Tag: Trout

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The Beaverkill, The Catskills, New York, June 24, 2019.

At the Wulff School we’d cast fly rods most of the weekend, but we hadn’t fished, and before we left New York State we needed to catch a fish. We had a mile of private access to the Beaverkill, and Monday morning we’d booked Craig Buckbee as a guide. Saturday and Sunday we’d fished once or twice before or after class, but the class day was long, and the bar at the Beaverkill was very good, and practicing Bach on the porch with the guitar and a martini in the evening or the guitar and coffee in the morning was a lot easier than climbing into waders. Plus it’s hard to drink a martini while fly fishing. That’s where bait fishing has fly fishing beat cold.

Craig was one of the Wulff School instructors. He tournament casts, guides in New York and Pennsylvania, and teaches casting in Central Park. That last didn’t seem odd to me, but then I realized that most people may not as a matter of course practice casting in urban parks. Thinking about it later there aren’t many places it would be more fun to learn to fly cast than Central Park. I bet you could aim your casts at those little sailboats.

The manager at the Inn told us we’d done the school right, staying over that morning to fish. The Catskills have had their moments: 19th century fly fishing, Borscht Belt resorts, and the Hudson River School. I told her that a young colleague had mentioned that her husband wanted to go to the Catskills, and she said that the Catskills were again a hot outdoors destination, especially for young folk out of New York City. They come to camp and fish and mountain bike and kayak and Nordic ski and feed the ticks. I guess if I were 30 years old and in the City I’d be there as well. I guess come to think of it I was there. I’m such a hipster.

The locals told us that the Beaverkill Valley Inn and the surrounding area had once been owned by Larry. The locals we talked to all mentioned Larry. Larry turned out to be Laurance Rockefeller Jr., great grandson of John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil (and business partner of Henry Flagler). He’s a noted Republican environmentalist, which is a species that as a conservationist he couldn’t save from extinction. Mr. Rockefeller Jr. has spent big bucks on land preservation, both in New York and out West, and on the Upper Beaverkill he seems to have done smart things. He took acreage and resold it in 20 acre plots protected by conservation easements. He renovated and sold the Inn as a country club to the new residents. There’s no golf at the club, but there is croquet.

He also did about a zillion dollars of stream restoration, and Craig pointed out where huge granite blocks had been carefully arranged  in the river to preserve trout habitat. He did not, on the other hand, spend a zillion dollars on tick eradication, or on mosquito prevention, or, as my new discovery on this summer’s list of insect horrors, doing to death the black flies. Black flies love me. I am their new Man God, and they each want a piece of me as a remembrance. 

Maybe it was so even before all the work, but Mr. Rockefeller’s Beaverkill is as picturesque and inviting as a trout river can be. There was no covered bridge where we fished, and someone should point that out to Larry, but there was a mighty picturesque one just down the road. As a general matter trout live in pretty places, and this pretty place was all a trout could desire.

Meanwhile in this pretty place Craig had spent the past two days teaching us, and I worried getting out on the river that he would constantly remind me to relax my shoulder. He didn’t. He was low key and quietly humorous. He asked about Kris’s preferences, and I told him that Kris would be happiest if he gave her plenty of time to flail away on her own, and he did. He paid attention to her, but it wasn’t intrusive, and it was always just enough. Same for me. He didn’t correct my sloppy casts, even though I figured he ached to do so. This was about fishing, and he talked about the water and helped me fish.

He must have changed out my flies a half dozen times in that four hours. I vaguely remember fishing small streamers with a wet dropper down and across and on the swing. Did I do that? I think I did that, but at this point things blend and that may have happened two days later in Vermont. I think though that that’s how I caught my first small brown. It came off the hook at the net, and I didn’t get a picture, but I figured that if I caught nothing else that was good enough for me and New York.

I also vaguely remember fishing nymphs, and Craig pointing out a yellow Sallie. Mostly I remember how pretty everything was, including the yellow Sallie.

Kris caught a small wild brown on a purple bodied dry, and then another larger stocked brown, and after a while I was fishing with a purple bodied dry. This must be our year for purple. Speaking of Mississippi Craig said he’d gone to Houston’s Glassell School of Art, and had expected to be a children’s book illustrator. He had a particular interest in nature illustrations, and he and Kris talked birds. I wanted to ask if he knew Walter Anderson’s strange work, but never got around to it. I think if I were interested in nature illustrations I’d want to know Walter Anderson, but I never even asked Craig if he painted now. Next time.

