All Fishermen Are Liars Page 18
On the west side of the pass, I drive through one of those soulless ski towns with a solid business plan but no character or history. I pass up a Starbucks and drive on into the ranch country along the upper Colorado River. In a blue-collar café down there, I get a cup of coffee that doesn’t cost seven dollars, doesn’t come with whipped cream and sprinkles, and isn’t served by a blond girl named Tiffany.
I posthole to the river through eighteen inches of wet snow that make the level mile feel more like six miles uphill, envying the person who went in ahead of me leaving cross-country ski tracks. The river itself is a pretty little thing sparsely bordered in cottonwood and juniper, meandering through its shallow valley between steep snowbanks like something out of Currier & Ives. I don’t carry a stream thermometer, but a finger stuck in the river begins to sting in four seconds, which puts the water temperature in the mid-thirties. I’m hoping for a midge hatch, but there are no telltale flies in the air and no rises or boils on the water. So I put together the standard Colorado winter rig—two small nymphs, a twist of weight and a chartreuse Thingamabobber—and go to work.
I run into four other fishermen that day. One says he landed two brown trout early and then nothing. The other three say they haven’t had a touch or even seen a fish all day. I say, “Yeah, me too.”
On the walk back to the pickup, I cross the tracks of a large elk herd that had passed through the previous night. There must have been close to a hundred animals. A wide swath of snow looks like it was rototilled and sprinkled with small black turds. I had a granola bar and half a bottle of water for lunch, but that was hours ago and I’ve slogged through a lot of deep snow since then. Suddenly, I’m ravenous for a medium-rare elk burger smothered in A.1. steak sauce. There’s still fifteen pounds of elk burger left from last fall’s hunt, but it’s three hours away and frozen solid, so I’ll have to settle for a Big Mac.
This isn’t the worst slump I’ve ever had. This is just the slack that comes with marginal conditions and seasonal impatience. There’s something to be said for seeing your home water in all its moods instead of just when it’s at its best—it’s the difference between being a tourist and a resident—but the old insecurities kick in anyway. Is the fishing really this slow, or am I just going through the motions without benefit of inspiration? Should I keep plugging away, or pack it in and do something else entirely, like cleaning out the garage? I assume this will pass because it always has before, but for the time being it seems permanent.
Of course, I pride myself on being a fisherman who’s not especially interested in competition—and not just because I usually lose. But then I’m also at large in the twenty-first century when it’s hard to find a fishing magazine that doesn’t have the words “catch more” and “bigger” emblazoned on the cover. So where my father would have shrugged and said the fish aren’t bitin’, I now have to suspect that I’m not deploying the proper technology. I tell myself it’s only fishing and my confidence shouldn’t be so fragile.
I call a contact out West to see how the steelheading has been. “Kind of slow,” he says, “and it’s been raining, but I’ve had a few hatchery fish and one wild hen about ten pounds. I’m hoping it’ll pick up.”
I stop in to see my injured friend. He’s making progress, but he’s still in a cast, more than a little bored and not too happy about being sidelined from the fishing. I tell him he hasn’t been missing much. He appreciates the sentiment and feels a little better, but, like any fisherman, he secretly thinks that if he’d been there he’d have caught fish. He may be right.
The next day I stop to see a boatbuilder friend who tells me the ice up in the canyon has cleared, midges are hatching and the road opened two days ago. There are flagmen and construction delays, but at least you can drive down there now. The guy has been too busy making boats to go fishing himself, but he heard this firsthand through his extensive grapevine, so it’s reliable.
Driving to the river the next morning, I remember a reviewer of sporting books saying you can work so hard at being a trout bum that your fishing becomes an example of the Puritan ethic you set out to escape in the first place. Well, maybe, but most fishermen are single-minded enough to be immune to criticism. We rarely question what we’re doing, only how we’re doing it. I remind myself of a decades-old vow to disregard the opinions of reviewers whenever I feel like it.
