Wild Trout Fix

I love ice fishing, but won't dwell on an early end to hardwater season. Last week brought with it unseasonal spring-like weather and a hankering for trout fishing. It was tough being stuck inside at work, but I was able to pay a visit to a favorite small stream before heading to the office one morning. It was a short, productive session with six gorgeous trout finding my net. The first two were sizable brown trout for this run that ate my dry fly in the head of the riffle. I was more expecting the dry to serve as an indicator in my dry-dropper rig, but was pleasantly surprised to see the surface eats in February. The next four trout, a mix of brookies and browns, gobbled up a small, beaded pheasant tail nymph. The color and fight of these stream-born trout never gets old. It was also encouraging to see skunk cabbage already sprouting in the woods. A sure sign that spring is near. 

Black Bass Spring

Editor's note: I have some talented friends. Chad is one of them. Below is the last of three guest posts for a while from my buddy east of the Big River. His writings last year (here, here and here) were well received and different from what you typically find on this blog. I hope you enjoy Chad’s work and style as much as I do. 

As long as I have fly-fished I’ve been fascinated by bass bugs.  I appreciate the form and function of them, and the artistry of the flies.  Bass bugs are purely American in history as black bass are native only to the Americas.  References to fly fishing for black bass in America dates back as far as the mid 1700s when William Bartram observed Seminole Indians dap them up on a series of hooks wrapped in deer hair and hung off the end of a cut sapling.  By the early 1900s bass bugs were produced and fished widely in the United States.  They still are.

For me, the touchstone of true spring in Northeastern Connecticut is when I can begin fishing for bass in farm ponds.  It is when I know winter is truly over and there will be no more snow.  It is the first warm spell of over a few days, and the evening has stretched out and begun to linger.  It is the sound of peep frogs, untold and unseen thousands of them, singing in the low wet places.  Among those wet places first, a new spring green emerging from the grey bracken and underbrush. 

I love the flies used to fish bass.  The insane intricacies of color that a good fly tier can meld and pack in their making, and clip so perfect to form: frog divers, mice patterns, poppers, birds even.  I love the gear used, I often use a #7 glass rod that is older than I am.  I love it that it is substantial and weighty and off the business end a short and stout leader.  Much like the fish, bass bugging is not delicate.

Farm ponds generally warm quickly.  The best early spring ponds are exposed to full sun, and are shallow.  Any bay available, but a North bay especially.  Walking the bank, amazed at the life teeming in the shallows so soon.  Young of the year fish breaking, frogs, the dark wake of a good fish pushing off in less than a foot of water.  A hunting fish.

I love the strike.  It will surprise me always, the first strike of the year, and I will generally miss the fish.  Even if that mouse looks so damn good skating on the oil slick black water with its rabbit strip tail undulating like a snake, it will take me off guard.  When the violence comes and the fish hits it.  The key is to wait on the set, and not do it like you would any trout.  I love the boiling take, when the fish porpoises onto the fly perpendicular to me, exposing its size and kicking down the back end of its feed.  The deep bend to the glass rod, head shakes and runs.  The quick fight, no quarter given, pressuring on that short stout leader freely.

You can lip a bass, and should do so with authority, especially on a good fish. They’ll shake their heads and fuss, but soon settle.  I love the feel of their course jaw on my thumb and appreciate their dark lateral lines, dual dorsal fins, and broad tails.  Their deep green, the darker their water, the deeper the green, but generally in the early spring lighter as weed growth hasn’t yet shaded their homes.  

In the spring, on those first sweet nights where it is warm until it is full dark.  Fishing through full dark.  The deep flexing glass rod, hucking that bug out and letting it sit to settle as the rings of its landing dissipate out into the evening lake.  Bringing it to life.  Stripping it to be alive on the surface of the pond.  I love when the wake appears and follows.  Quickening the pace, the implied fear in the fly.  Then, the flash of the predatory mouth.

I associate this fishing with the first campfires and sweatshirts.  The static hush of the Fenway crowd and Joe Castiglione calling for the Red Sox on WEEI, “Now here’s the set.  The pitch…….”  Windows down on the ride home, sated.  Sleeping with the windows open for the first time, waking with a rough bass thumb in the cool April morning.

Smarch

Editor's note: I think this post from my buddy Chad sums up the feelings of many anglers in the Northeast that are itching for spring. 

I didn’t even bother to change the calendar from February to March. Now six days in, and still looking at J Tomelleri’s Sockeye Salmon and its native range three thousand miles to the west of me, a pink blob running from Bearing Sea south along that long foreign coast. On this forlorn and barren coast I am socked in by three feet of snow still, and the winter lags like an illness taken deeply in the chest, frozen in deep, with roots that break apart the land in their freezing and half-thawing, make ruptures, refreeze.

It has been a hard winter here, the coldest ever month of February they say, and none can doubt it. Most water is utterly gone. All covered in snow and ice still. The winter creeping and creeping, freezing and refreezing until finally, a leak in the roof, ominous dark spot on the ceiling bearing a steady drip. 

I call a friend of a friend skilled and unemployed enough to do the job and in short order he has shoveled the roof clear of four foot of snow. This is work I could not do, having tried it weeks earlier to be unceremoniously dumped off the roof in a slide of ice and shit pinged off the rickety ladder and deposited rib down on the frozen porch. With life flashing before my eyes certainly a wise choice to pony up the cash to someone with the skills. Someone less top-heavy then I, Mike works the roof with the easy foot guise of a squirrel.  Deep gratitude I feel and the leak stops.

The sun is out on the weekend and it is time to go fishing. I do not care where and have little to no hope of catching a fish. This is how you know you fish, when you go anyway. A bluebird day, and though only just above freezing the change is inevitable and with good intentions I am convinced that the end is nigh of the cold hard season. 

The only option is a brown line that flows through a mill town. I can see it from the highway; it has open water and that is all that matters. There are no fish living there, I am convinced. If they do live though, I am sure they are too cold and sluggish to eat anything. Not essential. This is the Smarch season in Northeastern Connecticut. It is nearly the opposite of what fishing should be, wherein you value the day on not catching any fish. A good day is no fish at all, but out in the field no less.

You belly up to the bar afterwards and order up with your wind chapped face and your sore bone fingers. “How’d you make out?” the bar keep asks. You smile and shake your head slowly like you are in a beer commercial and just say in a grin “Phenomenal.”

So you enter the water in your leaky waders with a white mink Zonker and you practice. And you cast to all the likely spots, and work the visible bait in rhythmic urges downstream, quartering it against the places you would be if you were a fish and you were feeding. Quartering it where in a month or so there will be a fish feeding. An hour in you feel you are fishing well, and you slump down for a cold beer into the streamside snow.

It gives hope, the flowing water and the sun climbing high through the growing afternoon. The snow takes on that shine, the metallic luster that it gives off in its melting. The shadows of trees are blue on the snow and they cross over a tiny dark stonefly crawling on the snow.

The old timers down around Beaver Brook call them snow-flies and the hook keepers of their grey un-sanded blanks bear tiny black nymphs to imitate them. Forcing the issue through all this slow crept winter that bears down on the land, forcing the issue both the flies and us old timers. Hope flies away into the sunlight and I reach for the fly box.

Could you imagine catching even one? Probably not. But still.