Tag: Guides

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Happy New Year! North Dakota!

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/10159

John Caleb Bingham, Trappers Descending the Missouri, 1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I know, I know, it’s February, and I haven’t written anything since, I dunno, August of last year? I’ve stalled. It’s past Valentine’s, and I haven’t wished you Happy New Year.

Happy New Year!

We have fished. We’ve fished for Redfish at Port O’Connor, for bonefish on South Andros in the Bahamas, and I caught a 12-pound grass carp at Damon on a six weight Winston trout rod. The carp dragged my canoe around until it finally came to hand. We were both exhausted, but I’m pretty certain that I was the only one happy about it.

I’ve planned fishing trips. In April I’m going with a group from Houston to Cuba, which is these days a hot fly-fishing destination. We’re going for the benefit of the Cuban people, but we’ll also fish. In September Kris and I are going to Maine, so maybe we’ll add at least one state this year.

And we’ve traveled without fishing. In November we went to Spain for our son’s wedding, and that took a lot of physical and mental energy. I had to write a speech for the wedding dinner, and it was the best wedding speech ever. You should have been there.

gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught on South Andros with a spinning rod.

Gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught in January in the Bahamas with a spinning rod.

We cleaned out our storage bin, mostly, and I learned Spanish, some. The Astros won the World Series.

So we’ve been stuck at 31 states since last August, and all of my angler’s block stems from our September trip to North Dakota.I had dreaded North Dakota. Even though I grew up in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota is just a wee bit past the middle. There are big lakes in North Dakota, some natural lakes left by glaciers, some man-made, and if you want to fish for walleye with conventional gear, it’s a good place to go. Not so much for fly fishing.

From time to time in recent years I’ve checked the internet for suggestions for fly fishing in North Dakota, and have come across a lot of forum posts that look something like this:

QUERY: I’ve just moved to North Dakota for medical school/to count grasshopers/for the climate. Where is there to fly fish?

REPLY: South Dakota. All the rivers in North Dakota are flat, slow, and muddy.

It’s kinda hard to separate South Dakota and North Dakota, though Congress clearly managed it. The best history of North Dakota, Dakota by Norman Rijsford, is also the best history of South Dakota. The Dakota/Lakota, the Mandan, the Cheyenne, the Crow, the Hidatsa, the Chippewa . . . they all blatantly disregarded the state line. When Lewis and Clark traveled up the wide Missouri, they never mentioned when they crossed from south to north. Congress separated the Dakotas when they entered the Union because the locals couldn’t agree on a location for the state capitol. South Dakota still ended up with Pierre.

There is one difference between the states. There are no native trout in North Dakota, and at least historically there wasn’t much fly fishing anywhere without trout. South Dakota, in and around Badlands National Park, has trout. North Dakota also has a national park, Theodore Roosevelt, but no trout.

After a lot of internet perusing I found a guide in Bismarck, halfway between the state’s eastern and western borders, about 16 hours and 980 miles almost directly north of Vernon, Texas, my hometown. That driving route is roughly on the line of the 100th Meridian, where the wetter east gives way to the drier Great Plains.

From The Great Plains Trail. I don’t know where they stole it from. The dry line may be moving east because of Global Warming. Just another thing to keep you up at night.

We didn’t make that drive though. We flew from Houston to Minneapolis, which would have been a roughly 17 hour and 1,230-mile drive. In Minneapolis we went to a late-season Twins game at Target Field on St. Olaf College night, ate fried walleye, bought some pike flies at a local fly shop, and had a delicious, healthy breakfast at the Minnesota State Fair: Mini donuts shot into a deep frier out of a mini-donut gun, fried cheese curds, deep fried corn on the cob, and a corny dog. I had a corny dog anyway. Kris didn’t really eat her fair share of the cheese curds either.

The guide I found, Kurt Yancy, isn’t a full-time fly fishing guide, but he is a full-time fishing guide who dabbles in fly fishing, and he said we might catch smallmouth, walleye, pike, or carp. On his website there are lots of photos of guys dressed against a north wind holding large walleyes. You can catch walleye on fly rods, but they’re mostly caught deep in lakes, as much as 30 feet, and once you get much beyond ten feet fishing with a fly rod starts getting really stupid. Stupider.

It’s also hard to ice fish with a fly rod, so our potential North Dakota season was short.

