Tag: Trout

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Broken Bow, Oklahoma

Saturday we fished with Chris Schatte on the Lower Mountain Fork River. I was going to brag that I caught two fish for every one of Kris’s, but then Kris caught another fish. It wasn’t a day with a lot of fish, but I never remember much about catching a lot of fish. I remember specific fish, not multitudes. 

We picked the Mountain Fork because it was in Oklahoma and close enough for a long weekend drive. The names are a bit confusing. It’s the Lower Mountain Fork River, which is a tailwater below Broken Bow Lake, which is in Beavers Bend State Park. It’s near the towns of Hochatown and Broken Bow, just past Idabel. It’s a pretty trout river within three hours of Dallas/Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, and there are a bunch of smaller cities, Norman, Lawton, Tyler, Longview, Shreveport, Texarkana, that are even closer.  It’s popular. It’s pretty.

To be fair, most of the folk in that photo were an on-the-water class, and if we’d walked further upriver we would have probably walked away from the crowd, but in the afternoon we picked our bit of river and fished that bit. I figured that it would get me ready for fishing in New York and Connecticut and Montana, all the crowded places. I’ve never fished much with crowds, and usually I tend to cast and move. There wasn’t much casting and moving.

We had fished a different part of the river that morning, and there were fewer people. It was theoretically a better place to fish, but at least this trip we didn’t get any strikes. Chris the Guide thought that three days’ heavy generation had put down the fish.  

Southeastern Oklahoma looks like Wisconsin. The trees are different, sure: I didn’t see a single cypress knee in Wisconsin, but at the end of the day lumber is business in both places. Driving out of Oklahoma Saturday evening there was lumbering machinery and lumber trucks everywhere. The cheese is better in Wisconsin, and the cheese curds, but Hochatown, Oklahoma had Stevens Point beat for pizza, and they both had good beer.  Even the weather, mid-November in Oklahoma and late September in Wisconsin, was pretty similar. I’m not sure if there’s been a freeze yet in Beavers Bend.

Out of curiosity we would probably have gone to Mountain Fork sooner or later, and might go back again, but the river’s probably happiest without us. People should go to the Mountain Fork because it’s their river, not because it’s a destination river. I suspect there are rivers all over the country just like it. Good places to go for days and weekends year after year, places that satisfy the need for pretty but close enough for frequent fliers, a place to know and criticize and praise, and maybe love.

We fished nymphs and emergers under a bobber without added weight. I missed a bunch of strikes, especially at the end of the swing when I made a few short strips before picking up the line. I was casting well enough, and at one point I fished three flies without killing anybody. I didn’t get hopelessly tangled until it was time to quit for the day, and then we quit for the day. 

Mid-afternoon I lay down on the bank and took a long nap.  Kris said I slept for about an hour, and that’s fine with me.  I guess people moving upriver had to step over me, or at least around me, but nobody tripped or kicked. It was a fine river for a nap, and I’ve napped by many fine rivers. If I did a product review of the FishPond Summit Sling, I would note that it’s exactly the right size to use as a pillow for napping bankside. For me that’s not a small consideration.

I watched Kris the Angler cast and she was casting beautifully.  Last year she didn’t cast so beautifully. 

When I planned Oklahoma I had thought that we would fish without a guide. I wouldn’t have used emergers, and I wouldn’t have known where to fish, but sooner or later, this trip or the one after or the one after that, we would have caught fish, but we fished with Chris the Guide because he was a freshman at my high school when I was a senior, and I got to spend the day talking about people and places we knew, the Osbornes and Joe Chat, what businesses were left downtown in our hometown, Johnson’s Jewelry, and what was wrong with the town’s water system. Chris has a good life: they picked Broken Bow because land is cheaper in Oklahoma than in Colorado. They bought some acreage. They built a house. He started guiding. They own an Airstream and his wife does triathlons and they go to Canada and Minnesota in the summer. It all sounded great to me.  

Plus I caught my fish. 

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Tailwaters

In two weeks we’re driving to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, 328 miles and 5 1/2 hours, to fish with Chris Schatte at Beavers Bend Fly Fishing Guide Service on the Lower Mountain Fork River.  I don’t know Chris, though my friend Mark Morgan says he’s from our home town. There are few enough people from my home town that it surprises me that I don’t know one who fly fishes, but there you are.  Maybe he was Church of Christ or Baptist. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t Methodist.

The Lower Mountain Fork River is a tailwater, which means it’s the waterway below a dam. There are all sorts of peculiarities about tailwaters. Flow can be dangerous or at least weird, particularly where electrical generation’s involved, and river temperatures below the dam can be substantially lower than above the dam. Our Guadalupe River changes from a nice warmwater fishery above the dam to a trout river below the dam, at least for a few miles. Water released from the bottom of a deep lake does that, and on rivers like the San Juan and the Green it turns an ignored high desert river supporting a population of catfish into a trout angler’s amusement park.