We were close to the end, and Craig had told Kris she could cast 15 more times–he’d really sussed her out. It was both a hard number and a small enough number that she couldn’t say she’d lost count. We’d moved downstream towards the Inn and Craig told me where to cast in the softer water flowing past a rock shelf set into the bank and I caught a nice stocked brown on my last cast of the day. I really did. I caught a brown trout on a dry fly. There was no hatch of course, hatches being a hoax that Yankees perpetrate on gullible Houstonians, but at least I’m reasonably certain now that it can be done. I did it. I caught a trout on a dry fly.

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The Wulff School of Fly Fishing, June 21-23, 2019

We matriculated at the Wulff School on a Friday evening, and graduated on the following Sunday. It was a quick education, and unlike high school I paid attention. Mostly. What they taught was useful, and even what I knew already it was good to hear again.

Here is the thing about the Wulff School: it has been on this earth for 40 years. It pre-dates trout hipsters. It pre-dates fly fishing for carp as a lifestyle choice and Euro-nymphing. It probably predates some parts of Europe. This is all trout all the time, and a trout fishing education of an older school. Sometimes the information is a bit idiosyncratic—that clinch knot variation and the water sock come to mind—but if you’re fishing for trout it’s stuff that will make your fishing better, or introduce you to fly fishing in an ordered and systematic way.

And it’s fun. There was no class bully. There was no prom. I declared myself class president and president of the National Honor Society and quarterback of the Joan Wulff Fighting Salmonids and nobody said no. Still, there was that anxiety that every school I’ve ever been to produces: Will I excel? Worse, will I embarrass myself? Well of course I will embarrass myself, but still . . . One worries about such things.

I suspect it was pretty much the same class I would have taken at the Wulff School in 2009, or 1999, or 1989. There were no Power Points, and laptops weren’t required. It was old school and it was charming. If Ms. Wulff started her school today it would be different, but I’m not sure that Power Points would add much.

There was plenty of hands-on stuff like knot tying and wading and casting. Then we cast some. Then we cast some more. Sometimes we didn’t go outside to cast, on Friday evening (after watching the 1969 Trout Unlimited video, The Way of the Trout) we practiced our grip and our power stroke with sawed off rods that consisted of the reel seat, the handle, and the first four or five inches of the butt section. Kris pointed out to me that there were no spells in these magic wands, then she had the nerve to shush me when I laughed out loud. I’m pretty sure she set me up to get in trouble with the teacher.

Did I mention we cast some? Joan Wulff made her bones as a caster and of course the most frustrating part of fly fishing is fly casting. Well, that and tangles. Tangles and putting down fish. Tangles and putting down fish and getting your waders filled with cold water and getting your back cast hung in the trees. But casting is right up there.

There were 22 of us in the class, and six instructors, and Ms. Wulff was around a lot to make seven. The students and instructors took class together, and we ate dinner together, and we hung out together. To practice casting—did I mention that we practiced casting?—we went out to the ponds in three groups and the instructors—all of whom were excellent—would watch us flail around and make encouraging and calm suggestions: Take your thumb to your temple, use your shoulder joint to bring down your elbow. Relax your shoulder. Relax your hand. Relax your shoulder. Relax your hand. Did I mention they told me to relax my shoulder? I think they discussed it in the teacher’s lounge: go by and tell the Thomas kid to relax his shoulder . . .

And why in Beelzebub’s tarnation are you casting sidearm? Ok, they didn’t say Beelzebub’s tarnation, they said if I didn’t stop casting sidearm my arm was going to fall off. Ok, they didn’t actually say that my arm would fall off, but that was what they would have said if they’d just thought of it. I started to tell them that I was 62 years old, and that if my arm hadn’t fallen off yet, it wasn’t going to because I tended to cast sidearm. I had come though to learn stuff, and even though I knew I was sloppy and lazy and could usually get done more or less what I wanted with my sloppy and lazy casts I could be a better caster if I just did what they told me to do.