Driving from Minneapolis to Bismarck takes about six hours. We ate lunch at the Fisher’s Club on Middle Spunk Lake in Avon, Mn., and the Fisher’s Club is charming and someplace everyone should visit. At the visitor center in Fargo we met North Dakota’s most famous actor. Almost to Bismarck, we drove past miles and miles of ponds that set my heart racing, but Kurt told me later that the ponds were very shallow, only a couple of feet deep, and that they froze solid in winter. Fish couldn’t survive the freeze. A thousand miles further south and those miles of ponds would be a destination, except of course when they dried up in the heat of the summer.

Well, actually, a thousand miles further south they’d be High Plains playa lakes, and those aren’t something you fish either.

At the Fargo visitor’s center, North Dakota’s most famous actor. He was autographed by the Coen brothers.

Ok, that’s enough of a wind up. Here’s the bottom line: we didn’t catch a fish in North Dakota. It was hard to get to, and then it was even harder getting home–it was our first intimation that things are a bit screwed up at Southwest Airlines. Coming home we had a 16-hour day and were routed through New Orleans from Austin to get to Houston. We could have gone to Paris from New York and back to New York again.

And like I said, we didn’t catch a fish. We fished the second day at Nelson Lake and watched carp gulp air into their swim bladders because the outfall from the power plant was heating the lake. It was frustrating. The first day though we fished in the side channels of the Missouri River, and the Missouri, maybe our most famous river after the Mississippi, was magnificent for every reason except fly fishing. You can’t stand beside the Missouri without thinking about Lewis and Clark, Teddy Roosevelt, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, western migration, buffalo, migratory birds and antelope and seas of grass, everything the plains are. North Dakota feels as wild as it gets in the lower 48.

Thoreau wrote a series of essays about Maine, and in one, Chesuncook, after a companion gratuitously kills a moose, he is at his best, writing about our relationship to nature and to wildness, and how–and I paraphrase here–our highest use of nature is not to catch a fish, or chop down a tree, or kill a moose–those uses are petty. Our highest use is to discover our shared immortality with the fish, or the pine tree, or the moose. I’m not sure I buy that immortality business, but I get what he’s saying, at least a bit, and he recognizes in 1853, when there was still plenty ‘o wildness, that something was lost if our incidental uses used up the unsullied natural world, or if we only approached the natural world as something only to be fished, or lumbered, or hunted. In North Dakota, there’s still some natural world left to contemplate, and some of the human world too, particularly while standing on the bank of the Missouri River.

But dangit, higher aspirations and Henry David Thoreau aside, I surely would have liked to catch a fish.

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Narragansett Bay, Newport, Rhode Island, for Striped Bass, August 17-19, 2022.

This was our second trip to Newport, and we had to go back because the first trip we didn’t catch anything. This time one of us caught a good striped bass, and one of us foul-hooked something called a chub mackerel. Foul-hooked means you accidentally snag the fish somewhere besides the mouth. Here are two truths about fly fishing: whenever you foul-hook a fish, it’s a bad thing; and whenever you catch something called a chub, it’s also a bad thing. The combination creates kinda the worst of undesirables. I would have counted the chub though, if only I hadn’t foul-hooked it.

I guess I have to go back. Kris doesn’t, not that I’m jealous, but I suspect she’ll want to go along. She catches great fish in Rhode Island.

We fished with Captain Rene Letourneau, who has spent 71 years in Rhode Island. Rene put us on fish after fish after fish. Why didn’t I catch a fish? I couldn’t keep my line untangled. I couldn’t keep from standing on my line. I couldn’t cast. I was hopeless. Now mind, I’m not usually a horrible caster, but after spending a week two-hand casting in Alaska, I guess I’d forgotten how to cast a single-handed rod.

Last Saturday back in Houston, at the Texas Flyfishers annual mini expo, Jeff Ferguson from Lake Charles told me what I was doing wrong, and I slapped my forehead and said duh. Then I mentioned that in Rhode Island I was fishing with sinking and intermediate lines, not floating lines.

“Oh, that’s different . . . ” and then Jeff tried to explain how I needed to cast a sinking line and it was too much information and I had to walk away.

Even casting badly, I got plenty of shots. We were fishing where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Rhode Island coast, so even if Rhode Island is a tiny state it’s a pretty big place to fish, and seeing from the ocean side where the Atlantic meets the rocks is in itself worth the trip. Captain Letourneau went to where he expected fish and then we watched for birds. The striped bass chase baitfish to the surface, then the birds join the feeding frenzy. The water is boiling with fish and the sky is boiling with diving gulls. It all lasts a few minutes, and then it dies until it pops up again 200 yards away. I had some hook-ups but lost them. My most exciting fish wasn’t a striper at all but a a toothy bluefish that took my fly just long enough to cut my leader.

