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 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.
I’m a pretty mediocre fly fisher. There are other things I do well, complex things, enviable things, useful things. I am, I think, a good husband, a good father, and a good lawyer. I’m curious, and reasonably quick on the uptake. If you wanted to elect someone as Benevolent Overlord, I’d be an excellent candidate.
Me, demonstrating one of my higher level fishing skills. I demonstrated similar prowess in Pennsylvania.
Still, my knowledge of trout fishing is weak. I know trout live in rivers (and also lakes), I know they eat bugs (and also fish and freshwater mollusks), and I know that when I catch one it’s more often than not pure happenstance. I’m a greedy man though, and more than most things I want to know how to fish for trout. Fifty years later all those wasted adolescent hours studying Field and Stream have left me ambitious.
Parts of Pennsylvania, along with a few other American places–the Catskills and Yellowstone come to mind–are trout fishing holy ground. Fly fishing lore is loaded with Pennsylvania names; Vince Marinaro, Charlie Fox, and Ed Shenk at Letort Spring Run, Bob Clouser on the Susquehanna, and, at State College, Bob Harvey, Joe Humphries, and most recently George Daniel. I suspect there are several reasons Pennsylvania’s such fertile ground: a lot of great streams spread across the state, an outdoors recreation tradition, just enough leisure and money, and–and this is peculiarly my own invention–a manufacturing industry that encouraged Pennsylvanians to think in a peculiar way. It’s probably nonsense, but I like to think there’s a tie between Pennsylvanian’s aptness with the mechanics of fly fishing and their aptness with the mechanics of industry.
Philadelphia to State College and the Crick
I rarely get messages on this blog, and except for one article*, I’m pretty convinced that nobody ever reads it but Kris and a cadre of hackers from Mainland China. That’s ok, I write it for Kris, and as for the hackers I’m glad for the attention. Last year though Jim Litrum left a message on the blog. He asked if I’d been at Joan Wulf’s school the previous June, and I thought that sounded about right. He volunteers at the schools and said he remembered me. I didn’t think I disrupted class that much.
Jim said that when we came to Pennsylvania, we should go to State College and he’d introduce us to some people. State College, population circa 42,000, is nigh on the state’s center. It’s the home of Penn State**. We were planning, then Covid shut everything down.
As part of our 2020 planning I had booked Dom Swentosky as a guide for two days in May near State College. I admired Dom’s writing, and he coached little league so if nothing else we could talk about baseball. When Kris and I re-planned for May 2021, we had one spare day and Jim said we should fish Spring Creek, State College.
Actually he said Spring Crick. Did you know Pennsylvanians say Crick, not Creek? Apparently in the Mid-Atlantic (including Pennsylvania) and the South (except for Texas), proper pronunciation is crick. Of all Southerners, only us Texans stubbornly say creek, with a long e. We also say buy-you, not buy-yo, so what the hell do we know? We got that wrong too. You can’t rhyme “Goodby Joe/Me gotta go” with buy-you, not even right here in Buy-you City.
So on Jim’s advice we went to State College a day earlier than we had originally planned. We had dinner with Jim, and it was a great dinner, in a good place, and Jim, who I’d only talked to on the phone, is a pretty funny guy, particularly after a martini. Plus I tricked him into agreeing to buy breakfast the next morning. Hah!
The Mayor of Spring Creek.
Jim grew up in Pennsylvania, went to the Merchant Marine Academy and then the Navy, and after the navy spent a career in the chemical industry. He retired to State College to fish (after a stint in the Keys), then for family moved two hours southwest, still in Pennsylvania. On Wednesday we had breakfast with Jim and his friend Chris at the Waffle Shop. Jim paid. Hah!
We followed Chris to Fisherman’s Paradise on Spring Creek. I kid-you-not. Pennsylvanians had the nerve to name the place Fisherman’s Paradise and put it right there on the map.
