Tag: Guides

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Fly Fishing the Driftless, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, September 26-29, 2021

I had breakfast in Houston yesterday with a lawyer from Minneapolis, a compliance officer for a securities dealer. He had grown up in Norfthfield, about 120 miles from where we stayed near Spring Grove, and went to law school at the University of Minnesota. I mentioned that we’d been to an area near Austin and Rochester, in the Driftless region, and said how much I liked it. He’d never heard of the Driftless.

We drove 2,122 miles. We fished in three states, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. We fished in five streams, and caught wild brown trout and native brookies. I finally cast a bamboo fly rod. We saw lots of corn.

It’s two days from Houston, Texas, to Spring Grove, Minnesota, which is only 22 miles from Houston, Minnesota. I’d like to tell you that Houston, Minnesota, and Houston, Texas, are similar, but they’re not. Houston, Texas, is located on a flat coastal plain in Southeast Texas, and has 2.31 million residents. Houston, Minnesota, is located in the relatively hilly Driftless region of Southeast Minnesota, and has 979 residents.

They were both named after Sam Houston. Houston, Minnesota, has a wider selection of farm implements.

According to our Minnesota guide, Tim Carver of The Driftless Fly Fishing Company, a lot of his clients are from Chicago. From Chicago, the Driftless holds the closest native trout. I guess that if we lived in Chicago we’d only be five hours from Houston, Minnesota. From here it’s 19 hours. We’d have to be Cubs fans though, so it’s not worth it.

* * *

Gretchen, the Houston Orvis fishing manager, asked where we’d been lately and I told her about the Driftless, how pretty it was, how different from the rest of the Midwest. Gretchen is from New Hampshire, and I told her how it reminded me of New England. She’d never heard of the Driftless.

I hadn’t planned to fish in Minnesota on this trip. In Minnesota I had imagined that one day we would visit the far north, the Boundary Waters, but after I rented a farmhouse near Decorah, Iowa, I figured out it was actually in Minnesota. It was a sign.

Let’s get this out of the way now: each of the streams we fished in the Driftless was a bit different, but I suspect that if I found a place I liked in Iowa, I could find a similar place in Wisconsin, or in Minnesota. None of the water was big, the largest stream was maybe 40 feet across, and each was a mix of pools, slow water, bends, and riffles. What was remarkable was not the variation, but the amount. Minnesota claims more than 700 miles of fishable trout water, Iowa 2,500, and Wisconsin more than 13,000. If I fished a mile of stream each day, I’d be tottering around in a walker and still not out of Iowa.

Our guide Tim was a youngish man, at least to my old eyes, and I suspect that guiding and fly fishing are his anchors. I couldn’t imagine what Tim would do if there wasn’t water to fish, and nothing seemed more important to him than our having a good day. I liked Tim a lot.

We fished the morning on the South Fork Root River. There is also a South Branch of the Root, and a North and a Middle Branch, plus each has tributaries of its own. After they all join together the Root joins the Mississippi near La Crescent, Minnesota, across the Mississippi from La Crosse, Wisconsin. Even with all that joining the Root never seemed like a big river.

On the South Fork we crossed a public easement at the edge of a bit of pasture, and Tim placed Kris at the base of a long pool banked on one side by the pasture and on the other by a sandstone bluff. It was pretty characteristic Driftless karst topology. Kris spent the rest of the morning fishing that pool. Every time she thought about moving she caught another fish.

We started out fishing dry dropper rigs; at first I fished a pheasant tail nymph under a parachute Adams but later switched to a brace of dries, a spinner and a dun. I started downstream below Kris, and then moved around her and upstream.

The fish were spooky, and I was making, for me, long casts. I know all this modern stuff about keeping casts short and relying on stealthy approaches, but there are few things more thrilling than taking a trout on a dry fly after a long perfect cast, or even a pretty good cast, or even a good enough cast. It is such a joy.