Did I mention that one of us caught a great striped bass, over 30 inches and about 12 pounds, and it wasn’t me? Dammit.

When we were in Alaska one of our guides, Tom Schaeffer, was from Maine, and he told us about his nephew’s new bonefish lodge in the Berry Islands in the Bahamas, Soul Fly Lodge. In Rhode Island, Rene was telling us about his trip to Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas with Peter Jenkins, who owns The Saltwater Edge in Newport. We’d met last year the first time I didn’t catch a fish in Rhode Island. Our last day at the dock there stood Peter, who was buying a new used boat, and who told us he’d invested in Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas. Now I kinda feel it’s preordained that we go to Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas. Are the Bahamas a state? Can we fit it in after the Dakotas?

Anyway, I’m ok with going back to Newport. We found a place to stay that wasn’t extraordinarily expensive–and there are a lot of places to stay in Newport that define expensive. The Sea Whale was roughly $200 per night, which in Newport counts as a bargain. The Sea Whale had it’s own humble charm and free parking, was spotless, and was only a block from Flo’s Clam Shack.

We reconnected with clam shacks, which are the greatest invention since taco stands, and over the three days we were in Rhode Island we made it to three: Flo’s in Middletown, Tommy’s World Famous in Warwick, and the Sea View Snack Bar in Mystic, Connecticut, where we went to see the Mystic Seaport Museum. There are a lot more clam shacks to visit. Fried clams and chowder are now high on my list of great picnic table eating, though for my money clam cakes are a poor second to hush puppies. Clam cakes could be greatly improved with some green onions and corn meal, but then hush puppies could probably be improved with some bits of clam.

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Kanektok River, Bethel Census Area, Alaska, July 3-10, 2022.

I had imagined Alaska, and not just the bears, either. I had imagined glaciers and mountains, forests and Western streams and endless fish–like Yellowstone, but better, with more of all the stuff that makes the West wild. That’s not exactly the Alaska where we fished. We spent a week on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta where the Kanektok River meets the Bering Sea, and it was both different and more interesting.

Swinging for Kings

We fished six days at Deneki Outdoors’ Alaska West camp, five miles upstream from the coastal village of Quinagak, population 856. We were where Alaska ended and the Bering Sea began, with no roads into town through the tundra. Quinagak is 72 air miles from the next largest town, Bethel. It was pretty remote.

Fishing for salmon in Alaska is about time. Arrive two weeks too early or two weeks too late and you won’t catch the salmon you want. The salmon come in from the sea on a schedule, year after year, in bigger or smaller numbers, though it seems that these days the numbers are always smaller. We chose early July for king salmon, the largest Pacific salmon. Hubris I reckon.

Fly fishing for kings differs from most other fly fishing. The rods are different. The lines are different. The flies are different.

Spey rods are long, 13 feet compared to the usual 9-foot fly rod, and heavy. You use both hands to cast, and there’s no back-cast. It’s the simplest fly cast, a roll cast, but with some complicating twists and turns and issues of timing, and the arcane lines are the heart of it. We fished with Skagit lines. There is another type of spey line, a Scandi line, but it’s the Skagit that’s used on the Kanektok for kings.

Skagit lines are short, as short as 20 feet, and thick and heavy. They’re the colors of Play-Doh so you can see them on the water, and they’re thick as baling wire, nearly an 1/8th of an inch. Skagit line weights are measured in grains. The heaviest part of a regular 9-weight redfish line, a heavy line, might weigh 330 grains. My 8/9-weight Skagit line weighs 600 grains. See what I mean by arcane? They use an ancient alchemist weight system to measure the lines, and I doubt that much of anybody knows what a grain actually is. Regardless, nearly twice the weight makes a difference, whether it’s measured in grains or in kilograms or in ounces.

The Skagit line is attached to the reel through 100 feet of thin plastic-coated running line, and then through 200 yards of braided nylon backing. We would cast some of the running line, but only saw the backing when a hot fish ran.

Skagit lines are designed to pick up and throw a sinking tip that is also heavy. A sink tip’s plastic coating is mixed with ground tungsten to sink into the river as much as 7- or 8-inches per second. At the end of that heavy ten-foot sink tip is a large, annoying fly with the added water weight of a good river baptism. And the flies are annoying. Once they hit freshwater from the sea, salmon aren’t feeding. The flies are designed for provocation, not imitation.

Learning to spey cast is not for the faint-hearted. The heavy lines, large soaked flies, and high line speed can leave a lasting impression, even if you don’t actually hook yourself. I thwacked my left ear hard, and another bad cast took my stocking cap into the river. If I hadn’t been wearing the cap it would have been bits of my scalp.

