Tag: Guides

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Goodbye Joe

I’ve known the coffee bean fly for a while, decades really, and a long time ago I tied a few and fished them. They were simple to tie.

  • Size 8-10 dry fly hook
  • Brown thread
  • Coffee bean
  • Super glue
  • Five-minute epoxy

Wrap thread from the eye to the bend to lay down a base. Score the coffee bean down the center line of the flat side with a hack saw, then Super Glue the bean onto the thread along the scored line. Cover the bean with epoxy. Let dry. Done.

I suspect that now I’d cover the bean with an ultraviolet resin instead of epoxy, but to tie any I’d still need to find my hacksaw. Most internet discussions recite its origins as beetles generally, and invasive Japanese beetles particularly. It’s rough justice that a fly for an invasive Asian fish imitates an invasive Asian bug. Palmered hackle is sometimes added for legs, though we don’t bother with that down on the Bayou.

Bruce Martin, Adult scarab beetle, Popillia japonica, commonly known as the Japanese Beetle, 2006, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

I learned to tie the fly from a friend and guide, Mark Marmon, and Mark was the first person I knew who fished the fly. I thought for years that he had created it, but if so he was probably not its only creator–pre-foam beetles it’s a pretty obvious choice, at least among coffee drinkers. There are reports on the internet of the fly used for trout as early as the 30s, and not even Mark and I are that old. He did start fishing the fly for carp on Brays Bayou 30 years ago. That’s long before the current carp craze, long before Orvis published a book on carp and long before there were Internet forums on fly fishing for carp. Shoot, this was before there were Internet forums. Mark discovered carp early, particularly grass carp, and he figured out that they take flies, sometimes nymphs, but also sometimes a coffee bean fished as a dry.

Brays, also spelled Braes or Brae’s, runs 30-odd miles from west to east through Houston and then empties into Buffalo Bayou, which in turn empties into Galveston Bay. The Corps of Engineers channelized large parts of Brays 50 years ago for flood control. Brays was once probably slow and meandering, at least during low flow, but prone to flooding. Straightened and lined with concrete Brays water never moves slow but it still floods, and maybe floods more as concreted Houston has spread west and global warming has increased our severe rain events. Harvey, Tax Day, Imelda . . . In the rash of recent 500-year Houston floods Brays has done its part, and more than its part, to flood the city. Two years after Harvey I can still find boarded windows and cleared lots along the Bayou.

Aerial view of Hermann Park, Harris Gulley and Brays Bayou looking north. 1925, John P. McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center, Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library: https://hdl.handle.net/1911/36730Courtesy of Photograph Collection at the McGovern Historical Center, HAM-TMC Library, 1133 John Freeman Blvd, Houston, Texas 77030, 713-799-7141, mcgovern@library.tmc.edu.

Only the Corps could come up with the verb “channelized,” and only the Corps could think concrete was our best drainage solution. Channelized Braes isn’t pretty, at best you can say its a fine example of 50s Brutalist Architecture, and is part of the excess of concrete that gives a good city an ugly reputation. The walls are maybe 15 feet high and slope at 30 degrees, but they don’t meet to form a V. At the base there is a flat, 50 feet across, gently sloping towards a narrow deeper center channel. Even at low flow there is always flow in the center channel, partly from upstream sanitary sewer plant effluent. After a few days’ rain Brays can rise 15 feet and run 100 feet from bank to bank. At lower flows the water doesn’t look particularly dirty, though there is an odd ozone scent in the air, and downwind from the City’s Braes Bayou treatment plant the odor can be decidedly rich. I wouldn’t recommend contact recreation.

On the Bayou Purel is part of any smart angler’s kit.

There are always enough runners and bikers along Brays to make me feel conspicuously foolish approaching the water with a fly rod, or even a camera, and I’m always conscious that I’d just as soon no one I knew saw me. It’s one of the reasons I stopped going. If this is glamorous fly fishing, it’s decidedly perverse glamorous fly fishing.

For the first few coffee beans I tied I didn’t coat them with epoxy. A glued bean is secure and they look fine, but because the roasted beans are brittle and the banks are hard, unless you cover the bean with epoxy the flies don’t last. One slap against the concrete slope and the bean is crushed. When I long ago fished Brays somewhat regularly I wasn’t a very good caster, and in addition to not casting where I wanted I couldn’t keep the fly from slapping the slope. I coated the next batch, and that’s probably the last batch I tied.