* * *

To meet Tim, we came into Preston down a long hill onto the main street. It was a handsome street, lined with houses and shops that seemed to pre-date World War I. A lot of the buildings sported American flags. It reminded me of a record cover I’d once owned, or maybe that I imagined, of Charles Ives’ New England Holiday Symphony, an Impressionistic cover that I recall as a mishmash of American flags and New England town. Likely as not I was making it up to fit the moment.

At the shop, there was a ridiculously good-looking young couple from Rochester, also meeting their guide. He was handsome and tall and dark and she was tall and red-headed and movie-star pretty. I fantasized that they were young doctors or some such from the Mayo Clinic–it’s what Rochester is best known for–learning to fly fish (they were being fitted for rented waders, so I think that I was right they were learning. I was certainly right about them being ridiculously good looking).

We talked about where they were from, and I mentioned that Preston reminded me more of New England than of the Midwest–I was still pondering the memory of that probably mis-remembered record cover–and she said that was good to know, because she’d never been to New England. I suppose that some day she’ll drive into a New England town and think to herself that it looks absolutely nothing like Preston, Minnesota.

In Decorah, Iowa, we fished with Liz Siepker, of Driftless Fishers LLC. I had googled guides in Decorah, and picked Liz first because I realized that after 20-odd states I had yet to hire a woman guide. Unfortunately Liz was only available for an afternoon, and I wanted to fish a full day. I emailed another guide who never answered, and a third who responded that on a Monday in October both he and his guiding partner had to work their real jobs. We booked the afternoon with Liz.

When I met Liz I accused her of having a Midwestern accent, but it turned out she was from Pennsylvania. Her masters was in one or another kind of fishology, and she got to Iowa via a fisheries job in Missouri and an Iowa-born husband. I still swear I heard her say you betcha.

At least theoretically, fishing in Iowa differs from the other Driftless states in a couple of ways, neither of which affected us. There is a trout season in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, and with a few exceptions in both states, trout fishing in the Minnesota and Wisconsin Driftless mostly stops on October 15. Iowa has no season, fishing is year ’round, and our guides in Minnesota and Wisconsin admitted that in late fall and winter they would cross into Iowa for their own off-season fishing.

Iowa also stocks rainbow trout in some places, though where we fished we only caught wild browns–I think Wisconsin has stopped all stocking in the Driftless. There is natural reproduction in Iowa, both among brown trout and brook trout and I’d guess the general population, and at least one Iowa creek is set aside for naturally reproducing native brook trout.

Liz suggested that we fish Trout Run, in a county park on the edge of urban Decorah. To be honest, compared to Houston, Texas, Decorah is never particularly urban, though it is multiples larger than Houston, Minnesota. It’s still fewer than 10,000 people. Urban or no, on Trout Run we were isolated enough to forget that the town was nearby, and the only other angler we saw was back at the parking lot; us going, him arriving.

Even if Liz wasn’t from Iowa, you betcha she knew the water like a native. She even took us on a jungle adventure into deepest, darkest Iowa.

With Liz we fished nymphs under a foam indicator with no added split shot. Like Kris the morning before in Minnesota, I caught all of my fish, maybe a dozen, fishing one deep pool. Nothing we caught in the Driftless was particularly large, but all of the guides assured us that there were 22-inch browns right there, right where we were fishing, and that nighttime fishing with mouse patterns was great for big browns. I’m sure it is, and I hope they enjoy it.

* * *

I am a superstitious baseball fan, which is redundant, and one of my longest running superstitions is Frito pie. Do you know Frito pie? If you’re not from New Mexico or Texas you probably don’t. It is great stuff: spicy, unctuous chile mixed into a bed of crisp salty Fritos, then topped with onions and cheese and whatever else comes to hand. Sometimes a small Fritos bag is split down the side and the chili–at Texas high school football games it’s likely Wolf Brand from the can–the chili is mixed straight into the bag. It’s our version of a hot dog.