Jim’s friend Chris is a former army colonel who retired to State College to . . . fish. This is a recurring theme here. Retired. Fish. And Chris fishes. Chris fishes every day, or almost every day. He spends 300+ days a year on the water, mostly on Spring Creek. Jim called him the Mayor of Spring Creek. When we fished with Dom he said that Chris was the best dry fly fisher that Dom knew. Dom said that on those 300+ days that Chris fishes Spring Creek, he always fishes dry flies, and that he catches fish on a dry every month of the year. He said that some months Chris was fishing midges so tiny . . . Well, I can’t come up with a metaphor for so tiny. Really tiny, teensy, too small to see on the water, too small to count most days as more than a smudge, and on Pennsylvania February days when everybody and everything sane (including bugs and fish) are home in front of the heating vent, Chris is fishing Spring Creek, in shorts, watching where his smudge might be–Chris can’t possibly see his fly–watching for the suggestion of a rising fish, and catching fish. That’s crazy. That’s good.
Of course this is all hearsay and imagination, and will remain so. I’m not going fishing in Pennsylvania in February to see if it’s true.
Spring Creek might not be considered much of a place to be mayor of, it’s neither very wide nor very deep, but if you’re mayor of a trout population, it’s a large constituency. According to Jim, where we fished Spring Creek holds about 4000 wild brown trout per river mile. That’s a lot, and the best parts of the Creek are never stocked. There are no rainbows, no brookies (though certainly there once were), just wild brown trout. The trout can run larger than 20 inches, but most we saw–ok, ok, the one that through random dumb luck and Jim’s good advice I actually caught–was probably about 10 inches. I suspect that’s pretty common.
The river is spring fed,*** so flows are reasonably constant, both as to volume and temperature. Jim explained it to me. Beneath us and the topsoil was limestone. Limestone is permeable. Water filters down into the limestone, cools, and leaches mineral deposits. As new water seeps in, old water is pushed up and out. First-in, first-out. My finance lawyer brain can understand that. Spring Creek’s springs are the products of FIFO accounting.
The Spring Creek limestone was formed from invertebrate deposits settling from ancient seas that eons ago covered Central Pennsylvania.**** When the spring water emerges from the limestone, it brings along the leached minerals from the ancient dead things, and the mineral nutrients that once fed the ancient dead things can now do double duty, this time feeding new invertebrates that feed the mayflies and caddises that feed the brown trout. Lots of brown trout. The world’s motherload of brown trout. And Jim and the Mayor and their friends are there to fish those brown trout. 300+ days a year, including February.
Jim and the Mayor and Friends
With Jim’s guidance I caught my trout early. Kris fished with the Mayor and caught one a bit later. I guess it goes without saying that we were fishing dries. Jim and the Mayor fish dries. These days nymph fishing is all the rage among trout anglers, and most of the best new writing about trout fishing is about the unexpected complexities of nymph fishing, but watching a bobber hesitate can’t compare with watching a fish rise. The Mayor and Jim fish dries.
And we met the guys. I don’t know what Jim told people, or maybe everybody just shows up at Spring Creek every day, but it seemed that morning everybody started showing up. There was the retired Penn State biology professor, Art the retired Penn State engineering professor, and Luke from the local fly shop, Angler’s Paradise. I apologize that I can’t remember names, or everyone. There was Dan Shields, who literally wrote the book about Spring Creek, and Dan gave me a copy.***** We had to fish in front of these people. These people actually know how to fish.
It was the sulphur mayfly season, so Jim (who’d offered whatever flies I needed, which was helpful since Chris pronounced my 40-years of randomly accumulated dry flies worthless for the sulfur hatch), tied a size 16 sulpher on my line. I fished that all day. I was casting ok, and my drifts were mostly ok, but I probably missed a half-dozen rises. Jim gently–ok maybe not so gently–pointed out that my hook sets were horrible because my line management was horrible, that I left my left hand, my line hand, off the line too often, that I left too much slack line on the water, and that by the time I cleared the enormous line slack the striking fish had sent a couple of texts, called in a dinner reservation, and readjusted the car radio to find the ballgame. Sulfer duns were coming off the water, so the mayflies were cooperating, and I was getting rises. My biggest problem was that the trout didn’t have the courtesy to hook themselves, and apparently I was too polite to do it for them.