Brays runs not far from our house, and this year for the first time in a decade I’ve been down there a few times. Originally Kris wanted to go for carp and I went along. I don’t really like carp: I’m old enough to think of them as an undesirable trash fish, and ugly, with coarse scales, ragged fins and tales, and unrefined features. Plus I’ve been told all my life that carp are inedible, and notwithstanding Czech Christmas traditions I’m good with that. I’m not eating anything I pull out of the Bayou, even if it is Christmas.

Plecostomus, Braes Bayou

When I first fished Brays I hired Mark as a guide. It’s sight-fishing, walking along the concrete liner to look for feeding fish. At low flows–you don’t get near the Bayou at high flows–you can see the fish, both pods and singles, and if you’re a good enough caster the idea is to lead the fish by a few feet when they coast onto the shallow flat to feed. There are more fish than carp in the Bayou; there are supposedly largemouth, certainly mullet, gar, and the occasional rogue koi. One night late after an Astros game we boarded the train downtown with a guy with a spinning rod and a catfish in a five-gallon plastic bucket, caught in Buffalo Bayou. I talked to him, and he said he fished the Bayou often. He seemed . . . simple, sketchy, but I don’t know if his deficiencies began before or after he started eating Bayou fish.

Maybe I caught a carp that day with Mark; I don’t remember. What I remember was catching two mullet on the coffee bean fly. When I went with Kris to the Bayou last spring I cast for a while in the general direction of a seven or eight pound carp holding in shallow water. I’ve seen osprey this winter on the Bayou, so carp holding in the shallows to sun may be a summer avocation, and anyway in the Bayou feeding carp are moving carp. This fish was just sitting, from above looking all the world like a dark tumorous lump, and it was something I was decidedly ambivalent about catching. In any event it ignored me. It finally got tired of my fly slapping around its head and moved into deeper water.

Plecostomus, Braes Bayou

Recently I’ve thought a good bit about the coffee bean fly, in part because I opened an old box of flies and found a couple, and in part because of the rash of perfect tiers I follow on the internet. It’s apparently the golden age of fly tying, where everyone but me is artful, creative, and careful. I’m not. I mostly follow recipes and hope that the end result is useable. On my bench I keep a razor blade to scrape off failures and salvage hooks, and I use it often. Even if tied well the coffee bean fly, along with San Juan worm variants, beaded salmon eggs, and spoon flies, is as far from artful tying as one can get (though it takes some skill to tie a decent spoon fly). Even in its day it was controversial. Mark would have the record for grass carp on the fly except that the bean has a scent, and therefore doesn’t meet IGFA standards. Who knew carp drink coffee?

In the same box where I found the coffee beans was a brown spun deer hair fly shaped to look like a coffee bean. I guess that’s Artful, Creative, Careful. I didn’t remember when or where I got the fly, but it was certainly something I had bought. Like I said, my tying is none of those things.

According to Benjamin Gosset at Bayou City Angler the Braes fish have moved out of the channel for winter, into the wider, deeper water where the concrete ends, but at least once recently I saw a few large carp stacked in a plant outfall on the far bank. I gather that both the grass carp and mullet are essentially vegetarians, so when 20 years ago an otherwise forgotten fly shop clerk said he wouldn’t fish with a coffee bean fly because he wouldn’t fish with something designed to imitate shit–that’s the alternate explanation to a Japanese beetle–his denunciation had the ring of truth, even if it also rang of arrogance.

I tried a couple of times to cast to the stacked fish in the outfall. There were four or five, and they were big: I could see their tails and their backs, and who wouldn’t try to make that cast? I had to cast across the center channel current and there was too much drag on the fly, but about the fifth stubborn cast I snagged a fish, and it ran out into the current and upstream until I was left with nothing but a smashed coffee bean hooked through a thick ugly scale. I suspect that both of us, me and the fish, were ok with that result. I didn’t want to snag fish and the fish didn’t want to be snagged. After it came off the hook I went back to my car and dug the Purel out of the center console. Down on the Bayou you can’t have enough Purel.

Mark still guides, and I hope we fish trout together on the Guadalupe over the Christmas holiday. There was another young guy guiding carp for a while, Danny Scarborough, but I heard that Danny moved to Dallas. Here in Houston carp are now Chosen Ones, and there’s even a local carp tournament in the spring, because carp are now a lifestyle choice. Bayou City Angler is always good for advice on carp. It’s magic having a destination fishery so close to home.

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I Got Speyed, Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Middle Fork Salmon River, Idaho, September 23-28, 2019.