Frito pie is my comfort food for baseball superstitions. I’m constantly finding new sources of Frito pie in Houston, Texas (though not Houston, Minnesota), from ice houses to upscale, and if the Astros are losing, I eat Frito pie and know that I’ve done all that I can to help turn things around.

Anyway, we were in the Driftless in the final week of the baseball season and the Astros were stalled. After our afternoon fishing with Liz, Kris and I stopped at the Decorah Fareway grocery. There was no Wolf Brand in the canned soup aisle (which was also the Miracle Whip aisle–this was Iowa). I thought maybe the store stocked some kind of frozen chili, and found the store manager on the frozen food aisle. “Do ya’ll have frozen chili?”

I said those four words; I really did. It may have been the most Texas thing I’ve ever said. The guy just stared at me. After a bit he said I’ve never heard of anything like that and walked away. We found a chili spice mix where the Wolf Brand should have been, added it to some ground beef, and the Astros won the division. It was pretty good, too.

Liz had recommended the Root River Rod Company in Lanesboro, so on Tuesday on our way out of \Minnesota for Wisconsin we stopped there. Kris bought some stuff, and then bought some more stuff–she was jealous of Liz’s wading boots, so it was a pretty good day for the Root River Rod Company. Liz was right, it was a good shop, but best of all the owner, Steve Sobieniak, let me cast one of his bamboo rods; he both builds and restores bamboo. I cast one of his builds, and it was a lovely thing, casting soft and true. If I fished the Driftless day to day, season to season, that’s what I would own. The Driftless is bamboo rod water.

* * *

I’ve read that there are more certified organic farms in Driftless Wisconsin than in any other area in the States. The first night in Viroqua we ate at the farm-to-table Driftless Cafe. At the table next to us were guys passing around fish photos on their phones. I didn’t have the Frito pie, but it was wonderful. The second night at the Driftless Cafe (we went back the second night), we had the pizza, and not only were guys at the table next to us declaiming how they ate there every time they came to Viroqua to fish, our guide Matt was there for his Dad’s birthday. The third night (we made night three) we ate appetizers and a salad at the bar (which was inlaid with a swimming trout), and we saw their framed James Beard semi-finalist certificate. I reckon you don’t get a lot of James Beard semi-finalists in cafes in towns of fewer than 5,000, even if the cafe is pretty upscale. If I was still in Viroqua I’d be back for night four. They also have good martinis.

On Wednesday we fished a half-day with Matt Bethke of Driftless Angler. I figured we’d fish with Matt in the morning, then explore in the afternoon. Matt grew up in the area, moved around the country some, and came home to Westby, just up the road from Viroqua.

Agriculture almost killed the Driftless streams before World War II, sort of like agriculture almost killed the southern plains with the Dust Bowl. Trees were clear cut, everything was plowed for planting, and streams filled with silt from erosion. It was the damaged Wisconsin of A Sand County Almanac. What had been spring-fed coldwater wild-trout streams was choked with silt. The states have largely reversed the damage, and private groups like Trout Unlimited have also invested heavily in stream restoration.

Matt took us to Weister Creek, in the Kickapoo Valley Reserve. The Reserve was originally land accumulated by the Corps of Engineers in the 1960s for a since-abandoned dam project. After the proposed dam project was finally abandoned, a chunk of the Corps-owned land in the Reserve, about 8600 acres including part of Weister Creek, was given to the State of Wisconsin or held in trust for the Ho-Chunk Nation. The land has been undeveloped and reclaimed by nature since the 60s. I don’t think it’s an accident that Weister was the most deeply incised water we fished; I suspect that the Weister was as close as we came to what the streams were like before the Driftless was farmed.

We fished a nymph under a foam beetle, and the fish were spooky. We cast a lot from the banks, though I couldn’t stay out of the water–since Pennsylvania I’m a convert to the notion that my best drifts are straight towards my rod tip, and that can be hard to manage from a bank. Most of our casts were pretty short–there wasn’t sufficient space between cut banks on a winding small stream to make long casts or take long drifts.

