Water Works

I was in Japan last week and when I flew back to Minneapolis on Saturday, frost warnings and rumors of snowflakes had been replaced by more typical mid-September weather, if you live in Alabama, that is.  87 degrees is ridiculous. I fell asleep at about 8:30 pm and woke up just past midnight yesterday with a nasty case of jet lag. I spent the next 9 hours drinking coffee, staring at the wall, watching Packers highlights on YouTube and being generally useless until I decided enough was enough and willed myself into my car to drive out to a trout stream.

My destination was a small, brushy stream where the only habitat work has been done by beavers.  It doesn’t look like much, but holds some surprisingly large trout who are looking for hoppers this time of year.  It is a challenge to fish: the clear shallow water keeps the fish under the banks, which are decorated with an assortment of fallen logs and overhanging brush that make a snag-free drift against the bank impossible in most places.  I have found in past years that if I stay out of sight and plop my hopper into the patches of open water, fish will race out from under the bank to grab it.  This kind of fishing requires careful attention and good motor reflexes—both of which were in short supply given my jet lagged state.  I should have gone to an open, easy-to-fish stream like the Rush or the Kinni, but along with affecting attention and reflexes, jet lag messes up your judgment.
By the time I got to the stream, it was so sultry that fog was rising off the cold, spring-fed water.  Mosquitoes were enjoying the return of summer, and destroyed what remained of my frazzled concentration. To cut to the chase, I spooked hundreds of fish, hung up my fly on every imaginable obstacle, and managed to land only one 11-inch brown that raced 10 feet downstream to grab a hopper that I had managed to land in the water.    I declared victory and retreated to my car.  Last night I slept like a baby.
A couple of winters ago I gave Mike Hodgens, our chapter treasurer, a call to talk about some TU stuff.  He was in a hotel in Reno, and was planning to head to Pyramid Lake the next day to fish for the giant Lahontan Cutthroats that make it famous.  At least it is famous if you are a trout angler. The next evening, I received a photo by email showing him bundled up like an Eskimo, sporting a silly grin and holding a giant fish.  It looked like a salmon, but the red slash across the throat gave it away.  The caption on the email read “It was a one fish day”.  My one fish wasn’t nearly as impressive, and it didn’t even cross my mind to take a photo, but it was memorable in its own way.