Summer’s Winding Down

I’m trying to catch my breath…

It seems the past two months have spun past like a whirlwind. It has been a great summer, allowing me to more than make up for the spring fishing that was lost. Things have slowed down, finally, and I am feeling a sense of relief. I would not begrudge the weather keeping me off the rivers today.

The energy of great fishing had me cruising through long days one after another. Now, with the slower pace of late summer, there is more work, more water to cover to find just one good trout to ply my trade, spin the magic of the dry fly.

Yesterday I covered a lot of water carefully, taking my time to dissect every possible lie my eyes could see. Casting from distance, there is no chance to observe just what makes a trout to rush into a spontaneous rise. I could see the odd trico spinner pass by in the film through the late hours of morning, but such fare does not bring an apparently idle trout to swirl hard and shower his placid abode with spray.

Granted, the larger terrestrials would seem to be the answer, but there was no proof. Cast after cast was ignored, even where there was some secondary movement to prove the fish I targeted was still in the area where he rose. When the evidence confuses, I often think that movement is the culprit.

By late August, these wild trout have been assaulted by an army of visiting anglers, throwing everything but the kitchen sink. They have been harangued and spooked. Some have been caught early on and more have been fooled by those of us who hunt stealthily and aware. By this time, they are as schooled as well as the best of us, likely more. There is always an equalizer in Nature, the attraction of an alive, wiggling, bite size something which finds itself on the water. The lack of frequency screams the laws of chance are at work!

Throughout my thirty-five years of designing and tying trout flies, the guiding principle has been to project the image of life. That is paramount – and exceedingly difficult. When the predator trout has been conditioned by a full season of heavy angling pressure, when the largesse of the spring hatches are but a memory, that image of life often comes down to movement. Ninety-nine percent of the time brother, twitchin’ ain’t gonna cut it!

A twitched fly is of course attached to a leader, and any movement imparted to a fly is accompanied with a great deal more movement, movement of unnatural things: the leader, the line, and all of the water disturbed by them. Yes, one can get away with a very subtle upstream twitch in fast water, but not in the flat sheen of summer.

A handful of early afternoon Cahills allowed me to present a Cross Special to a trout who was looking for one, and how surprised was he when that tasty looking mayfly fought back! He was a nice fish, but not a big one, but he more than it made up with surprised energy.

For a moment, it seemed there might be enough of those little pale mayflies to start something, but no. A rise here or there… and then silence.

I checked the time, after two, and so having determined those mayflies were not going to be the start of something, I changed flies and tactics.

The last cast of the day…

His movements betrayed him. He wasn’t rising, wasn’t finding the food he sought, but he clearly wanted some. I stalked him as slowly and gently as my tired bones were capable.

The most difficult decisions in that kind of game are choosing to end one drift, withdraw the fly, watch and determine the next cast. Care and a bit of divine charity let me to make those decisions correctly. I had worked all of the corridor of water he had been moving through, leaving me the only place he must have been holding, returning to when his little sorties returned no engagements. Thus, that last cast…

The drift was slow, as was the slightest little soft ring. No nose, just that soft ring…

He gave a wonderful account of himself, a pair of leaps, hard, quick runs against that deadly silent modern drag, all ignored by the sole other angler in the river not far away. Had it been a typical day, armed with a light cane rod and a classic, musical Hardy, he and I would have not kept our secret. Geared for bombing casts across two thirds of the river had me unpack the old T&T Paradigm number four; silence is deadly.

Twenty inches, right on the button, how perfect might be that last cast at the end of a long day!