That morning we fished about a half-mile of river and caught wild brown trout. We didn’t see anybody else.

* * *

The van’s change oil light came on, so Thursday I spent part of the morning at the Viroqua Chrysler dealer. I waited on the sales floor for the oil change, and passed some of the time talking to a salesman. We talked a lot about the Brewers winning their division. He asked what we were doing there, so I told him we were fishing. He asked what for? Walleye?

I’d like to catch a walleye. I’ve never seen a walleye.

Following Matt back from Weister Creek to Viroqua, he showed us a bit of isolated stream where the state had eradicated the European browns and reestablished the native strain brook trout. That evening Kris and I went back to the brook trout stream and fished a quarter mile up the easement until dark. We didn’t catch anything.

The next day after the oil change I worked at lawyering through the afternoon, and then in the evening, before our third dinner at the Viroqua Diner, we went back to the little creek. At first nothing, but after a while I figured that maybe we were too close to the road, that maybe that portion of the water got fished too hard and too often. I walked further upstream, maybe a half mile from the road, and watched trout rising in a long pool. I was fishing dry flies, and I caught a brookie, went back and got Kris to show her where I had fished and how, and on my example cast caught another brookie on a long just-good-enough cast with a Royal Wulff. She had lost her fly, so we traded rods and I headed back to the car. I’d caught a perfect fish.

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Conejos River, Colorado, July 29, 2021

I was ambivalent about fishing Colorado. I had this romantic notion of spending a month or so rambling around the state following inclinations and topographic maps to fish. Instead of a month we only gave Colorado a day. We didn’t even spend the night.

We crossed the border at Antonito, at the Sinclair station and the marijuana dispensary. I grew up in a county that prohibited alcohol sales, so the marijuana dispensary just over the New Mexico line made perfect sense. Since New Mexico has recently legalized pot and in-state sales will start soon, I guess the dispensary will move on to Clovis, in legal New Mexico just over the illegal Texas border, so that it’s ready for the next dry state.

From the Wikipedia entry for Antonito:

The area’s economy has recently experienced an upsurge with the passage of Colorado’s recreational marijuana laws. A 420-friendly town, several recreational marijuana dispensaries have opened within the city limits. 

We didn’t visit any of the dispensaries, but there are also a bunch of fly fishing businesses–lodges, cabins, shops, and guides. Every other car sported a rooftop rod rack. I own a rooftop rod rack, but it’s one of the few I’ve seen in Houston. In Antonito they’re required by local law. Given the dispensaries, I suspect there are plenty of mellow anglers trying to remember where they put the key to their rod rack.

This is a car with a rooftop rod rack. I knew where the key was.

Back in New Mexico on the Cimarron, Shane Clawson and I had talked about not catching fish at all. I lose a lot of fish before I land them, and since catch-and-release is the goal anyway, that’s perfectly ok with me–fishing is cruel, and a remote release helps fish survive, plus I always remember the fish I lose better than the fish I catch.

I mentioned to Shane that I’d thought about cutting the point off my flies at the bend of the hook and playing tag with the fish, just watching them rise to my disabled fly but never hooking any. Shane said that a Taos friend did something similar. Most of us already fish with barbless hooks, and Shane’s friend widened the hook gap so that any hooked fish was almost certain to shake loose before landing. He could play them for a second, then watch them disappear.

“Of course he’s Buddhist,” Shane said.

Well of course he is. He’s from Taos. Buddhists are more common in Taos than pot dispensaries in Antonito. I’m pretty sure there’s a prayer wheel aisle at the local Walmart.

That’s a long introduction to hanging out early on Thursday at Conejos River Anglers, waiting for the guide, and saying that I didn’t really care if we caught fish or not. “Bullshit,” someone snapped. I guess so, some anyway, but truth is, I’m always a bit ambivalent about catching fish. I’ve got my Buddhist tendencies, plus if I didn’t catch a fish on the Conejos, I’d still have my chance at a month-long ramble.

