Tag: Guides

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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.

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Spring Creek, State College, Pennsylvania, May 12, 2021.

Some Egocentric Background

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.

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Nymphing at the South Holston River Lodge, July 28-29, 2020

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.