As the season draws to a close, I haunt familiar places. It has become somewhat of a late season ritual for me to spend a number of the season’s final hours at one I call simply the glides.
I traveled there yesterday, expecting not to find the game I wanted passionately. I nearly affixed the reel with the intermediate line to my rod, and sadly I did tie a new heavier tippet to my leader, tipped with a lightly weighted swinging fly.
There was sunlight on the water when I first waded into the river, and it was calm and beautiful as I made a few casts and swings upriver from the glides. The first rise was unmistakable, soft and gentle, though clearly not a leaf turning over in the current – one of autumn’s little teases for desperate dry fly anglers scanning the surface at a distance.
I was cutting and re-building the leader as I waded down the shallower part of the river, and smiled ruefully when the wind sprung suddenly to life obscuring the surface of the glides with a shower of leaves. It was to be expected that the Red Gods would punish me for my faithless beginning to this day. And so, thus my penance would begin…
I had waded close, struggling to knot a little olive to the wind whipped tippet, and waited for a time for the gusts to subside. As I studied the sinuous mirror of the glides, I knew there was still too much flow to make my task easy. The rise that had sparked my approach and the revisions to my terminal tackle was not repeated, though in a while I caught a glint of light from upstream. Sure enough, within a few minutes the barest tip of a trout’s nose creased the surface where one tiny olive mayfly had drifted.
I repositioned as carefully as the uneven bottom would allow and tried three casts before pausing. That rise too, would not be repeated.
The flies were very sparse and looked to be smaller than the size 20 dry that has become part of my autumn ritual here. With varying banks of clouds exchanging dominance of the sky with the sun, I was having a difficult time tracking the twenty. There was no decision here, as I was confident that my chest pack lacked anything smaller. In truth, I had sensed the theme of the day, knowing that the river’s flow was still too high for success on sippers in the glides.
Such water tends to be the most challenging I encounter in my pursuit of wild trout with the dry fly, for even at the perfect flow, the smooth appearance of the moving surface is a ruse. Microcurrents is the popular technical term for Nature’s primary obstacle to fishing the glides, but I prefer to think of this phenomenon as a unique bedevilment of the magical life within bright waters.
The perfectly placed dry fly, touched down with an ideal amount of slack in a supple tippet, will dance and spin within a foot of drift. No; to be honest an actual foot of drag free drift here is a blessed gift from the heavens on most days! But don’t insects dance and dart on such water? Certainly they do at times, but it is different.
The mental game reaches a high level when fishing the glides. There are three practical tactics that may be employed in the battle against wildly dancing flies. Adjusting casting position can improve one’s chances of a drag free drift, though the Red Gods have arranged the river bottom to complicate this extraordinarily. Casting adjustments to put more slack in the leader and tippet would seem a better choice, but more curves of tippet material require more surface space and are quickly defeated by the myriad swirls and upwellings of the glides’ currents, sometimes making the fly skate wildly away. The third tactic involves reducing the tippet size down to the dreaded 6X! The waters of the glides hold treasures, powerful finned and spotted treasures, and the Red Gods’ architecture includes many unique angular rocks and boulders. Six X requires the angler pin his hopes to luck alone!
Impossible water? At times it has been, yet that is why I am drawn there, why this has become a ritual.
The afternoon brought periods of wind and rain and the breathtaking glow of autumn sunlight, and yes, every quarter hour or so a trout would rise. Just once in most cases, though as fish move from lie to lie in this place it can be difficult to determine. The last and most fervent blow and rain shower even brought a little flurry of mayflies, and one last chance for this angler to vanquish the power of the Red Gods.
My nerves were too well frazzled by then I guess, for I drove my hurried third cast down into the water with a splat. The flies would quickly diminish after that, and the river grew quiet.
Bright Waters Catskill 