When we started on Sunday we were less than competent casters. By the next Saturday we were casting more or less in the vicinity of ok. Our guides were good teachers, and we were at it most of 10 hours a day for six days. Even I had a chance of getting better.

We waded along gravel bars, trying to fish the places the salmon might hold before another upstream push. There was enough river and few enough anglers to always have our own private gravel bar. We’d wade out in the shallows then cast across to the deeper water, maybe 70 feet, more likely 60, and let the fly and 10-foot sink tip drag down and across in the current. That arc–more of a rounded right angle, really–is the swing, arced down and across from me, the pivot. When the line and fly were almost directly below me I would let the fly hang in the current, then retrieve line back until I could cast again.

When I usually fish, I cast to fish I see, or cast to where I think fish are likely. This was more like broadcasting on the radio, casting out to as much of the river as I could cover and then letting the fly search. Cast, swing, retrieve, step downriver one or two steps, and then do it all again. Then do it all again. Then do it all again. I never really knew who was out there.

Those tungsten sink tips? Rio fly lines sells them as MOW tips, and I was told that MOW are the initials of three former Alaska West guides who developed the lines. The Kanektok has the reputation of one of the best places in the world to swing flies for kings, and whether or not you catch fish, it’s a mesmerizing business.

The River, the tundra, and the sea.

Most anybody can work up some mystical awe for a mountain, but it’s hard to work up much awe for a delta. Its beauty is more difficult to parse. I’ve probably spent more time fishing coastal marshes than most, and that’s what first struck me about the Kanektok. Out of context, if someone told you that those were mangroves, not stunted alders, and that that was marsh grass, not tundra grass, you’d like as not believe you were somewhere in Belize, or Galveston, or New Orleans.

The Kanektok flow was steady and smooth. The gravel bottom was easy to wade, though it did get deep. We stayed in the shallows, and I doubt that I ever waded in water that was much above my knees.

At the sea the mouth of the Kanektok is a tidal plain. At low tide at the outlet there were sand bars and tall, cut banks. Twelve hours later, everything we saw would be hidden under ten feet of high tide. I climbed up a bank, in part from a full bladder and in part from curiosity, and from there the tundra grass, flat and seemingly endless, was dotted with purple fire weed, white yarrow, and yellow grundsels.

I’ve read that in summer the Bering Sea hosts the largest biomass on earth, and that carries over into the Delta. Even along the relatively people-inhabited river we watched swallows attack a golden eagle, compared the glaucous gulls to our own smaller laughing gulls, saw beaver swim dragging fresh-cut alder, and watched tiny yellow warblers, maybe from as far south as the Yucatan, explore the bankside alders.

An odd factoid: the average American eats about one ton, 2000 pounds, of food each year. In Quinagak, about 700 pounds of each resident’s annual food supply comes from subsistence fishing, hunting, and gathering. Even with our annual fig crop and July okra production, plus those two or three tomatoes each year that actually ripen, I doubt that we get 25 pounds of food per year from anywhere but the HEB. And this year the figs didn’t make because of the drought. We’ve had a lot of okra though.

There’s Yup’ik archeological history near Quinagak that dates from as early as 1350, so it’s a well-established trading site, and probably a fishing site. During the year though the current residents’ ancestors would disburse throughout the region to gather food. I suppose that’s part of the legacy of the Alaskan Native Claims Act: it mandated that Native Alaskans pick their spot. Maybe there’s an anthropologist somewhere who knows.

Anyway, back to that 700 pounds. There always seemed to be Quinagakians on the river snagging sockeye. It wasn’t sporting, but then it wasn’t meant to be. It was harvesting. And from the river mouth we could watch Quinagak boats put out to sea to net fish.

On the Kanektok, the king return was down, and for the season Alaska had banned chum salmon fishing because the numbers of returning chum are way off. Global warming maybe, maybe the efficiency of gill nets, maybe both. Probably combinations of things I can’t imagine.

Fish, No Fish

The first day I caught five fish. Now mind, any day with five fish is a good day, and I caught one 15-pound king, a couple of smaller jacks, and two chum. They were bright, fast fish, only a few miles from the ocean and not yet changing to their spawning form and colors, not yet dying.

We couldn’t target chum, but when we fished for kings we couldn’t help accidentally catching chum. We landed and released them as quickly as we could. The jacks are a bit of an oddity, and are defined by Alaska law as any king salmon that’s less than 30 inches long. The two Jacks I caught the first day were big for jacks, maybe close to ten pounds. They were good fish, but they weren’t 30 inches. They weren’t kings.

