Comfortable Angling

Fishing a comfortable piece of water can be a lot like visiting an old friend. You have walked that reach a hundred times, know where the trout are likely to rise, even expect them in those favorite corners.

Yesterday was one of those comfortable days, a warm high summer afternoon with intermittent breezes, both sunshine and clouds, and even a few tiny mayflies drifting on the surface now and then. While those flies were too few to capture and identify, I guessed them to be the little pale olives common on summer afternoons. My size 20 imitation however, was blatantly ignored whenever I cast over one of the sporadic rises I observed. I had seen something dark and drowned in the film once or twice, so I relied upon a small Grizzly Beetle to turn the tide in my favor.

The wild brownies I entertained weren’t large, but they fought with all of the strength and vigor their junior proportions could sustain, giving me a smile and a good time.

There was one that left a question in my mind, for I had seen a couple of heavier rises at a distance. When my wandering took me near their locations, I traded my beetle for a larger terrestrial.

I had just tied on a new 5X tippet before I approached one of those promising lies, and I lofted a long cast with the Menscer hollowbuilt. The wind blew a lot of slack in the line while the fly was in the air, and I overreacted a bit when a good rise vanished the fly. The line came away freely after a split second of marginal resistance, the tippet knot having failed. Some sort of a fish might have spent the afternoon sulking near that deadfall, munching on my fly and four feet of tippet. I worked along down river with a fresh fly, but there were no further signs of the big brown I coveted.

Before I turned back upstream, I knotted an Isonychia pattern to the third fresh tippet of the day. There is always a chance for a few of these flies to hang around into midsummer, though the main hatches occur in early June and September. That claret bodied 100-Year Dun did bring a few more browns to the surface as I reworked the best lies along my way back.

I took my time, covering all of the old haunts, just in case a big boy might be looking up. That’s the way it is with familiar water. Experience keeps you focused on the places trout like best, and all you have to do is make good casts, almost from memory.