The school director, Sheila Hassan, at one point had me shut my eyes and go through the motion of the cast on feel, just like Obi Wan and Luke. Then she said I was doing really well. And for that moment or two I really was. I felt the Force, Luke. However much I may have wanted to brand Ms. Wulff’s method as nit-picky and unrealistic, it was marvelously accurate, totally without my normal leftward slice of the leader and fly at the end of the cast. Normally I can cast a great slider. It’s just too bad the point isn’t to strike the fish out.

But with Ms. Wulff’s method, sidearm? Not happening! I was really feeling good, but then they filmed us on video and it all fell apart. Sorry Sheila. I know for about five seconds I was your star pupil.

I also fell apart any time Ms. Wulff watched me cast. Ms. Wulff is a handsome and active 92, engaged with her instructors and her students, and as demanding as the high school English teacher who made us read the Book of Job and Murder in the Cathedral the first week of class to get ready to start the Canterbury Tales. Why Job? I still don’t know. But like Mrs. Selman Ms. Wulff doesn’t accept laziness. She doesn’t accept sloppiness. I’m a bit surprised she didn’t rap my fingers with a magic wand.

Days later, fishing for pike in New Hampshire, throwing an eight weight with flies the size of baby ducklings, it occurred to me that I was concentrating. I wasn’t my usual lazy and sloppy self. I was following Ms. Wulff’s method and my casts on the river were both far enough and clean. I wished Ms. Wulff could have seen me, not like that time in class when she came up to watch me cast.

“Relax your shoulder,” she said. “Lift your arm up before it falls off.”

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Brook Trout

Currier & Ives, Brook Trout, 1868, chromolithograph, Library of Congress.

If you fly fish, sooner or later you hear two things:

  1. You idiot. Brook Trout aren’t a trout.
  2. Brook trout have been driven out of their native range.

The first, that brook trout aren’t a trout, isn’t so much spoken as declaimed. Those aren’t trout! Those are char! What’s actually being said is that brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, are taxonomically closer to members of the genus Salvelinus, commonly called char, than they are to brown trout, Salmo trutta, always called trout. Of course that begs the question of why rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, get a pass on trouthood when they’re taxonomically closer to Pacific salmon than to brown trout. And that begs the question of why Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are a salmon when they’re taxonomically closer to brown trout than to Pacific salmon.

Worthington Whittredge, Trout Brook in the Catskills, c. 1874, National Gallery of Art, Hudson River School. There’s an angler in that painting, though well hid. He’s above the rock on the left in the small falls. The painting could have just as well been named Brook Trout in the Catskills, but not Char in the Catskills.

These are probably the sorts of existential questions that trout ponder, but for me at least there’s some irrelevance to it. One supposes that all that taxonomic relativity means something scientifically, but common usage is common usage, and it’s brook trout, not brook char. One also supposes that the taxonomic classification of beetles is just as confusing as the various fishes, but likely as not every time you say June bug no one says that’s not John but Paul.

Historic Brook Trout Eastern Range Map, Trout Unlimited.

Questions about brook trout range are much more interesting. There was a time, roughly coinciding with somewheres in the Pleistocene to 1883, when brook trout were the only river trout in eastern North America. They ranged from Georgia to as far west as Michigan and north into Canada. By the 19th Century the Catskills were the destination fishery for New York, like now New Zealand and Iceland and Christmas Island and Kansas are the destination fisheries for modern anglers, and without cars or even trains the Catskills weren’t much easier to get to than Christmas Island. When in 1830 you fished the Catskills for trout you fished for brook trout, and I suspect that no officious busybody butted in to to tell you that’s not a trout it’s a char.

Brook trout first declined in much of their native range because of over-fishing and habitat degradation. Meanwhile innovators were beginning to raise hatchery brown trout, and the browns were adaptive and more heat and environmentally tolerant. Brown trout were first introduced into Michigan, but their introducers quickly took them east. Rainbows from the west coast were also introduced. While being crowded out of the east, brook trout meanwhile were carried west, and, along with their cousin the lake trout, brook trout are now an invasive species in cutthroat habitat. Poor cutthroat. They catch it from everybody.

By the way, lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) are not a trout but a char.

U.S. Geological Survey, Native and Introduced Ranges of Brook Trout, 2013. I have never heard of brook trout introduced in Texas, but I’m sure somebody did. Howdy!