My father grew up Church of Christ, and they practice a rigorous kind of orthodoxy about the strangest things. They don’t allow, for instance, musical instruments as part of the service, just like the Greek Orthodox. While my Dad became an apostate Methodist and took his family along, I figure I inherited that orthodoxy gene, and it comes to the fore about tailwaters.  There’s just something about them that seems artificial.

Now mind, fishing 50 states is an excuse: visiting all 50 states is something I’ve wanted to do that I haven’t made time for yet, like playing Layla on the guitar and reading Ulysses. But when you reach my age, time isn’t a limitless commodity. If I’m going to see the country, I need to get a move on. We like to fish. We like to travel. Fishing gives the travel a purpose, an excuse, a prod, and not a gentle one either.

So this whole enterprise is a bit artificial. Even the geography of it is arbitrary. The difference between the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and the Gulf Coast of Alabama or between a trout stream in New Hampshire and a trout stream in Vermont is some miles, and not very many either. So why, since this whole business is a bit made up, do I resent the stocking of Southern and Southwestern tailwaters with trout? Why is it that tailwaters in particular bother me?

Because I’m a hypocrite of course, because all winter long I drive up to the Canyon Lake/Lower Guadalupe tailwater and fish for stocked trout. Am I dubious about stocked trout? Yeah. Do I fish for them? Yeah. And I’m happy as can be when I catch a tailwater fish.  From time to time I’ve gone out of my way to fish tailwaters: the White and the Little Red in Arkansas, the San Juan in New Mexico, the Gunpowder in Maryland.

Come to think of it, there’s only one natural lake in Texas (which I’ve never fished), and every time I drive out to Damon’s and spend a couple of hours catching bass I’m participating in the fly fishing equivalent of an amusement park, or at least a golf course. Nearly every time I fish, most places I fish, there’s some unnaturalness going on, some dam upstream or downstream, some introduced species not native to the place, some native population supplemented by stocking. I ought to recognize my scruples for what they are: my tendency for misplaced orthodoxy.

Meantime when we go to Broken Bow we’ll come back through Texarkana and have breakfast with my cousins. I haven’t seen them in years, and we were close when we were younger. The elder, six years older than me, seems bent in her FaceBook posts on forcing President Obama from office.  Can’t wait to see them.

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The Native Fish Society

When I was reading about Oregon I didn’t find a conservation organization to donate to. There was nothing like the Tarpon and Bonefish Trust that reached out and gave me a good shake and said we’re doing good work. A week or so later I got one of the usual fishing emails,  this time from The Venturing Angler, announcing the Native Fish Society Native Trout-A-Thon in Oregon.

I looked at the Native Fish Society website, and they were what I had been looking for: a Pacific Northwest conservation organization for the protection of salmon, steelhead, and trout. They need to work on how easy they are to find on search engines, at least by random folk like me.  I sent them some money, and they promised to send me a ball cap. I am now a member of the Adipossessed Society of the Native Fish Society, clipping of the adipose fin being the marker for hatchery fish. Adipossessed. Cute.

If I had been willing to donate $5,000, the Society would have sent me a C.F. Burkheimer custom spey rod inscribed with “Native Fish Society Lifetime Member.” That seems like a pretty reasonable price for a Burkheimer Spey rod, but alas, I have no current need.

I can always use another ball cap. 

From the 2016 Native Fish Society Annual Report. 

Meanwhile in Houston it’s the prettiest time of year, which could only be better if the Astros were in the World Series. This morning I went out early to hand out push cards for a neighbor who’s running for Congress–his mother had called and asked if I’d work the polls for early voting, and how can you turn down someone’s mother? It was in the mid-50s, and clear and bright and excellent people watching. By the afternoon it was in the 80s and I went out and fished for largemouth at Damon’s. Lately I’ve started each bass trip with whatever fly was successful the last time (unless it was lost in the trees) and then moving on if that’s not working.  Today I moved on to a dark blue and black Clouser, which never works. Today it worked, I think because the water was clear with the cooler weather and in the bright sun the dark color was the thing, maybe. In any case, what’s more fun than casting to a particular fish then watching it take, whatever the fish?

  

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Fly Fish Oregon Done

Last Sunday we met our guide, Travis Johnson, at 4:30 in the morning, waders on, and got back to the hotel that night at 9:20. It was a long day. Most of our days in Oregon were long days. Up early, fish until lunch, nap for a few hours then fish again until dark. Long days.

We spent the next three nights at a riverside camp on a trip put together by Louis Cahill of Gink & Gasoline, through Jeff Hickman’s Fish the Swing.  I’d signed up for the camp on a whim, because steelhead was the right color of fish for Oregon, and there was a personal invitation, addressed to occupant, in my emails. Kris was a bit startled that I’d signed her up for a group camping trip on a river with a latrine tent and no blow drier, but I swear I told her first. I think I told her first.