Then I went out and caught a fish.

Which is skipping way ahead. To get to that fish–and it was a lovely, fine cutbow, about 19 inches, fat and healthy, and caught not on my first cast but on no more than my tenth–anyway to get to that fish we had to meet our guide, Micah Keys, at the fly shop and then drive. Antonito is at 7,890 feet. Where we fished on the Conejos, near its headwaters below the Platoro Reservoir, is around 9,900 feet. To gain that 2000 feet of elevation we drove 48 long winding miles up the Conejos River, much of it on gravel mountain roads.

That’s a lot of river, and from time to time during the year I suppose almost all of it is fishable. In high summer though we went as high as we could to beat the heat. Fish mortality increases when the water temperature approaches 70 degrees, plus the fish stop feeding. Even at elevation the water was too hot to fish by 2 o’clock.

Before the water temperature stopped us, we caught more fish, all browns. Micah had us fishing size 18 bead-head nymph droppers, not much more than a bit of colored thread with a tail for visual balance and a tungsten bead to make it sink–fished about 20 inches under a parachute Adams floating in the surface. Micah said his name, by the way, was from the sheriff on The Rifleman, not the Old Testament Minor Prophet. That’s probably for the best, since it seems to me that the Minor Prophets would be lousy fishing companions.

Google Earth

Where we fished, the Conejos is a series of braids and random meanders through the meadow. I thought at first it was feeder streams, but it was only the river making it up as it went. None of it was slow, it had 2000 feet to fall after all, but wading wasn’t that hard either, at least not hard qua wading, because frankly any movement was kind of tough. Houston is 80 feet above sea level, and we were fishing close enough to 10,000 feet to make no never-mind. I’m in reasonable shape, but following Micah from the car to the stream was better aerobics than my daily run, and a lot harder.

After lunch Micah and I stood in the river and watched a brown 30 feet away consistently rise to something on the surface. I’ve never watched a fish rise so often or over such a long period. I thought for a while that there was more than one fish, but I don’t think there was. There was just one big fish, actively feeding.

What I should have done, and of course what I didn’t do, was get a photo of the fish before trying any cast, but I didn’t even bother getting a good photo of Micah, much less a hard photo of a fish. Micah helped me get positioned for the cast, and then the fish took my dry fly just like it was supposed to.

And then the fish was on and then it wasn’t. Dammit. Of course it never rose again. Dammit. I hate losing fish.

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Rio Costilla and Cimarron River, New Mexico, July 26-27, 2021

We fished with Shane Clawson through Doc Thompson’s High Country Anglers in New Mexico, and Shane was great. There are several well-known guides in Northern New Mexico, and I delayed choosing because I couldn’t decide. I called Thompson because he’s Orvis-endorsed. Doc himself was booked, but Shane contracts with him–our good luck.

Covid hit guides in New Mexico hard. New Mexico did what other states should have done to get rid of Covid, but Shane’s business was shut for much of 2020. Later our Colorado guide told us that during 2020 he’d never been busier. Now New Mexico will get hit with the fourth surge like the rest of us, because we didn’t do what was needed.

I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroats in Latir Creek, and wanted to fish the Cimarron River. Ok, I’m lying. I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grand cutthroats in the Rio Costilla in the Valle Vidal, and that I wanted to fish the Rio Grande River. Apparently late July is too hot for the Rio Grande, so I picked the Cimarron because it’s not far from Taos, and because of the 1976 Poco album. I figured any day spent humming Rose of Cimarron is a day well spent.

As for the Valle Vidal, I had fished there once before, almost 25 years ago. We were on a family camping trip through Northern New Mexico—I promise, if I’d known my daughter had that tiny stress fracture, I wouldn’t have forced her to backpack into the Rio Grande Gorge. And she wasn’t carrying much besides her sleeping bag and some clothes. That and a couple of gallons of water.