Towards the end of the day I was fishing up river from the bridge with Jim and Art, and I watched Art catch fish. His casts were all just a foot or five finer than mine, his drifts were just a bit-to-a-whole-lot cleaner, his hook sets were, well, he set the hook. Mid-afternoon Kris and I left the creek to check into our room, and then Kris had us back at Fisherman’s Paradise for the evening’s spinner fall. In the roughly three hours we were gone Jim caught and named most of the fish in the Creek. That part anyway.
What These Guys Got
Jim said that he and Chris would fish until dark because the best fishing of the day would be the spinner fall–after mayflies emerge from the stream as duns, their lives consist mostly of partying, laying eggs, and falling dead back to the water as spinners. I didn’t fish much that evening, for some reason I couldn’t see my fly and for some reason I didn’t trust my fly or my fishing, so I just watched. Kris was having a fine old time, but I was oddly unsettled. Our companions were so knowledgeable, so practiced, so accustomed to their water, and while I was happy just to watch them, I was also a bit jealous. Ok, more than a bit.
One of the downsides to our gallivanting around to fish is that it’s a great way to travel, but a lousy way to fish. I have learned a lot about visiting places, but not so much about catching fish. These guys stayed put in a place worth staying put and had learned how to fish.
I sat down a night or so later and read parts of Dan Shields Fly Fishing Pennsylvania’s Spring Creek, and I’ve read it off and on since. Dan covers the year at Spring Creek, nymphs and dries, and he covers the miles of the river. There are parts of it that unfortunately I’ll never need:
Fall brings some decent hatches of Trichotera, Tan Caddis in #16-18 and a larger fly in #14 produce interesting fishing.
I say unfortunate because I doubt I’ll be back to Spring Creek in the fall. My loss.
There are also things Dan writes that could be said for most bodies of water:
Improve stormwater detention basins. They should trap, filter, and permit water to seep into the ground instead of pollute streams.
Of course in Houston we need detention basins to keep from drowning, which selfishly encourages detention more than any aversion to our considerable non-point source pollution, but that judgment could be written for any urban area near a body of water.
Entertainment isn’t Dan’s goal either, though at times he’s flat-out amusing, at least in a fly-fishing sort of way:
Spring Creek trout see more different imitations than I do, and I work in a fly shop.
But Dan’s not really writing to amuse. Where Dan shines brightest is in his description of the place, its geological and human history, its biology and ecological fragility, its provenance, if you will. Dan is thorough, careful, and writing from his obvious affection and knowledge. You may from time to time get some information out of me, but I assure you, it’s purely accidental and completely unintended. Dan on the other hand knows Spring Creek, and he willingly shares the considerable stuff he knows. It’s not casual knowledge, either, he’s worked for it. It’s a small book, but it’s a glimpse of love for a place worth loving.
No wonder I envied these guys.
Postscript
Before we left, at the end of the evening when we were losing the light, while I was moping about feeling wistful and debating with myself whether I had ever actually seen a spinner, or knew what one was, Kris caught one last trout. Sometimes I envy my fishing partner too.
* For some reason, I have one blog post that gets hits almost every day. It’s about Pyramid Lake ladders, and was published April 1, 2019, which should tell you everything you need to know. I feel sorry for the poor people who stumble across that post looking for information.
**I’m guessing that’s where State College got its name.
***I’m guessing that’s where Spring Creek got its name.
****This may qualify as the worst sentence I’ve ever written, and since I’m a lawyer it’s got considerable competition. I thought about rewriting it, but it was so marvelously bad, I had to let it be. It reads like I stole it from the introductory paragraph to Chapter 4 of your 8th grade earth science textbook.
