-dollar rod, but it’s well put together. It’s perfectly good to fool with in local waters.

And for most of what we catch in Texas rivers a 3 weight will work just fine. It would let us practice spey casts before our trip to Washington, and that’s all I really wanted. The rod came, and we drove three hours to New Braunfels to see if there were any trout yet in the Guadalupe. There weren’t, they won’t be stocked until Thanksgiving, and the flow in the river was ridiculously low, but I hadn’t forgotten everything I knew, the rod cast fine, and there were bluegill and bass. I caught a Guadalupe bass, the state fish of Texas, swinging a girdle bug. I also caught a tiny bluegill on a partridge and yellow. What sounds more manly than a partridge and yellow? Just forget that tiny bluegill part.

And then I went home and had a wee dram. Or two.

T.E. Pritt, Pritt’s Orange and Partridge, Plate 6 – Yorkshire Trout Flies, 1885, Goodall and Suddick, Leeds.

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Waloomsac River, Vermont, June 25, 2019

“Waloomsac River, is a small stream, which is formed in Bennington by the union of several branches, which rise in Glastenbury, Woodford and Pownal. It takes a northwestern direction, leaves the state near the northwest corner of Bennington and unites with Hoosac river, nearly on the line between Washington and Rensalaer counties, N.Y. Between this stream and Hoosac river was fought the Bennington Battle. On the Waloomsac and its branches are many good mill privileges and some fine meadows.”

Zadock Thompson, A Gazetteer of the State of Vermont, 1824, Montpelier, Vermont, E.P. Walton, Printer.

We stayed two days in Manchester, Vermont. There is a famous river near Manchester. It’s famous because since at least the 1960s Orvis has sold a fine series of reels dubbed Battenkill, and also sold a high-dollar bamboo rod of the same name. The reels are pretty things, always made by somebody else and marketed by Orvis, and I have a couple from the early 90s when they were made in England. Bamboo rods are always pretty, and the Battenkill particularly so, and I don’t have one of the rods, dammit. If the reels are that good though, and the rods that pretty, then the river must be good too, right? So I had a vague notion heading to Vermont that the Batten Kill was the place to fish.

The Batten Kill though doesn’t get that great of reviews. Apparently it’s pretty, but has better name recognition than fish. Our guide, Christian Betit, with Taconic Guide Service, wanted us to fish the Waloomsac near Bennington, a tiny river that runs 16 miles from Vermont across the New York border where it joins the Hoosic. Part of its course takes it along the edge of Bennington, and for a bit the Waloomsac becomes an urban waterway in one of the least urban states in the Northeast.

Bennington was a mill town, and is now a town sans mills. It’s not a wasteland, but it’s not the Ritz either. Mills were built in Bennington in the 19th century in part because of water power, Waloomsac water power specifically, and a diversion dam ran much of the flow out of the Waloomsac proper through Bennington. The old mills died somewhere in the last century, and while some remain vacant or were torn down, others house small businesses such as the de rigueur craft brewery and a racing snowshoe manufacturer. We don’t have many showshoe races in Houston, so the existence of a racing snowshoe manufacturer was pretty remarkable.

“[The Waloomsac’s] a pretty little freestone stream that has suffered the same kinds of neglect as the area through which it flows, so it’s not odd to find an old car battery or lawn furniture half-buried in the gravel riverbed. But despite this evidence of man’s folly, the stream is home to beautiful trout —some wild, some stockers that have migrated from elsewhere in the system. I’d been introduced to the particular hidden stretch of water along Benmont by a couple of colleagues, who referred to the spot as ‘The Sh*thole'” 

Phil Monahan, The Trout Stream That No One Else Wanted, Orvis News, June 29, 2017.

If I’ve got the history right, the diversion dam was removed, and the Waloomsac flow was restored. The Bennington sewer plant ain’t the very thing and it discharges into the Waloomsac, but in 2017 the City voted $9.9 million in bonds to fix the plant. I figured if they started from the election it should take about a year to prepare plans, issue bonds, and bid construction contracts, and then another year or two to complete construction. This is why I tell my children: Always vote yes for bonds! Well that and because I’m a bond lawyer, and they should support their father in his dotage.

Vermont Fish & Wildlife began stocking the river in 2014 with trophy rainbows and browns, fish at least 14 inches long, so there are good fish. We didn’t fish Phil Monahan’s raggedy water behind the Taco Bell, so I don’t know if it too has been improved, but what we fished was lovely, with overhanging trees and clear water. We put in at the picturesque Henry Street Bridge and fished downstream towards the New York border. It was a Tuesday, and nobody else was on the water.