Ok. I didn’t really make her carry any water. I made her little brother carry the water.

During that trip I stole an hour from my family to fish the Rio Costilla, and I remember the Valle Vidal as one of the prettiest mountain meadows I’ve ever seen. I didn’t catch anything, and Julie Andrews never sang, so I’ve thought ever since that I’d left something undone–at least for the fishing if not for the singing.

No luck though. The Valle Vidal is closed to fishing for two years for Rio Grande cutthroat trout restoration. Everything with gills in the Rio Costilla will be poisoned, and a pure strain of Rio Grande cutthroat will be reintroduced. Closing the Rio Costilla for two years to remove invasive species is absolutely a good thing, except of course that the two years is smack in the middle of when I finally decided to go back again to the Valle Vidal. Dang it. Dang invasive species.

Cimarron River

Except for the San Juan River, New Mexico doesn’t really have the fishing reputation of other Western states. It’s harder to get to, and except for the San Juan it’s not known for trophy fish. Most New Mexico rivers are small. New Mexican food is special, the mix of people is unique, and the art can be magnificent, plus there’s great high-desert scenery, but some of the best fly fishing is for some of the smallest fish.

Second things first. We fished the Cimarron the second day. It’s popular, and gear anglers are as common as fly anglers. We were in Cimarron Canyon State Park (elev. 7500 ft.) in Carson National Forest, on highway 64 between Taos (elev. 6969) and the town of Cimarron (elev. 6430), with considerable ups and downs thrown in for good measure. It’s a tailwater out of Eagle’s Nest Lake, but the river is still only 25 feet or so across, and that’s being generous. Because it was midweek, we had no problem finding space on the water.

With some detours for downed trees, the Cimarron is wadeable, and there are lots of wild browns. We started in the morning on San Juan worms under a dry dropper. It had rained, and Shane said he only fished worms while they moved in the soil after rain. Later we switched out the worms for small nymphs–WD 40s–still rigged under a dry dropper. Only one largish fish–maybe 12 inches and fat–hit the dry, and it had taken the nymph first and then just kept going. Our tippets were small, 5x, and leaders were short, 7.5 feet.

Cimarron River Brown Trout

The Cimarron was interesting, but the day before, the day we fished for cutthroat, was the reason I was there. I told Shane I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroat. Shane misheard me, or maybe I misspoke. He heard I wanted to catch a Rio Grande cutthroat. I guess I did, but really, I just wanted to be in a high place that held cutthroat. If trout live in pretty places, cutthroat live in the prettiest places.

Latir Creek is part of the Rio Costilla drainage, so it’s not far from where I wanted to be. To get there we drove 45 miles north of Taos to Costilla (elev. 7700 ft), turned right on a paved county road that turned into an unpaved county road, then turned right again on a double track road that kept climbing until it petered out into a jeep trail. It’s a satisfying drive, and a drive that I thought justified that extra money for four-wheel drive, though to be honest we didn’t really spend any time on the jeep trail, and drove nowhere my father wouldn’t have driven a Buick LeSabre. Still. I’m manly. I have 4-wheel drive.

Mary Orvis Marbury, Royal Coachman Wet Fly, Favorite Flies and Their Histories, 1892, via Wikipedia.

If the Cimarron was small, Latir Creek was tiny. If I were a jumping man, I could have had a good day jumping back and forth across it. Not being a jumping man, we fished, sometimes from the bank, sometimes wading. Here’s the really cool part though: all day long I fished a parachute Royal Wulff, about a #14, which is like saying that all day long I played Ringo’s drums. It’s iconic, unmistakeable, a beautiful dry fly that floats on top of the water and that has a lineage back to the 1800s. It’s got its own Wikipedia page! Ok, what doesn’t, but still . . . . If I could spend the rest of my fly-fishing-life catching fish on a Royal Coachman descendant, I’d take that deal.

