Wind Stalking

Another beautiful spring day: cobalt blue skies, brilliant sunshine, and a gentle breeze! Well, maybe not so gentle. Wind is always a factor in these mountains, and how much, their direction and maximum velocity combine to add challenge to our fishing. As if the avoidance behavior of heavily fished wild trout failed to provide sufficient challenges.

I more or less lucked out yesterday. I was delayed in the morning while a technician replaced the modem on our internet service, hoping to finally put to rest the glitches and outages that make me hate electronics. When the work was done, I jumped into the shower, gathered my gear and beat feet for the river. I never stopped to check my watch, and actually ended up reaching the river’s edge earlier than planned.

Perhaps the Red Gods weren’t looking my way, I can’t be certain, but I waded out into the river to find a few early Hendricksons drifting by. The wind was intermittent at that point, gusting upstream from time to time, while leaving reasonably long periods when a guy could actually make an accurate fly presentation. I went instantly into trout hunting mode.

Wading along carefully, I was distracted by a rise just below and flipped my fly in it’s direction. There was no response to the drift, but as soon as I tightened for the pickup a little brownie grabbed my fly. He fought with all the ten inches of vigor he could muster before I hand lined him in to twist the hook free.

There was enough wind at times that I kept hearing the little wavelets plop, plopping against the rocky sections of the riverbank. Every once in a while I heard the distinct plop of a rise behind me, but every time I turned to look, the wind had dissipated all evidence of the riseform. This persisted until I turned back downstream and studied that water. There had been this big Canada Goose in the water diving and feeding on vegetation, and I was thinking that he was making all of that racket, but I wasn’t sure. Some of those plops sounded closer to me than the goose, so I kept watching. It’s not like there was anything eating those Hendricksons upstream anyway.

Staring hard into the glare, I finally heard a rise while looking right at the riseform before the wind ate it up, and I knew I had him. I had a faithful old CDC sparkle dun tied on, one of my best producers on that river, and I pulled some more line from my old Hardy Perfect and let the 8-foot Thomas & Thomas Paradigm bamboo rod do the rest. The wind blew my first cast a bit of course, but the second one was right down the pipe. Plop…zoom! That trout charged straight towards me, and I stripped line as fast as possible, barely keeping tight. The head shakes telegraphed size and strength, then he turned and brought that old Hardy into full song! She’s as old as I am that reel, but a much better singer.

The cane was bucking as I was reeling, then giving line again, and the big trout gave me everything he had. I had a heck of a time seeing him when I tried to bring him close to the net. I was standing about thigh deep and the glare on the wind rippled water kept me guessing and watching the leader. He tried to wrap me in the leader once, but somehow I blindly kept him from breaking off. I even lost sight for a critical moment when I scooped with my net, but he was there when I completed the lift, still with the greenish coloration and steely flanks of winter.

Not long after releasing that brownie, the early duns began to fade. I wandered further upriver, stood around scanning the water for activity, and managed to pass the time until the main event started trickling off. The winds increased as the afternoon warmed of course and, though there was a decent hatch for close to an hour, I didn’t find another feeder until the flies had nearly disappeared.

There was a fish noodling around in a shallow scum line, fully exposed to that upstream wind. I worked close, but the gusts were just too strong and too constant by that point to allow a suitable presentation. Whatever finny predator was milking the cripples from that scum line was too savvy to take a compromised, dragging fly.