We rafted six days down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, and except when we had to sit down through rapids we fished. We caught and released fish too, lots of fish: native west slope cutthroats, a couple of small parr-marked rainbows evidencing a prior successful steelhead romance, and two eight-inch Chinook smolts ready to attempt the 1000-odd mile trip to the Pacific. We didn’t raft on our own; Kris never rowed and I never set up a tent. We were with Solitude River Trips, along with 16 other clients and 11 guides. The guides did everything of importance, including rowing, making coffee, cooking food, and untangling leaders. The guests were an unnecessary but happy accompaniment to the guides’ good work.

The guests drank coffee in the morning and beer in the evening and fished. I gained weight during my wilderness experience, which weight gain was fun at the time but not so good in retrospect.

The Middle Fork of the Salmon cuts through the Frank Church Wilderness, which is the largest contiguous protected wilderness in the lower 48, which is a long way around to saying it’s big but don’t forget Death Valley and Alaska. Under the 1964 Wilderness Act no new improvements–roads, mines, convenience stores, or apartment complexes–are allowed. It’s name is actually the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, changed in 1984 to honor Idaho Senator Frank Church.

U.S. Forest Service, A User’s Guide: Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness

The Salmon River Mountains dominate the Wilderness. The Mountains are a discrete range of the Rockies, defined by the Salmon River and its tributaries. The Main Fork canyons are actually deeper than the Grand Canyon, though not so sheer or dramatic. It’s plenty dramatic enough. There’s low brush and trees along the river, steep barren elevation changes marked by scattered pines and granite faces, blocks, and scree, and high crags covered by new snow. Like I said, plenty of drama.

It isn’t the River of No Return Wilderness because you go there and never come out, but because if you come out by river you can’t turn around and go back by river. Even going down the Salmon is hard, and the lower canyon of the Middle Fork is impassable except by boat. I guess that’s why somebody named it Impassable Canyon. I’m quick that way.

When Lewis and Clark reached the Salmon they abandoned their original plan to float the river to reach the Pacific. It could have been done, the Salmon to the Snake, the Snake to the Columbia, the Columbia to the Pacific, but it ain’t easy. The Middle Fork is the same only more so, and in these late days while the Main Fork is generally accessible by car we could only reach the Middle Fork by bush plane.

Bush plane, a tiny four-person piper, to the put-in at Thomas Creek Airstrip on the Middle Fork. The pilot Mike pointed out we were often flying below terrain. That meant that when we looked out the window we were as often as not below nearby mountain ridges. It was all pretty exciting, though Mike wouldn’t roll down the windows and let us fish.

The Middle Fork runs northish, and the guides brought the rafts downriver from the south to meet us when we got off the planes. During higher spring and summer water the float trips are longer, 100 miles. We did 60, which made things both leisurely and less crowded. School was back in session and late-fall Idaho weather can be iffy, wet and cold, so there weren’t a lot of other parties on the river. Flows were very low, about 1.6 feet at the USGS gauge near where we put in. While coming downriver we could look up to see 15 feet above us where early-season high water had slammed debris into rock crevices and the forks of trees.

The weather, by the way, was perfect. Sunny and cool, clear except for a bit of spitting rain one afternoon and a lot of wind the final day.

We were there for west slope cutthroat. Seven states have cutthroat as their state fish, and the list reads like a Who’s Who of western fly fishing: Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. William Clark wrote the first description of cutthroat, and the species, Oncorhynchus clarkii, was named for Clark. The subspecies, west slope (Oncorhynchus clarkii lewisi), was named for both Lewis and Clark. It is such an American fish.

USGS, Native Range of Cutthroat Trout, excluding southeastern Alaska, in ochre. That’s the orangy brown.

There are 14 identified subspecies of cutthroat, spread across the western states and Canada. Two subspecies are extinct. Two subspecies, the Lahontan and the greenback, were thought extinct but were rediscovered in remote streams.

Loss of habitat has decreased cutthroat populations. Because of its seclusion, the Middle Fork remains one of the great cutthroat rivers. The great fish, like the great places, often survive on the margins.

United States Forest Service.

The cutthroat looks like its closest kin, the rainbow, without the brightly-colored side-bands. The cutthroat’s distinguishing mark, and one of the prettiest (and most violently named) marks in fishdom are the crimson symmetrical slashes at the bottom of its jaw, the slashed throat, the cutthroat. The west slope’s back is green, and marked by tiny sparse fine dark spots towards the head accelerating in density down the back and sides through the tail. The belly is bright silver. In the middle fork they are small, with a good fish at 14 inches, and until the wind drove me to a 5 weight a 3 weight was the very thing.