Two miles down the canyon I’m stopped by a flagman in front of the still-closed-for-the-season Whispering Pine Motel. I sit there long enough to think about turning off the engine to save gas, but just as I’m reaching for the key, he lets me through. I pull off at a good pool a hundred yards downstream of the roadwork to take a look at the water. There are patches of snow in the canyon and some old, dirty ice along the banks, but the river is completely open. It’s still at a low winter flow, so the long tail of the pool is glassy and I can clearly see trout rising.
I’m more excited than usual, but I make a point of rigging up slowly and methodically, cinching the boots a little too tight to allow for the laces to stretch when they get wet; stringing the rod with the fly line bent double so if I drop it, it will catch in a guide and not all snake out on the ground; stretching the memory coils out of the leader and checking it for wind knots. All the same things and always in the same order in the belief that if I get the beginning right, the part that comes next might go more smoothly.
The trout are rising to a steady hatch of midges, so I tie on a local favorite midge pattern—size 22, black—and start in the slack water in the tail of the pool. This is a cloudy but bright morning with the kind of diffuse light that at one angle makes water so transparent it’s as if it isn’t even there and at another turns the river to a sheet of pewter. In the smooth tail of the pool where I can see them clearly, I hook two small browns at the end of long, slow drifts and spook another fish I didn’t see with one of my casts. Several other trout inspect the fly but aren’t convinced. I hang an unweighted midge pupa off the dry fly on an eighteen-inch dropper, squeeze it wet and catch one of the fish that didn’t like the floating fly.
Then I work a few casts out into the faster current where I can see rises but can’t spot the fish. I miss one strike and then hook a bigger rainbow. He takes a little line and comes in stubbornly. He’s not all that much longer than the browns I’ve already landed, but he’s muscular and has a deep, hard belly, a thickly spotted deep green back and a brilliant reddish-orange lateral stripe. This river had a slump of its own years ago after a terrible flash flood, but it’s come back nicely and now has a reputation for real pretty trout and lots of them. They’re wild catch-and-release fish and no pushovers, but they’re feeding heavily now, so they’re at a disadvantage. Robert Traver once said, “Funny thing, I become a hell of a good fisherman when the trout decide to commit suicide.”
My next strike is a heavier fish. It’s a longer cast up into bumpy, chromy water where I can’t see the little fly, so I slap the water to see where it lands and then follow the drift. When I see a dark snout come up where I think the fly should be, I wait the exact half second it takes for the fish to take and turn and then set just hard enough to break the 7x tippet. I try to think of a way that this isn’t my fault, but can’t come up with anything.
I rerig with another dry fly and catch five or six more trout before the hatch goes off. The last one takes a while. He’s lying in the soft current along the far bank picking off strays, and even after I’ve worked out the drift, he doesn’t like the fly I’m using. I switch to a fly I copied from a Roy Palm pattern: just a few wraps of black thread on a size 22 hook with one turn of dun-colored soft hackle at the head. Greased lightly with fly floatant, it lies flush and messy on the surface like a crippled or stillborn midge fly. The fish picks it up on the first good drift and runs downstream, where I net him in the tail of the pool. It’s another chunky, handsome rainbow.
And that’s the end of it. I think about rigging up some nymphs and working
the deep water, but I don’t really need any more fish and feel like quitting on a high note. At this point I begin to hear the backup horn on a road grader upstream. It’s probably been there all along, but this is the first time in almost three hours that I’ve noticed it.
At the head of the canyon I drive past the shortcut over to the road home and go on into town. I stop for a cup of coffee to go and then stroll down the block to say hello to Steve at the fly shop. I’m hoping he’ll ask how I did this morning.
21
CHINOOKS
The first Chinook salmon I caught here was a twenty-five-pound buck. He made several long runs and spent quite a while bulldogging before I got him in the shallows where I could slip out of the boat onto a firm bottom to land him. A moment comes while playing a big fish when things begin to turn in your favor, but even then there’s only one way it can go right and dozens of ways it can go wrong, all of which will be your fault. So when he was finally in the net, I felt more relief than triumph.