*****Daniel L. Shields, Fly Fishing Pennsylvania’s Spring Creek, DLS Enterprises, P.O. Box 41, Lemont, Pa 16851. Dan’s book is self-published in the best way, by taking it to a local printer.
Whoever dubbed the larvae that skitter around the stones on the bottom of rivers as nymphs had a peculiar sense of humor. This is a proper nymph:
John William Waterhouse, Hylas with a Nymph, 1893, private collection, oil on canvass.
After that this is at best a disappointment, if not a horror:
Jim Rathert, mayfly nymph (or naiad), Missouri Department of Conservation, https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/mayfly-larvae
Unless of course you fly fish for trout, in which case you’re all in with the latter, and wouldn’t know how to tie a proper imitation of the former.
If you don’t fly fish, this takes some explanation. There are, more or less (and ignoring a bunch of important stuff altogether), three ways to fly fish for trout. If you fish on the surface with a fly that imitates surface bugs, that’s dry fly fishing. If you fish below the surface with a fly that imitates baitfish, that’s streamer fishing. If you fish with a fly that imitates larval bugs that swim or saunter along beneath the surface, that’s nymphing.
In North Carolina and Tennessee we went a’nymphing, and over four days’ fishing it was kind of a master class. Nymphing is more often than not the most productive way to trout fish, though historically it was thought unsportsmanlike by some. Frederic Halford, the English Father Of Modern Dry Fly Fishing, said just say no to nymphs, while G.E.M. Skues, the English Father Of Modern Nymphing, would infuriate Halford by tempting with a variety of seamy sinking flies. The residue of that argument hasn’t completely gone away.
Nymphs.
John William Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896, oil on canvass, Manchester Art Gallery.
Still, that controversy has mostly gone by the board, but anglers who nymph like to think that they’re doing something mildly disreputable. I don’t fish with dries often, but in some ways it seems the simpler method: to paraphrase Bull Durham, see the bugs, match the bugs, float the fly. That whole match the bug thing is a mystery, bug hatches being a tall tale pawned off on unsuspecting Texans, but still, if hatches did exist one would know one’s task. See the bug, match the bug, float the fly.
Meanwhile nymphing has taken on all manner of unexpected complexity. There’s Euro nymphing and the varieties thereof; French nymphing, Polish nymphing, and Czech nymphing. There are dry dropper rigs, and more different kinds of indicators (think bobbers) than would seem quite seemly. One writer touts New Zealand indicators sheared from the wool of a certain breed of high-country New Zealand sheep, while another swears by plastic globes only slightly smaller than beach balls. Those little foam tape tabs are making a comeback, and a friend makes his indicators from small party balloons. If you want to go online and search, you can find at least a couple of reams of discussions on building nymph leaders using bits of metal, different colored lines of different diameters, human skulls, and barbarous incantations at midnight.
It seems altogether fitting that the high priest of modern nymphing, George Daniel, was at the South Holston River Lodge when we were there. You’d expect that the guy who wrote the book on modern nymphing, Dynamic Nymphing, would be kind of nerdy, but Daniel is a young, handsome guy, tall, tan, and fit, and doesn’t even seem to wear a monocle. All-in-all it was kind of intimidating. If John McPhee can look exactly like a shad fisherman, why couldn’t George Daniel have the decency to look like a nymphing nerd?
***
The South Holston River and the South Holston River Lodge are in the northeastern corner where Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina come together. President Roosevelt built a bunch of dams on rivers up there as part of the TVA projects, giving the lie to those who think government never benefits anybody. In addition to social security, Roosevelt created a fine trout fishery. The 14 miles of South Holston trout river is fed by releases of deep cold lake water from the South Holston Dam, at a fairly constant 47°, so that even in the middle of the summer when water temperatures can otherwise be too hot for trout, or in the middle of winter when water temperatures can otherwise be too cold for folk, the South Holston is fishable, and more than fishable: it is an extraordinarily buggy river with estimates of up to 8,500 fish per mile, mostly brown trout, and mostly wild trout.