Kings go out to the ocean for five to eight years before they return to their home river. Jacks are immature males, always males, teenagers, who go out to the ocean but then return to their river after one to three years. People say it’s a bit of a mystery why the jacks return early, but do teenage boys ever believe in the possibility of death? Are teenage boys everywhere not stupid for the chance to get laid? Where’s the mystery?

The first day my five fish were the best catch for the camp, and I reveled in it, certain that I had this Alaska thing down. The next day I followed it up with nothing. Nichts, nada, nil. I worked hard, and came back to camp in the evening shamefaced. Kris caught fish, Kris always catches fish. Within a couple of hours of arriving at camp she walked down to the river and caught a nice rainbow. Then she caught a jack, a chum and a rainbow on Monday, a jack and two rainbows on Tuesday, a chum on Wednesday, two rainbows on Thursday, a jack, a king and the first pink of the season on Friday, and three rainbows and two jacks on Saturday. She mostly spent her time in Alaska outfishing me.

I had imagined Alaska as a steady stream of fish, and after going nil on Monday, on the third day, Wednesday, I caught one jack.

None of this matched my imagination. On Thursday again I caught nothing. I hooked two fish and lost them after setting the hook. Once I tried to set the hook too soon after the slightest nudge.

I got plenty of practice casting.

All of this was done under lead skies, in cold and rain. Kris caught fish and I caught nada.

Besides the obvious differences in rod and line, maybe the biggest difference between swinging flies and other fly fishing is the take. So much of fly fishing is visual, or a fish attacks a retrieved streamer. You watch the line, you watch an indicator on the line, you watch the fish, or you watch the fly. You’re active, you’re looking. Swinging the fly, on the other hand, is all tactile. The connection through the line between you and the hook is direct, and it’s the only connection. We couldn’t see what was happening beneath the surface, but could only feel a nudge, a tug, and then the heavy pull of the fish on the line. If you hadn’t already blown it, that’s when you would set the hook. It is the most connected, electric thing.

On Friday, I lost a good king after a good fight, and landed another king within a mile of the ocean. There was a lamprey wound on its belly, and it still had the sea lice it would lose in freshwater. Kris also landed a king, and her fish had the beginning colors of the spawn. Late in the day I hooked a salmon, and it ran down and across the river, taking all of the 100-foot running line and a good bit of the braided backing. I saw the fish once, 100 feet across and downriver, dragging the long curve of my line and jumping upriver parallel to the surface. While I fought the fish it started to rain, the only rain of the day, big, heavy drops. When I finally landed the fish it was a huge chum, bigger than any of the kings I’d caught, and by then the rain had stopped. Alaska can be a volatile place.

Chris the Guide spent time reviving the fish, and Kris the companion snapped a photo when he took it from the net. It was nothing but a moment, a few minutes to revive the fish, and a brief glimpse of the sea, of the river, of a different place from what I had imagined.

Our last day

Our last day fishing, Saturday, was bright and clear, warm and sunny, with low tides. It was a terrible day for fishing, though of course Kris caught all sorts of fish. We fished for a bit, caught nothing, then went down to the mouth of the river at the sea, as much to see it as to fish. After lunch Chris the Guide ran the boat upriver 15 miles to fish for trout with single-handed rods. We caught some on heavy sculpin patterns, and Kris caught a couple of jacks, but we went as much to sightsee as to fish.

They were good rainbow trout, big by the standards of the lower 48, as much as 20 inches. They weren’t big Alaska trout though. Those would come later in the season, and downriver, closer to the ocean, after more salmon had spawned and died and the trout were fat with salmon flesh and eggs.

Upriver I sat bankside to change flies and was swarmed with mosquitos. They weren’t as substantial as our Gulf Coast mosquitos, more of whisps of mosquitos, but they were real enough and plenty numerous and persistent, plenty annoying, and until we left that place the swarm stayed with me. I guess that was something I hadn’t really imagined either. Just like I hadn’t imagined the tundra, or the wildflowers, or the tiny bank-side yellow warblers.

On our final sunny day I could finally see the sockeye ghosting upriver to spawn. It was a continuous line of driven fish, and I watched hundreds, maybe thousands. They coasted up the shallows where I stood, and would come within a few feet of me then swerve deliberately, out and around me, never stopping, never running, saving their energy to move upstream.

The sockeyes were fish I couldn’t catch, or at least that I wouldn’t snag. I would go again just to watch those fish.

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The Housatonic River, Litchfield County, Ct., May 2-3

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?