After a number of years at sea in what Russell Chatham called “a dining room bound only by the continents,” this fish was the picture of well-fed strength and health, but although he may have left the ocean only a day or two before, he already had a faint flush of pink along his flanks and a pale bronze cast on the back reminiscent of a brown trout. That meant his metabolism had changed to the point that he would no longer feed, and after I released him, he’d live first off his fat and then his muscle as he continued upstream to spawn and die.
Anyone who’s caught and released one of these magnificent Pacific salmon should probably go up into the headwaters later to see how this ends. There will be your fish—or one just like it—now darkened to the color of a waterlogged stump, spawned out, gasping, exhausted, fining weakly in the current as he quietly falls apart. You wonder if he had any inkling of this when he swam out of the ocean shiny as a chrome bumper and horny as a billy goat. No telling. I’ve looked into the eyes of caught salmon before and what I’ve seen is not something I recognized as comprehension.
The estuary Rob Russell and I were fishing ran smack through one of those small coastal towns that have shaped their outlines and character around the mouths of rivers. In places, the bank above the high-water mark was lined with cottages, and although some were newer than others, they all shared the graying driftwood look of houses near an ocean. A few were built so low to the water it seemed like a high runoff or a good tidal surge would swamp them. In an unexpected adult moment, I caught myself wondering about the availability of flood insurance. I lived on the water myself for twenty-one years and know that to have a river for a neighbor is to have a streak of wildness in your backyard. It’s beautiful and familiar, but also as unpredictably dangerous as a half-tame mountain lion.
It’s tempting to say that everyone who lived there not only fished, but also went about it with some expectation of success. I’m sure that’s not strictly true (all towns have their misfits), but on any given day it seemed as though every able-bodied adult was out in a boat or lined up casting from the bank at the Bridge Pool. Most were fishing bait and many wore rubber gloves to protect their hands from the caustic brine commercial salmon eggs come packaged in. In one backyard a middle-aged couple was casting from the lawn while a barbeque grill smoldered on the porch and the family cat lounged nearby waiting for a fresh salmon. Even in town, everyone was dressed in rubber boots and rain slickers for the drizzly October weather and could have at least passed as a fisherman.
The Chinook run was on and the estuary was bustling with fishing boats. It looked like the kind of event that might have been dreamed up by the Chamber of Commerce. The only thing missing was a banner across Main Street reading GOOD OL’ SALMON DAZE! But as festive as it looked from a distance, the atmosphere on the water was sometimes tense as boats angled for position at the known honey holes. The boundaries of personal space were in question and the occasional cold shoulders, territorial stares and unreturned greetings were hard to miss, but there was also the tacit acknowledgment that if you were too polite or timid, you’d never get a spot to fish.
Fly fishermen don’t always fit seamlessly into this scene. Bait is the gold standard here, and some may still remember when it was assumed that you couldn’t catch Chinooks on a fly—the same thing they once said about permit. That’s long since been proved wrong, but the idea that a fly rod isn’t appropriate tackle for Chinooks hasn’t entirely died out.
For one thing, fly fishers are still referred to by some as “snaggers,” and in fact, foul-hooking can be a problem if you fish a sinking line through pods of salmon with the traditional down-and-across swing. So many have taken to anchoring fore and aft at right angles to the current, casting steeply downstream and fishing a narrow swing and retrieve. But then that upsets the natural order of boats anchored parallel to the current and can leave the impression that you’re covering more water than you deserve.
Fly fishers are also said to let their fish run too far. That would normally be your own business, but etiquette at least suggests that when a hooked fish runs in your direction you should raise your anchor to avoid fouling the line. When a salmon is attached to a fly rod, some still weigh anchor and move as a matter of course, others do it grudgingly—complete with theatrical eye-rolling—and still others pointedly stay put believing that if you’d just fish the way you’re supposed to, you could winch that sucker in without inconveniencing your neighbors. These are the people who think those of us who fish for Chinooks with a fly rod are out to prove something—which of course we are.