The Middle Fork runs into the Main Fork, where we would take out six days after we put in. The anadromous fish, steelhead and salmon, make the run the opposite way from the Pacific to have sex and die–which I guess is better than making the run the opposite way just to die. Even though impeded by power dams and predators and whatnot, there are still both salmon and steelhead that make the journey, the longest fish migration in North America, the river of sometimes some return. Do you think salmon quote Kipling as they head upriver? Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do or die. It is such a cruel joke: Sex and death: they’re just piscine Romeos and Juliets.

Snake River Watershed, by Shannon1, under GNU Free Documentation License.

After packing the stuff in our tent–the hardest work of our day and really almost too much to bear–and after breakfast we were on the river by 9ish. I played the guitar in the morning, sitting as close to the river and the fire as I could get, drinking coffee, trying to remember bits and pieces of Bach and Gaspar Sanz and Tárrega. It was the most pleasant thing in the world, at least for me. I can’t speak for the poor people who had to listen.

When we weren’t on the river we spent considerable time lazing around with the 16 other clients while waiting for the guides to do all the work. We were from a narrow range of circumstances. The largest contingent was from Portland or just on the Washington side of the Oregon-Washington border. There were five Texans (including us), with four from greater Houston and one from Austin.  Two clients were from New Mexico, two from Idaho, and then some outliers, Alabama, Maine. There were doctors, lawyers, hydrologists, retirees, a nurse, and a consultant.

It was a congenial group, educated, mostly older, tending towards the same predispositions and attitudes. There was an evening when I sat with Lynn and Dan, Mike and Carol, Russell and Cathy at dinner, and we veered into politics.  Lynn from Maine believed that Susan Collins would retire rather than run for the Senate again, which was interesting to me. No one was injured because of the political discussion, which was also interesting to me, but then there wasn’t a lot of voiced disagreement either. I suspect some who differed from the voiced opinions kept their mouth shut.

On the way downriver groups are permitted for designated campsites, and at night we would arrive with tents up and dinner underway. We hiked some during the day, once to see Shoshone pictographs, once to a waterfall, but mostly we floated and fished, or in the two boats of non-anglers floated and watched the wilderness. I supposed at my most intense all of the Middle Fork looked to me like the couple of square feet of water around the fly I was fishing. It’s no wonder that back home from time to time I find myself standing in the middle of a fire ant bed. I kinda narrow my focus when I fish.

We fished dry flies, big hoppers mostly, or hoppers with a purple haze dry dropper, or hoppers with a weighted underwater purple prince nymph dropper. It didn’t matter. The fish were gullible and eager. I had checked the hatch chart–the chart of bugs that are likely to appear in that place at that time–in my ancient copy of Great Hatches, Great Rivers, a classic that I’m sure is on everyone’s shelf. The Middle Fork isn’t one of the listed rivers, but Silver Creek was, and I figured that was close enough. Grasshoppers it said, grasshoppers and flying ants and blue-winged olives.

I tried to tie some size 20 blue winged olives, tiny wee things that could fit four flies comfortably together in the cup of a contact lens. It wasn’t my best effort, producing lumpy, misshapened mayfly imitations that would have embarrassed the Creator if they looked like anything in creation. It took me three weeks to crank out five, and then I left them in my box, ashamed and distrustful. Hoppers on the other hand were more in my wheelhouse, and I found an easy pattern from FlyFish Food that I could crank out simple as kiss my hand. Flying ants were easy too.

And I caught stuff on the hoppers, if not the flying ants. So did Kris, and for the most part Kris caught better fish than me all week. There was a day, my birthday, when she outfished me all day and I spent most of the day untangling leaders and maybe, maybe, managed five fish. I reckon God was punishing me for those ugly blue-winged olives and for being old.

There was a day too when I outfished Kris, and at the end of the day the guide held the boat past an underwater granite shelf where clear green water dropped off of a riffle into a deep slow hole. I made perfect casts back over my shoulder and each time caught a fish and too often crossed Kris’s line. I had already caught dozens of fish over the course of the day and Kris finally caught two, all day, and not that we’re in the least competitive but yeah, we are sometimes competitive. I’m lucky I made it off the river and am not still treading water in that deep green hole. In any event the last day I was punished and sent to the back of the boat.