There are efforts by the the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, a coalition of states, local governments, and private entities, to restore brook trout populations and habitat in their native range and to preserve the rivers and lakes where brook trout populations are healthy. the following Joint Venture map is dated, but it indicates where to fish for native brook trout. Maine. Go to Maine. And northern New Hampshire.

Hey! We’re on our way to northern New Hampshire!

From Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, Eastern Brook Trout: Roadmap to Restoration, before 2012. Who doesn’t date data?

Brook trout, which are members of the char family, spawn in the autumn beginning in their second year. I came across this peculiarly lurid description of brook trout spawning on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife website:

Pre-spawning courtship of the brook trout begins with the male attempting to drive a female toward suitable gravel habitat to facilitate spawning. A receptive female chooses a spot and digs a redd. While the female brook trout is digging, the male brook trout continues his courtship activity, darting alongside the female and quivering, swimming over and under her and rubbing the female with his fins.

https://www.fws.gov/fisheries/freshwater-fish-of-america/brook_trout.html.

Dang. These are your government employees at work. Pretty salty stuff.

And speaking of salt, like rainbows brook trout can move into the ocean (in which case they’re called salties). They return to freshwater to spawn.

If there’s a creature that a brook trout can put in their mouth, they’ll eat it. They feed by sight, so they’re daytime feeders. They’re short-lived, commonly living three to four years. Their size varies based on habitat.

50 fish from American Waters, Allen & Winter, Richmond Virginia, 188__. Cigarette cards.

Man they’re pretty. They’re also not a trout, but a char.

Four to eight pound brook trout are trophies. All of the IGFA tippet class records for brook trout are from Canada, and range up to about 10 pounds. The all tackle record is a bit more than 14 pounds. Weirdly all of the women’s records are vacant except for two pound tippet, which is for a 2 lb 8 oz fish. Kris really does need to get busy.

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We Visited the Pyramids and Posed on the Camel, April 12-13, 2019

First things first, I caught a fish, but unfortunately Kris didn’t. Actually, I caught two fish, one was a Summit Lahontan cutthroat that probably weighed two pounds. The other was a Pilot Peak Lahontan cutthroat that weighed about five pounds. Those are goodly trout for anyplace else, and they were fun to catch, but I gather they are on the small side for Pyramid Lake.

Kris meanwhile never had a fish take a fly. It was nothing she did wrong. She was casting well, and while the fishing is unique, and while we wouldn’t have figured it out on our own, with a good guide it’s not hard.  We were fishing with Casey Gipson out of Reno, and Casey was all the good things a good guide should be. He had good equipment, including excellent ladders. He was patient with the birds nests we made of our leaders. He kept us at plausible locations out of the crowds. When he picked us up at the hotel he had coffee. Coffee is no small thing.

He is also a great cook. You wouldn’t think that was so important, but shows what you know. We had homemade chorizo po’boys for lunch the first day and homemade chicken burritos the second. Whatever else happened, we had great food. And coffee.

Casey’s photo. I’m the model. I’m not really sleeping. Really.

But the fishing was slow. What we kept trying to explain to Casey was that this was just a normal fishing trip with the Thomases. Unless you know that the Thomases are going to be there, April may be the best time to fish Pyramid. If we’re there the fish will be down for our visit. Honestly, except for the nap I took on the bank the second day, we fished hard, we fished reasonably well, and I didn’t hurt anybody with my casting.

Casey told us that the worst fishing days on Pyramid are the nicest days, the days when the barometric pressure is high, the breezes are gentle, and the lake is glass. The best days to fish are the days when the weather is the worst. We had nice days, beautiful days, the days of the first morning of the world. Casey worked his butt off, but what can you do? It’s easy to guide when all you have to do is net and release fish. Poor Casey had to answer all the questions we came up with because we weren’t busy, plus come up with stories to keep us engaged. Nobody ever said guiding was easy.

We had planned to fish one day on the Pyramid and one on the Truckee River, the river that carries water from Lake Tahoe down to Pyramid Lake, but the Truckee flows were dangerously high, around 6,000 cubic feet per second. Our Reno hotel room window looked down on the Truckee, and we constantly checked the river, hopeful, but then had hopes washed away. The river was dashing and carrying on and generally taunting us. It was one whole lot of silted, roiling, angry water. I’m sure most weekends it it’s the gentlest bubbling brook, perfect for a three weight bamboo rod and size 18 quill Gordons.