We caught rainbows and cutthroats; rainbows in the lower drainage, and then in the meadows and higher we caught cutthroats. All of the fish I saw were small, five or six inches, and their parr-marks–that’s a series of thumbprints extending down the fish’s body to its tail–hadn’t faded. Parr marks tell you that the fish are less than a year old. They also had the orange cutthroat on the Rio Grande’s lower jaw. I was happy as I could be to see those fish.

Shane wasn’t satisfied. In addition to the orange, on some of our fish there was a line of reddish iridescence–a rainbow–with the parr marks. Shane was concerned that the red line indicated that the fish were cutbows, rainbow-cutthroat hybrids. After the first couple of those, we moved further upstream (just verging on the jeep track), where hybridization was less likely.

Latir Creek Rio Grande Cutthroat

There wasn’t a lot of casting going on during all of this, not the kind of fine, artistic casting at which I am most likely to do injury to those around me and avoid the fish altogether. I would flick the leader a few feet forward in a half-assed roll cast, or just dap. What’s dapping? It’s not casting at all. It’s letting out just enough line to lay the fly on the water beneath the rod tip. Shane kept reminding me to take in more line. He said if I couldn’t make my cast (or in fact my dap), it was because I had too much line extended. By day’s end, I was fishing with only a few feet of leader extended from the end of the rod. It’s the earliest kind of fly fishing, say the mid-1300s, but the lies of the fish were so tiny, so pocketed into bits of soft water in the midst of a mad downhill rush, that nothing else worked. So there I was, happily dapping with a royal coachman for a fish that’s continuously declined in numbers and range since the 1920s. Don’t nobody ever tell me I ain’t hidebound, or at least nostalgic.

Even at the higher elevation, Shane was worried that our fish might be cutbows.

Latir Creek

When we met Tuesday Shane told us he’d spent Monday evening talking to other guides, who assured him that Latir Creek fish were almost certainly pure cutthroats. Apparently for parr fish it’s difficult to tell the difference by color, and other indications include the shape of the tail (rainbow trout caudal fins–tail fins–are square and not forked, while cutthroats’ are forked) and the place. I told him that he could have just told me they were cutthroats, that he didn’t need to spend all of his evening looking at pictures of fish tails on the internet, but he told me he wasn’t that sort of guide. I told him that I was that sort of client, but I really didn’t mean it. Cutthroat or no, I’d done what I wanted.

Latir Creek
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Spring Creek and Penns Creek, Pennsylvania, May 13-14, 2021.

After our day of fishing on Spring Creek at Fishermen’s Paradise, we fished two more days near State College with Dom Swentosky guiding; one day on a different part of Spring Creek, and then a day on Penns Creek. For the uninitiated, (1) these are Cricks not Creeks, and (2) Dom Swentosky is a good writer, he plays the guitar, and his sons play little league baseball. I guess as much as anything, those are the reasons we hired him.

A lot of Dom’s writing is the kind of detailed technical nuts and bolts stuff that warms fly fishers’ hearts: after reading one of Dom’s blog posts, I swapped out my elastic wader belt–the kind that sags–with a police utility belt that doesn’t sag. I’ve never regretted it, at least not after I figured out how the safety catch worked and could stop wiggling. Dom also has a blog post on how while wearing waders to stay warm, dry, and pee. It’s not a post that will speak to Kris, but for 50% of the population it’s useful, particularly if you already know about the safety catch. 

Dom wade fishes in trout streams. It’s everyone’s mental image of fly fishing; romantic, peaceful, aesthetically pleasing. It may also be the least guided fishing in these late days, what with the rise of drift boats and saltwater angling, and it’s certainly the kind of fishing I do least. Wading in a warmwater bayou just doesn’t have quite the appeal, plus one is likely to lose boots in the muck. It doesn’t matter whether I ever get to do it though. Wading in a trout stream is what fly fishing looks like. 