8500 is a lot of fish.
Because of dam releases for power production the river flow can change radically over the course of a day. Jon Hooper, the chief factotum, head guide, and general manager of the lodge told us that because it had been dry, flows could be below 100 cfs, but that in high water the flows could be above 2500 cfs. Apparently the river can go from 60 feet from bank to bank to 100 feet from bank to bank in less than an hour, and then do it again the next day. Wading’s not safe when the water’s rising. That was ok with us. We fished from a drift boat.
You can’t fish gin-clear water at 100 cfs the same way you fish gin-clear water at 1500 cfs. We were nymphing, of course: there’s supposed to be an excellent sulphur and baetis hatch from time to time on the river, but I’ve never seen an excellent hatch and I won’t be fooled by the stories these non-Texans tell me. Our guide, Brandon Barbour, was way ahead of us, so in the morning with the water low we fished tiny size 22 midge nymphs on tiny 6x tippet. If you’re argumentative, 6x tippet is in fact split hairs. The water was slow and clear, and the fish educated, so that’s what we used. The indicator was a small bit of yellow foam tape. That was our first method of nymphing during the trip: light tippet, light indicator, tiny weighted flies, and no weight added.
What did we see in Tennessee? We mostly saw a tiny press-on foam indicator floating in a square foot of river, because that’s what we watched to know if a fish took our fly.
In the afternoon Brandon took us higher on the river, closer to the dam where released water would reach first. We ate lunch and watched water rise on the legs of a wader until it made all of us nervous. I guess it finally made the angler nervous too, because he finally left the river.
Brandon liked the fishing better at higher flows. He said the fish had less time to study the flies, and had to react quicker. The problem was that to get the nymphs down in the swift current Brandon had to add weight, and then add more weight, and then add a couple o’ more bits of weight. All of this weight, four or five BB sized pinch on weights, was at the very bottom of the rig, then two nymphs were tied onto the uncut tag ends of surgeon’s knots, about three inches from the leader itself. This wasn’t 6x tippet.
At the top of the rig was a particularly large plastic indicator, a Thingamabobber. The indicator had to be large enough to suspend the hooks and weight below it. The weight would bounce along the bottom, and we’d have to distinguish the bottom bounce from the fish take. You’d think that something involving nymphs and called bottom bouncing would be more lewd than it was, but what it lacked in prurience it made up for with fish.
Jam-stop Thingamabobber
What did we see in Tennessee? A big orange thingamabobber getting jiggy while we bottom bounced. That could well be a metaphor for the modern world. It sounds meaningful anyway.
Casting the light rig was pretty easy. We weren’t casting far, 20 or 30 feet for the most part. I seemed to roll cast a lot, and every now and then would throw in a fairly standard cast. The bottom-bouncing rig was a different matter. I tried a standard cast once and got a clump of BB weights to the center of the back, hard enough to evoke what I suspect was an unmanly shriek. Casting the rig required a water haul, laying out the line behind and then using the drag of the water to load the rod when I pulled it forward. I expect it wasn’t pretty. No fish were going to come out of the water for my shadow cast, but it was better than a clump of weights to the back of my head.
We fished the Holston with Brandon the first day, low water early and high water later in the day. The next day we fished the Holston with Brandon at low water in the morning and then moved over to the Watauga, another nearby tailwater, for higher flows in the afternoon. Because the Holston was so low, everybody else was on the Watauga as well. That was ok, it wasn’t combat fishing, but it’s a smaller river and drifting along we had plenty of lively and pleasant companions, and caught fish.
***
I always think the same thing when I travel, could I live here? Would I like to come here and stay? I liked where we were, and on the way down the river the first day I got Dolly Parton’s “Tennessee Mountain Home” stuck in my head while I fished. Technically it wasn’t Dolly Parton’s version, it was Maria Muldaur’s version (which I know better, but which honestly isn’t as good). I liked it in my head. I liked the South Holston River Lodge and Jon and Lynne and Brandon and the chef, J.D., and all the other people at the lodge who took care of us. I could live there, on that river. I won’t, but I could.