The middle fork is a wild and scenic river, undammed, as is the Main Fork. At dinner the final evening—steak night! Baked potatoes, surely from Idaho! Sautéed mushrooms! More red wine! Did I mention the food was just fine? And red wine?—Mike and Russell discussed Snake River dam removal. In 2020 the Corps of Engineers is scheduled to publish its report on removal of four dams on the Snake down drainage from the Middle Fork, so the report is likely to be completed in the next decade or so.  In the Columbia River drainage most dams were built first for cheap power and second for irrigation and flood control. Woody Guthrie, that shill for Bonneville Power, wrote Roll On Columbia and 25 other songs in the 30s as damned dam propaganda. Cheap power changed lives. It also changed rivers.

Mike sided with dam removal. Russell argued that removal wouldn’t matter, that there would still be plenty of dams left to kill salmon and steelhead on their way to or from Idaho. Mike said the loss of salmon and steelhead was increased incrementally dam by dam. Russell countered that collected sediment made removal impractical and probably harmful. I stayed quiet, but that last seemed like an engineering problem, and the popular notion is that rivers heal quickly after dam removal.

Russell was passionate, Mike was passionate. Russell said that the economic upheaval from removal would be enormous.  Oddly the damaged people were more abstract to me than the restored river and the steelhead and salmon—my reaction reminded me of the incident in Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitude, where Abbey says that he’s a humanist, that he’d rather kill a man than a snake. I was a bit surprised at my own callousness, but all-in-all I’d just as soon let both the man and the snake be. If I parsed it correctly though Russell’s argument seemed to be that people who depended for irrigation and recreation from the dams have a right to dam preservation.

I doubt that there is any right to preservation, or if there is that it couldn’t be compensated–that’s my lawyerly training–but I have to admit my own reasoning was largely selfish. Those wild cutthroats in that wild river were not trophy fish, there were plenty of places to go to catch bigger fish and rarer fish, but these were wild and native fish, fish whose species and subspecies had been in that drainage from before our predecessors crossed the Bering Strait. Each one we caught was a beautiful fish, and when you watched them rise to your hopper, suddenly appearing suspended in the river a foot below your fly, it was somehow just better, better than other fish, as perfect as anything in all the world.

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Chicago Flyfish, Smallmouth, September 1, 2019

We fished with Kurt Nelson, co-owner of Midwest Waters Anglers. I picked Midwest by the worst possible method: I googled Chicago – flyfish – guide, and they were the first website that popped up. It’s a good website, and I got lucky, Kurt’s a fine guide. Illinois isn’t exactly a destination fishery, and Kurt said most of his clients lived in the City or are in Chicago for family or business. Like me probably a lot of people get to Kurt via Google.

Midwest Waters apparently guides several rivers around the City, and where we fished was the most urban, but Kurt said his other rivers were blown out from rain. We fished the 28-mile DuPage River, in Chicago suburbia, from Plainfield eight miles down river to Joliet. We were usually isolated by vegetation, but sometimes we floated past backyards, and sometimes we could hear the whack of golf balls from the golf course and race a golf cart. We passed under roadways and train tracks and power lines that sizzled with current. We passed by large engines that we couldn’t see but that were too large for tractors and too immobile for trains. There were some kayakers, but not many–during the summer there would be a tube hatch, but not this late. For such an urban place the river and the banks were surprisingly clean.

We put in at a canoe launch near Plainfield. Kurt fished a StealthCraft drift boat with a 30 HP Yamaha jet motor. That’s a pretty big motor, but we only used it as a convenient snag for my fly line.  Even with the obstacle I would rather fish from a drift boat than just about anything, and this was a big comfortable boat. There are, after all, always obstacles just waiting to snag your fly line. My feet never got wet, and I’m certain that thanks to the boat it never rained. Ok, maybe not that last.

There was steady current from bank to bank, without a lot of river drama: we weren’t reading seams or casting to rocks. We did look for eddies, but they were always where a tree or bank cut stopped the current for a few feet. There was some water clarity, not much but some. It was also overcast, which didn’t help visibility. Kurt said it was usually clear enough to sight cast, clear in part because of invasive zebra mussels. We fished for smallmouth, though I did cast for carp once or twice, casting to mud puffs in the water. Kris caught a nice fish early on a medium yellow popper, ten minutes from the launch. It was dark green with bronze fins, a couple of pounds, exactly what a smallmouth should be.

Over the course of the day I fished a big deer hair frog and medium yellow poppers, Bougles, both cast to the banks then drifted like dry flies with periodic pops or gurgles. I never catch fish with frogs, and I didn’t disappoint this time. Consistency is important, and bad juju with frogs is one of those things at which I’m consistent. They always look so excellent, cost so much, and then fail me because, well, me. I just can’t fish them with conviction.