Rob negotiates all this deftly. For one thing, his credentials as a local fisherman are impeccable. He’s fished here for years and he guided both bait and fly fishermen for a decade, so he’s known to some of these guys personally and to others by reputation. For another, he shoulders his way in with the aggressive neighborliness of a door-to-door salesman, cheerfully refusing to take no for an answer.
This kind of fishing revolves around the tides. There are no sure things, but as a rule of thumb, dark salmon bite best on a falling and low tide while bright fish bite on the rising tide they came in on from the sea—when they bite at all. Fish roll off and on throughout the day, but there’s often more activity on a high tide as fresh salmon jostle around in the holding water with the fish that are already there. Maybe they bite as a way of establishing territory, or out of habit, or nervousness, or curiosity. Some takes seem to be no more than quizzical nudges and can turn out to be either a twenty-pound salmon or a four-inch sculpin known as a “pogie.” Other hits seem downright murderous.
Everyone has a working theory about when, why and how salmon bite—factoring in things like river flow, wind direction, rainfall, cloud cover, barometric pressure and such—while at the same time allowing that migratory fish often respond to signals that mere humans can’t detect or understand. In the end, these estimations are largely psychological devices designed to give shape to your enthusiasm even as real life does its best to intrude. Rob said he once e-mailed a friend telling him when to be there to catch the tide. The friend e-mailed back, “I’ll meet you at the boat ramp as soon as I get through with marriage counseling.”
But theories or not, the tactics are invariably the same: locate a spot where salmon congregate and keep a hook in the water. If you were unfamiliar with the estuary, the most dependable holding water would be easy to find. It’s where all the boats are anchored.
Even if you’ve seen it before, this business of tides takes some getting used to. On a low tide the current runs downstream to the sea and it’s fresh water. As the tide turns, the current slows, stalls and then begins to flow in the opposite direction. If you were to taste the water then, it would be brackish or salty and as you stare distractedly at your rod tip held close to the water, a jellyfish might swim by. The word “estuary” is defined either as a place where a river meets the sea or where the sea meets a river, but the exact point where that happens ch
anges from minute to minute. This is disorienting to those of us from the Colorado Rockies, where, whatever else happens, water always flows downhill.
And there are the seals. They sometimes come far upriver following the salmon and reveal themselves with wakes reminiscent of nuclear submarines or when they pop their heads above the surface to take a breath and look around. Some say they put off the fishing and others say they just reveal the presence of salmon. I don’t have a firm opinion, but several times I saw seals blast through a pod of salmon, only to have the fish start rolling again ten minutes later. The first time I saw a seal in a salmon river was just upstream from Chiginagak Bay on the Alaska Peninsula. I mistook the bobbing black head for a Labrador retriever and asked the guy next to me, “Whose dog is that?”
Salmon fishing would bore the pants off a normal American with an attention span conditioned by television. Of course, there’s the initial strategy of deciding on your spot and the little drama of getting it. To beat the rush, perhaps you settle on known prime water and show up an hour early for the tide. That can work, but it’s not an original idea and there might well be five boats ahead of you that showed up even earlier. So maybe you crowd in around the edges or, if you’re with someone like Rob who knows the estuary better than most, you try an obscure tub that’s small, won’t hold a lot of salmon and is productive only under certain conditions of time, tide and weather, but that you’ll have to yourself.
Then you choose a sink tip to fit the depth and current speed and decide on a fly. If you’ve recently caught a fish or had a take on something, you stick with it. Otherwise you open the yellow plastic boat box and gaze at the rows of mostly medium-sized, predominantly orange or pink long-tailed Comet variations. If a nonangler were to ask how you make your decision, you wouldn’t know what to say, but intuition shouldn’t be discounted. I’ve seen lots of sea-run fish caught on flies a fisherman held up and said, “Damn it, I just like the looks of this.”