We all have seen them, particular spots, places where everything looks fishy, but there never seems to be any sort of a decent trout within a mile of it. The optimists think there must be the granddaddy of them all down there, but time eventually convinces them that trout just seem to don’t like that spot.
I mean, who knows what is in the mind in a trout?
Over time, you tend to ignore those places. You tell yourself well that place looks sooo good, every Tom, Dick and Harry bombards it with twenty casts, bad casts… so big trout learn to avoid it. Sure, once in a while you stop and throw a perfunctory wild cast there, but after enough fishless years go by and you just don’t bother.
Maybe it was my day, but I have been having a lot of good days lately. I missed out on my spring fishing, was threatened that I might be done period, and I have embraced the blessings offered me when I came through that. I like summer anyway. When it gets more difficult, skinny water, trout at their wariest, rare brief little hatches, that’s my comfort zone.
So yesterday morning I am walking, sneaking along the river’s edge, and I decide to go further and take a shot at an interesting new place, and yea, an old place where there is never a good trout there. The new spot doesn’t pan out. New cover may take time to appeal to a lunker trout I tell myself, so that leaves the old nowhere lie. Perfunctory cast and move on? No, I fish it! I work it like a surgeon taking out your something or other.
Now appreciate the fact that this place has never even threatened to produce anything but an odd foot long trout, and that has been nearby, not really on the lie that draws all of the attention. This has been like that for years! But I keep working, just like everything depends upon it. Nurse, retractor, I’m going in again…
The fly has dissected every foot of this lie, and finally I lose sight of my fly in the glare and see a bit of nervous water that hovers where I think it should be. I tighten up and it sort of drags, then comes away. Weeds? I check the fly and it is clean and in good shape, so I put the perfect cast tight in there and let it drift again… kawhomp!
I am on the line and stripping, the Leonard bowed up in a big, full curve, and the water is splashing all over the place. Those first few seconds are everything when the cover is impenetrable. Now I’ve got him out of it and we are on even ground.
I still don’t think the old fellow knows what hit him, but there he is out of his tree in the middle of the river in the sun light, and his breakfast is tugging on him. We had a good fight, but the net wasn’t something he liked very much. Twenty-three inches of indignant old brown trout was hopping mad one moment, and then sitting there at my feet, released to go ponder just what and how this happened.
Bright Waters Catskill 