Plus I really liked the nymphs.
John William Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900, oil on canvass, private collection. I think this was on the Watauga, not the South Holston.
I didn’t catch a steelhead on the Olympic Peninsula. I caught fish. I foul-hooked a couple of whitefish, landed two or three small rainbow—I remember a par and a smolt—and caught one nice 18” rainbow. I also caught a Dolly Varden. I didn’t know that Dolly Varden are named after a Charles Dickens character from the novel Barnaby Rudge, 1841. Dolly Varden are a pretty fish, with bright silver and pastel yellow jewels along their back and sides. Naming a pretty fish after a pretty Dickens’ character is such a 19th century sort of thing, you gotta like it. There was also a style of women’s dresses called Dolly Varden, which I suspect was named after the Dickens’ character and not the fish. The dress doesn’t much resemble the fish.
William Powell Frith, Dolly Varden, 1842, oil on canvass, The Victoria and Albert Museum. This is not the fish.
Kris had worse luck than me. She foul-hooked a whitefish, and her waders leaked. She was cold and wet and miserable the first day. It looks like a manufacturer’s defect, so back to Patagonia they go.
We fished with Ryan Steen of The Evening Hatch, and stayed at The Evening Hatch’s lodge on Lake Quinault. We don’t stay at a lot of lodges, but they are fun, and when we have, in Argentina and Belize, it’s been pretty luxurious, for us pretty glamorous. The Evening Hatch lodge wasn’t exactly luxurious, but it was very nice and the food was great and the coffee was excellent. It was less like a glamorous destination than when as a kid we visited my aunts’ house in Texarkana. The food was great at my aunts’ house too, though both aunts being Church of Christ there was nothing to drink but ice tea. Jeff and Jan Cotrell ran the lodge, and filled in well for relatives. If they weren’t younger than us they’d have made a great uncle and aunt. If we’d just played a bunch of dominoes it would have been my childhood all over again.
I caught the Dolly Varden on the Quinault River, above Lake Quinault. We floated from early to late, I’d guess six or seven miles, alternating between wading and swinging streamers with Spey rods, and nymphing with artificial salmon eggs, either plastic beads or yarn. The eggs were seven or eight feet under a bobber, and the point was to let the egg drift deep while we rafted downriver. We were fishing 9 foot 8 weights, with the bead drifting below a swivel and lead pencil weight crimped to the leader. Some folk would say that’s not fly fishing at all, but it takes some care to throw that monstrous rig without damaging your guide or yourself. I mostly managed.
Dolly Varden trout, Salvelinus malma malma, adult female, The Fishes of Alaska, 1906, Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries, Vol. XXVI, P. 360, Plate XL. Wikimedia Commons.
On the single hand rods we fished floating lines with a 30 lb nylon mono butt to 20 lb mono and finally to 15 lb tippet. When the bobber bobbed Ryan yelled SET! SET! SET!, and if I wasn’t watching the scenery I usually did. The set was sidearm, upstream, not a straight up trout set and not a strip set. The idea was to pull the bead out of the mouth and pull the hook trailing the bead into the mouth. The rig is supposed to result in fewer foul or deep hook sets for trout and steelhead, though because of their small mouths the poor white fish that went after the eggs were always foul-hooked, outside the mouth and in its skin. Maybe that’s why Western anglers don’t really like whitefish. It’s all that foul-hooking guilt.
In the river we drifted the egg along the seams and in the softer water just beyond the seams, and we caught a lot of trees, both drifting and casting. Poor Ryan lost a fortune in plastic beads and octopus hooks.
The Olympic Peninsula is a beautiful place, and the rain forest reminded me oddly of New York City back in the 80s, where if you stood still too long you’d get graffitied. Instead of spray paint the rain forest covers everything with moss. It’s lush, with each nook and cranny covered with something green and growing: ferns, moss, the largest red cedar in the world, the largest Sitka spruce in the world, the largest . . . Oh hell, I don’t know. Just about the largest every kind of tree except mesquite and mangrove, and they were probably there too until somebody logged them.