Wading in a trout stream with Dom is also a barrage of information. He had something useful to tell us about everything happening on the stream–as Dom would say, another data point–and the info was compressed into a constant stream of well-honed nutshells. I thought about making a list of the best stuff Dom said, but then I figured I’d probably forgotten most of it, or worse had garbled most of it.  I suspect that it’s all in Troutbitten anyway, and Dom says he learned to fish from books by Joe Humphreys and George Daniel, so among the three I wouldn’t be telling anybody anything new. When we got home I started re-reading Daniel’s Dynamic Nymphing, and came across this at the very beginning of the chapter on tight-lining:

The style is . . . physically demanding. You must be able to get close enough to present the patterns in a natural manner without opposing currents creating drag. As a result, a straight up-and-across approach is common to ensure that the line and leader end up in current flowing at the same speed. In large bodies of water, this means having to wade further out to cast directly upstream . . . .

George Daniel, Dynamic Nymphing, p. 48.

I suppose I had read that heartwarming passage before, but to me it only had meaning after I stood in the crick with Dom and he explained that to avoid dragging the fly, I should try to cast straight up from the rod tip and not cross currents. When I first read that passage in Daniel at home, it apparently didn’t register. Standing in a trout stream it made sense. 

There are a lot of possible streams near State College, and at the end of our first day Dom named some choices and asked us where we wanted to fish? The first day with Dom we had fished Spring Creek again, just a bit upriver from where we fished with Jim, and I was tempted to fish Spring Creek the third day, to adopt it as my short-term home water. We had seen Penns Creek though, and it was beautiful. It seemed a shame not to fish it. We chose, but I oddly hadn’t wanted the burden of choices. I don’t know why choosing was harder than it should have been.

I got a little obsessed with why it was hard to choose, which led to why do I fish with guides anyway? Which led to why do I fish? These are big existential questions, and I came up with and discarded dozens of answers. No single answer was completely satisfactory. Since I didn’t list what Dom told me, here’s a list of some of the best reasons, replete with bullet-points:

  • I like water. Think of songs about water, La Mer for instance, or Down by the Riverside or Shenandoah or Take Me to the River. There must be thousands. Everybody likes water. We need water.
  • I like to hold fish, if only for a second. At that moment of connection everything is centered.
  • Traveling with a fly rod is a good excuse. Why did we go to Pennsylvania? We went to Pennsylvania to fish. We could have gone to Pennsylvania to see the Liberty Bell, or to eat scrapple, or to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates. We went to fish.
  • I like the technical stuff. I don’t pretend I’m much good at it, but I enjoy the mechanical focus that fly-fishing demands.
  • It’s something my parents gave me, though I’m no longer baifishing for catfish. Still, I’ve always fished.
  • It’s something Kris likes. She likes golf, and she likes crochet, but I’m not going to play golf or take up crochet. Among the things we share, we share fishing.

Like I said, these were big questions, and of all the answers, the one I came back to most often was sitting bankside for lunch with Kris and Dom while we watched a sulphur mayfly hatch come off the water. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of mayflies, and they were lovely, delicate things, pale yellow and tiny. They drifted off the water like the gentlest act of creation. I napped a bit–I may not be so accomplished of a fly fisher, but I will brag on my streamside napping–and when I woke we still sat and watched the mayflies for a long, long time. There was anticipation, trout feed on rising mayflies and we expected at any moment to see the rings on the water where the fish were starting to rise, but they never rose. It didn’t matter. There was satisfaction in the moment, joy even. It was just enough of everything.

* * *

Before we left State College, we stopped by Flyfisher’s Paradise. There was a tray of sulphur flies on the counter, and the guy tying flies behind the counter joked that it was good to know when he came to work what he was going to do all day –tie sulphurs. For a couple of weeks he would tie sulphur after sulphur after sulphur. We bought some to bring home with us, a couple of spinners, a couple of emergers, and a couple of duns, not that we’re ever likely to use them. It doesn’t matter. Now I have them.