The food was great, and the company great. Hickman wasn’t there, but there were two boats of three anglers each and two guides, Barrett Ames and Curtis Ciszek, and Curtis’s good dog, Rowlf. And no one is nicer than Louis Cahill. The weather wasn’t the bitter cold we’d expected north of the Mason-Dixon after Labor Day, though people did make fun of our expedition wear. Who says four layers are too many for 60 degrees? That’s damned cold.

I learned two Spey casts, more or less, the double Spey and the snap-T. By the end of the week every 10th cast or so was ok, and every 20th cast I might shoot three or four feet of line.  Spey casting, mastered. I was only frustrated at that point, as opposed to deeply frustrated, or even exasperated.  Kris was pretty much exasperated, but she hung in, and got more casting instruction than is really good for anyone. She might have been happier (and just as effective) if the guides had left her alone to flail away, but she was game, and mostly patient.

The first day with Travis Johnson was upriver, south of Maupin.  Oregon has a split personality, with east of the Cascades dry, and the lush west landscaped by rain and the ocean. Technically on the Deschutes we were in Central Oregon, but it was east enough. When I first saw the east side, mostly treeless, pristine, arid, it looked enough like my childhood home to be familiar. It was comfortable.

As I said, the first day we fished a bit upriver, south of Maupin, which if you let that sink in is all wrong. Like the desert in the east, the Deschutes runs north, the wrong way. Upriver south, downriver north. Forest west, desert east. The lower Deschutes is north. No wonder Oregon has such a peculiar reputation.

Johnson is the reigning world champion Spey-caster, but he may also be the reigning world champion talker. From dark to dark he had a constant stream of great stories and strong opinions ranging from Ireland to Maupin and back again. Johnson somehow managed to weave the Northern Ireland prime minister into instructions on drift. It was almost as spectacular as the scenery.

Oregon has a peculiar history. In the decades after Lewis & Clark, the relatively new United States pushed expansion into Oregon to keep the British out. Britain and the States agreed on a 49th parallel border in 1846, and the Canadian border from Washington to North Dakota is artificially straight, designed by treaty not geography. Settlers came from New England and the old Ohio Territory, and the existing residents, the Yakima and Nez Perce and Umpqua, the lot of them, were killed, pushed out, or confined. Oregon was re-settled by white people. It wasn’t just any white people, either.  It was pretty universally British Isle-descended white people,

Interestingly, Wisconsin was settled at about the same time by the same Yankees, but with the addition of Germans, Norwegians, and other such foreign folk. The conflict in Wisconsin between Catholic beer-drinking Germans and Protestant temperance-pledging Yankees was defining, but I’m pretty sure the beer drinkers won.  Oregon, on the other hand, remained relatively isolated until World War II, the automobile, and television changed everything.  It’s still 87% white though (as is Wisconsin, interestingly enough). Oregon’s greatest novel (and one of our greatest novels), Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, constantly riffs on its characters’ casual racism. They must have brought it with them over the Oregon Trail, because the Oregon population is still only 2 percent African American, less than 2 percent Native American, and less than 5 percent Asian. White people.

Where we camped and fished on the lower Deschutes (that’s the north end of the river; keep up), there had been a 70,000-acre fire in July that had destroyed the grass-cover and most of the river trees.  Without ground cover there was lots of dust when the wind blew, and by midday every day the wind was blowing. If it ever rains hard, there’ll be erosion and dirty water, but big rain doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. It was a prairie fire, and by next year the grass should be back.

Because it’s spring fed, the river flow is apparently pretty constant, season to season, year to year. The river is big, fast, and hard wading, horizontal rock-climbing, and neither of us could have done it without wading staffs and Patagonia river crampons. The river crampons worked, and the one morning we tried without them, with only studs in rubber soles, was scary. Notwithstanding their generally excellent performance and the Patagonia hype, when river crampons get caked with ash and dirt river crampons are not ultralight.

I caught a jack Chinook the first day, and three redsides rainbows over the next couple of days, and finally a steelhead on the third.  The small jack, three pounds maybe, was a bit like a Gulf Coast speckled trout. It was nice to see it, it was nice to get the Oregon fish out of the way, but after a bit of a flurry it seemed resigned to being caught. The redsides were pretty, wild, and genetically pure, and one was about 20 inches which I was told was about as big as they get. They were a bit overpowered by the 7 weight Spey rod though. The final steelhead was a hatchery fish with a clipped adipose fin, but it was big, 24 or 25 inches I’d guess, and it was every bit as hard to land as billed. Not many things are as good as billed.

Kris got a nice redside and some other things, a tiny pikeminnow and a sucker, so all in all it was a fine week. Oregon’s done.