Kurt Nelson photo

I caught some fish on the poppers, at least one anyway, and Kris happily fished poppers most of the day. Most of the fish I caught were on a purple conehead woolly bugger variant, maybe a size 6 or 8, tied with grizzly hackle and lots of green rubber legs wrapped behind the conehead. I fished them like a dead drift nymph, waiting for any line tick or hesitation. That was new for me and woolly buggers, which I usually retrieve like a streamer. Since the fly often ticked along the bottom I must have hook set a thousand times for the five or six fish I caught. If Kurt had charged by the hook set he’d be a rich man. 

I really should learn to take pictures of the flies I fish. I never take enough pictures.

I caught my biggest fish, about two pounds, when for some reason I let the line rest midstream on my a backcast, and then Kurt yelled did you see that! when I picked up to cast. Of course I didn’t see it. I was facing the bank and my back was to the fly. I lay the fly down and the smallmouth came again for it. Luck, dumb luck, I wish I could be as consistently good with luck as I am consistently bad with big deer hair frogs. 

Kurt Nelson photo

There was lots of riverside vegetation, and lots of floating grass from the week prior’s rain. I did plenty of vegan fishing in the trees, and most retrieves required grass removal. There was river grass piled at my feet where I cleaned the line and my fly.  Sorry Kurt.

I reckon we cast a thousand times between us, and by the end of the day my shoulder ached and my forearm began to cramp. We cast, and then cast some more, and then cast for a while. By late in the day we were worn out and lazy, just flinging the fly to any old place and maybe letting it sit just a wee bit longer than strictly speaking could be considered fishing as opposed to hanging out.

We didn’t take our own rods, and one of the things I realized was how much I like to fish with guides’ stuff. They pick their stuff well. Kurt fished nice Hatch reels, but more striking were the rods, one piece rods, which I’d never cast before. Used to be ferrules were considered a design flaw and the fewer the better, but even then one piece rods were rare. These were Loomis IMG Pros, 8’10, 7 weight for me and 8 weight for Kris, and casting was a joy. Yeah, there were lots of tangles in grass and trees, but I never minded taking risks with that rod, and most of my casts did more or less what I wanted them to do, which was first not to hook me or anybody else and second to go somewhere in the vicinity of the bank.

Kurt fished short leaders, maybe 7 feet, but they were longer than what I usually use for bass, and they were tapered a bit, with a butt of maybe 25 pound and a 16 pound tippet.  He said that sometimes he used a mid section, but that because of the floating grass he wanted fewer knots. The leader worked well though, and the flies turned over. The grass I caught was usually on the flies anyway, and the single knot was rarely a problem.  

The fly line was a bass line with an aggressive front taper, maybe a Rio smallmouth line? I fished a streamer for a bit, a pretty white baitfish thing tied on maybe a size 4, on an intermediate tipped sinking line. That line was a monster. It was also a magnet for grass, so I didn’t fish it long.

Kurt pointed out something interesting, something that explained a lot to me about smallmouth.  Some fish fight the hook, some fish don’t, and then there are variations in between. I’ll never understand, for instance, the Gulf Coast popularity of speckled trout: it’s like catching grass on an Illinois river. Once hooked it’s done, and even the hook-up isn’t all that exciting. Largemouth are great fun but it’s mostly fun in the violence of the first few minutes, especially for bigger fish. Smallmouth never give up. They take like largemouth and then they don’t stop until they’re in the net. Then they swim away.

Like I said, Illinois is not a destination fishery, but Chicago is a destination city. While I’m in no hurry to fish the DuPage again, I’ll fish again near Chicago next time I’m there. I’d fish with Kurt again in a heartbeat. It reminded me of the Broken Bow in Oklahoma, not the river itself, but how the river fits in its space. If you live near there, in Dallas or Tulsa for the Broken Bow or Chicago for the DuPage, if that is your river, it is a very good river. No one will ever know and appreciate that river like the angler who gets to fish it three or four times every summer, year after year. You can learn a lot on the DuPage, not because it’s magnificent, or beautiful, or any sort of superlative, but because of days floated and green and bronze fish, some lost, some caught, some watched, because special knowledge of that river is yours. You could learn everything you need to know about fly fishing on that river, and with Kurt. I liked the river, but I was a visitor for a day. It would be an entirely different place if it were home. It could be a good home.

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