That largest dark blotch is a snapping turtle in the Waloomsac. In Texas, snapping turtles are an indicator species for good water quality. That’s a good thing.

Because of Christian and anglers like Christian the Waloomsac seems to be having its moment, and seems to be getting the attention it deserves. Vermont like a lot of states has a fishing season, and the Waloomsac is one of the few Vermont rivers Vermonters can fish year around. I gather that there are Vermont anglers who will in fact fish in the middle of a Vermont winter, and so a bunch of crazy people know and care about the Waloomsac.

“More than 20 volunteers worked to clean up a section of the Walloomsac River on Saturday morning. The volunteers pulled out bicycles, scrap metal, tires, wheels, and a propane tank from the Walloomsac, a popular recreation spot and cold water fish habitat.”

Edward Damon, Volunteers pitch in to clean up Walloomsac River, The Bennington Banner, August 1, 2016.

So I was on a nice river with an eager guide and my lovely fishing partner and notwithstanding all of that I was in a foul mood. It was raining. Okay, it was a light, pleasant rain and I knew it would be raining, but still it was wet and grey and a wee bit dreary. Launching the boat I slipped on a rock and fell down in the river. I wasn’t hurt except for that whole pride thing, and I didn’t get water in my waders. Still. That pride thing.

And I wasn’t catching any fish. For the first two hours I caught no fish. Kris caught fish. She hooked three fish while we were fishing at the boat launch. Not that I would let Kris’s good fortune ever blacken my mood. Oh no, not me. I’m surely above that. But dang, right at the launch?

Then I broke my rod. It was the new R.L. Winston 5 weight Pure that Trout Unlimited had sent me for perfect attendance, and I broke the rod tip when I slammed a weighted streamer into it on a forward cast. Now mind, I knew theoretically that sort of thing could happen, but in my earlier years I must have slammed a thousand woolly buggers into a thousand rod tips and come out fine. Now when I don’t do that sort of thing very often I finally break a rod tip. Worse still it was just after I’d finally hooked and lost a couple of fish. Poor Christian, he had an angler in a dark mood smashing rod tips and he had to loan him a rod to finish the day. I’m not sure I’d have done it.

But Christian loaned me a rod and he pulled out the day. At one point late in the morning–we were on a half-day float–Christian was pondering our final stretch, a nine-foot deep hole, and I watched him think through the alternatives and come up with an appropriate answer: an indicator high on the butt of the leader, a lot of weight, and a random buggy brown pheasant tail nymph variant–random to me, but presumably not to Christian. I’d fished much the same rig before, not that I would have thought of it, but with a different fly it’s the going concern on San Juan River drifts. Watching Christian think through his approach was a joy. He’d worked hard all morning and even with a cranky old guy in the back of his boat he was still working hard. And then I caught five nice rainbows in about 30 minutes. Not that my mood would brighten because I caught fish.

Oh no, not me. Man I love the Waloomsac.

*

We went to Manchester in the first place because Orvis is there, and there is both an outlet store (which is huge) and a separate flagship store (which is huger). American-made Orvis rods are also made in Manchester, though the corporate offices are in Sunderland on the way from Manchester to Bennington.

Manchester is decidedly upscale. We stayed in the Equinox Resort which dates back to a tavern founded before the Revolution, and it was pretty posh. Kris was convinced that Tiger Woods was in the resort with us, though the guy she thought was Woods was sitting behind a pillar in the dining room and I couldn’t get a good look. It might have been Tiger Woods. Woods wasn’t playing at the PGA Rocket Mortgage Classic, so he had to be somewhere, and the guy in the dining room was wearing a golf shirt, plus the Equinox is the kind of place where Tiger Woods might be staying. It could have been Tiger Woods.

Including the Equinox, I counted three pretty big resort hotels within a mile of each other on Main Street. There were good restaurants (though my duck breast glazed with maple syrup came off a bit like duck breast pancakes). Not even counting the Orvis stores, there were enough outlet shops–Ralph Lauren, Kate Spade, Vineyard Vines, and Brooks Brothers among others–to keep a shopper happy. The Orvis stores were enough for us, though we did find a great laundromat. The Orvis stores were magnificent temples to the fly fishing shopping gods, and there were great deals on Helios 2 rods in the outlet store. I went looking and found an Orvis bamboo rod in a glass case in the flagship store. It was one of the newer models, not a Battenkill, and I didn’t buy it this time either.

Instead I bought two size twelve brown drake flies, because that’s the sort of thing one has in one’s flybox in Vermont. You never know when you might need one. I wouldn’t anyway.