This is northern spotted owl country, which from its photos is a lovely little owl that doesn’t really deserve its notoriety, but it’s not an easy place for people to live either. There’s tension between the wildness of the place and its human inhabitants. Ryan tells good stories about the area, insightful stories, about backwoods North Carolinians who moved there a century before for logging, and who still live in isolated backwoods pockets; about Theodore Roosevelt creating the national park to save the elk wintering ground for hunters and how he incidentally saved the rivers for salmon and steelhead; about tribal netting of salmon and steelhead; about boom and bust logging and the minimal old growth forests preserved for the spotted owl.
It can’t be an easy place to live, either for the remaining tribal nations or the loggers, the commercial fishers, or the small business owners. The population is estimated to be a bit more than 100,000, or about 28 people per square mile, which is 15 more people per square mile than my hometown county in Texas, but still . . . It feels more remote, especially on the west side, and especially in the midst of all that isolating forest. Plus in West Texas we had oil and cotton and wheat and cattle, they’ve got trees and fish and tourism, tourism and fish and trees, and balancing wild places with making a living can’t be easy. It’s probably better now. At least for loggers and millworkers forest land is probably better managed, but it will never be perfect, and there’s always spotted owls to blame.
The flip side of all that fecundity is the rivers. The rivers aren’t rich with all the good things trout love, insects, baitfish, crawfish, there are few of them. The rainfall scours the rivers too often, much of the flow is glacial melt or spring water or rainfall, without a lot of organic stuff taking hold, and there’s not the richness in the water that grows concentrations of trout. There is some stuff, but the wealth in the rivers on the Olympic Peninsula is its access to saltwater. It’s salmon in the fall and steelhead in the winter that make the rivers great fishing, but it’s ultimately access to the Pacific, to baitfish and glass shrimp, that make the coastal rivers a destination fishery.
Kris didn’t have all the bad luck. I failed a cast—this is an important life lesson. You have to end the snap of the snap-T with the rod tip in or near the water or the weighted fly will slam into your rod tip and snap it. Notwithstanding its name, that’s not what the snap-T is all about, it’s not the snap-tip. It was operator error, but operator error that Beulah the rod maker will repair with a small contribution from the operator. Thank heavens for no-fault rod warranties.
The second day fishing we didn’t swing flies. I don’t know if it was because Ryan wanted to cover more water (we covered a lot of water), or because he was worried about Kris’s wader leak and wanted her to stay dry and warm (relatively warm anyway—we are, after all, from Houston), or maybe because he was sick of watching us flail around with Spey rods and wanted to watch us flail around with single handed rods (I don’t blame him, variety is the spice and all that). We were on a different river, the Clearwater, above where it joins the Queets. Fishing with Ryan was a bit like taking a river tour, only the sights to see were usually just the other side of that seam, closer to the bank, alongside that rock, and this is shallow. Every now and again he’d yell SET!
The Quinault ran through a broader bed with more channels and, as I recall, more riffles and rapids than the Clearwater. There was more rock in the river and on the banks, and more room between the river and the trees. The Clearwater ran in more of a channel, through heavier forest.
On the Clearwater I came as close as we got to a steelhead. There was a set, a thrash, a feel that this 8 weight may be too small for this fish, a streak of silver at the surface . . . It was enough to know that this is a big fish, to wonder if I could handle this big of a fish, and then it was gone. Just that moment, it lasted no more than that, but then again that’s the kind of lost fish that lasts a lifetime.
We had two days of sun while on the river, and it was amusing that Ryan had no sunscreen in his kit. “The next ten days,” he told us, “it’s rain.” Of course for all I know he was just telling us a tall tale. It may never rain on the Olympic Peninsula, and may always be sunny. I do know there are steelhead though. For a few seconds I hooked a steelhead.