The first day in Nevada we drove up the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe, and the last day we drove to Silver City. Both are classic Western alpine environments, formed by tectonic pressures that jumbled igneous rock into dramatic poses. There are pine trees and winding mountain roads and when it snowed on our drive to Tahoe we sang “Snow” from White Christmas. Pyramid though is different.  It’s also dramatic, but in an Old Testament Biblical sort of way. It looks like where Moses and the Hebrews spent their 40 years in the Wilderness.  

And there are no trees, but of course that didn’t stop me from getting my fly snagged in sagebrush. There are rocks, but the rocks aren’t the product of geologic cataclysm. The rocks are tufa deposits, a deposit of carbonate minerals like what accumulates around old plumbing where the water’s hard. Sometimes the deposits are rounded and lumpish, sometimes striated like something shattered and sharp and broken. The color of the deposits matches the sand and the sagebrush; tan, grey, barren, and dry. 

The lake is on the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation, and the fishing season is from October to the end of June. It’s huge, 28 miles long and nine miles across, but the air is so clear and dry that distances are confusing. It looks like it’s two instead of nine miles across. In the warmer months fishing is closed and other uses take over. Casey thought that the tribe closed the fishing season as much to prevent conflicts between jet skiers and anglers as for conservation.

Other than the big tufa rock, the lake shore (and the lake bed) is course sand and small broken rock, a beach perfect for summer recreation. There’s plenty of sage brush, but not much else. The near lake floor is a series of shelves, and you can see the pattern repeated on the shore. Shelf, drop, shelf, drop. The trout cruise the drops, and Casey planted our ladders about 15 feet from the shore at the first drop’s edge. Now Casey is a big ‘ol boy, but it’s height not girth.  He’s 6’8”, and Kris (who’s 5’4”) distrusted his awareness of relativity.  He did ok though, and she never drowned nor even dunked, much. Casey said that the key to excellent ladder placement was to never wade out past his wader belt, which was not quite to the top of Kris’s waders. 

When we fished, we first climbed the ladder, and then cast out 30 feet or so to get beyond the drop to the feeding fish.  There be monsters.  When there were no fish in the first hours, Casey had me prospect with streamers on a sinking line. I’d let the line sink and then retrieve with short strips. Other than that we fished nymphs under fluorescent Screw-Ball Indicators.  Casey said that streamers are generally fished in the fall, and nymphs are fished the rest of the season, and we fished big weighted nymphs: mahalos, holographic midges, red red and more red chironomids. Ok, they weren’t always red, just mostly. 

There was no real retrieve on the nymphs. The shifting lake current and the wind carried the indicator and nymphs through a drift, and from time to time you might give the line a twitch to jig the flies or an up-current mend to get slack out of your line. Sometimes the drift went left to right, sometimes right to left, sometimes straight toward you. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d do all of that some more. It was oddly mesmerizing, watching the bobber work through the waves.

If the fishing is on then the fish take is quick and strong. Casey said that when you see the indicator go down, that with a really large fish there will be no retrieve: it’s a full stop, like hooking a rock that commences a fight.  

I fished a lot of different rods, mostly 7-weights, some of ours, some of Casey’s. I fished for a while with Casey’s 11-foot two-handed rod using roll casts, and Casey said that Spey rods and switch rods were pretty much all he personally uses on the lake anymore. I liked it for a bit, but then got distracted and my roll cast went to play the slots back in Reno. I went back to single-handed rods. I’m better at daydreaming with single hand rods.

I asked Kris if we needed to go back to Nevada to catch her a fish. So far she’s caught fish everywhere I’ve caught fish except Mississippi and Nevada, but Nevada is a strange place, and it was a hard trip for a long weekend. I think she’s decided that this fish in every state business is mine, not hers, and while she likes going along she doesn’t need to catch a fish. I still need to go to Oxford, Mississippi though, even though I caught a fish in Mississippi. She didn’t catch a fish in Mississippi, but I could use that as an excuse to go again. Maybe Nevada falls into the same category.