Every Day Was Special

by William G. Tapply

  “About average,” said Elliot. “You know.” He grinned. “Typically awesome.”

  “PMDs came off every morning around eleven?” I said.

  They both nodded.

  “Bank sippers in the afternoon, and then the sulfurs started popping toward dark, huh?”

  “Just like you remember it,” said Andy.

  “They were hard to catch,” I said, “but not impossible, right? I mean, it was all about skill, not luck. Long fine tippets, careful drag-free drifts, a little experimenting to find the right fly …”

  “Yep,” said Andy. “You had to do it all right. If you did, they’d eat. If you didn’t, they’d give you the fin.”

  “Fish mostly thirteen or fourteen to—what, about sixteen inches? A few a little bigger than that?”

  “I busted one off in the weeds, had to’ve been nineteen or twenty,” said Elliot.

  “Right,” I said. “Usually one of us hooks a big one. We hardly ever land it, though. So how was the weather?”

  Andy shrugged. “Typical. Bright sunny skies, temperatures in the nineties, but dry, you know, so it didn’t feel hot.”

  “At least one afternoon thunderstorm,” I said. “Double rainbow over the snow-capped Absarokas in that amazing late light. You scrambled for your cameras, but the pictures never do justice to it.”

  They both smiled and nodded.

  “So did you try any new restaurants?”

  “Nothing wrong with the old ones,” said Elliot. “Inch-thick rib-eyes so big you can’t find your plate, those great local microbrews.”

  “I remember,” I said. “So you guys are saying this trip was pretty much like all our other trips. Great fishing, great weather, great food.”

  Andy nodded. “Just your average Montana spring-creek angling experience.”

  “See?” said Elliot. “You didn’t miss a thing.”

  It’s statistically predictable that most of our fishing days would fall into some kind of “average” range. We find the water level and temperature and clarity about average for that time of year. We catch an average number of fish, encounter an average number of fish that we can’t catch, experience average weather, identify the expected aquatic insects hatching in about average numbers, share the water with an average number of other anglers, spot an average number of minks and herons and deer.

  Unless you fish only a few times a year, pretty soon the specific memories of any particular typical day on the water begin to blur and mingle with all the other more-or-less average days until you’re left with a fuzzy kind of happy feeling about fishing in general. The accumulation of all those average days defines our generalized ideas of the pleasures of fishing.

  It’s the aberrant, non-average times that provide us with our most vivid, specific memories, whether it’s catching the biggest, or the most trout of our life, getting skunked in a drenching rainstorm, falling out of the boat, or going head-to-antlers with a bull moose who’s determined to cross the river right where we’re wading.

  What’s “average,” of course, is relative to our expectations, which we subconsciously—or maybe consciously—adjust for the water where we’re fishing, the time of year, the weather forecasts, and the reports from the locals.

  Average for you is different from average for me. You’ve got your own catalog of memories and expectations.

  My friends and I travel to Montana every July because an average day on a Paradise Valley spring creek would be the best day of fishing in the history of earth on one of our New England freestoners.

  Every year after I get back from Montana, you’d think I’d be sated for a while. After all, I just had five 12-hour days of intense and wonderful—spring-creek average—dry-fly fishing for large trout in the most beautiful river valley in North America. I ate rare Montana beef and sipped local beers with two of my best friends. I focused my thoughts on bugs and trout and flies and tippets, and pretty soon the worries and stresses of business and money and family and health sifted out of my mind.

  You’d think I had enough fishing to last me a while.

  But it doesn’t work that way. Instead, I barely pull into my driveway before I feel an oddly powerful urge to wade one of my local New Hampshire freestone trout streams. Something about rediscovering my roots, maybe, or restoring my perspective. I tie on a tan Elk Hair Caddis or a size-14 Adams and I run it through the pools and riffles, and on a typical evening I’ll catch four or five 10- or 11-inch brown trout and miss the quick spurting strikes of half a dozen others, and by the time I reel up and start back for my car, I’ll feel that I’ve reestablished a more comfortable concept of “average” for myself than the bloated standards I brought home from Montana.

  Several years ago I caught a 16-inch rainbow from this little New Hampshire stream. A veritable trophy, and I still remember every detail of it. Here in New England, that was hardly an average evening of small-stream fishing, although measured against the Montana spring-creek scale, that rainbow would be considered a “nice” but unremarkable—and ultimately forgettable—fish.

  I know a number of enthusiastic anglers who took up fly fishing as middle-aged adults. They learned to cast by taking classes at Orvis or L. L. Bean, and their first experiences on the water came in places like the Yellowstone or the Battenkill with an experienced guide at their elbow. When they decided they were hooked, they booked trips to Alaska and New Zealand and Patagonia.

  These guys don’t fish streams like my unremarkable little New Hampshire freestoner. Their idea of “average” is different from mine—but anyway, as they keep telling me, they have no interest in average fishing. They seek the best. They are compelled to keep outdoing themselves—and, I suspect, each other.

  If I had the time and money to travel the world questing for the best fishing it has to offer, maybe I’d look at it differently, but I do sometimes find myself feeling sorry for these guys who don’t really understand what “average” means and wouldn’t know how to have fun flicking an Elk Hair Caddis onto the currents of a little New Hampshire stream where a 12-incher is considered a pretty nice fish.

  Of course, if you look at it another way, there’s no such thing as an average day of fishing. Every hour on the water, every mayfly that hatches, every fish you raise, every mink or kingfisher you see, is—or should be—a gift that deserves to be appreciated and remembered specifically, not just as blurry parts of that fuzzy happy-fishing feeling.

  If you pay attention, there’s always something that makes each day on the water special, that disqualifies it from being “average.”

  On the other hand, some days would be better if they remained average. I’m thinking of a particular Thursday last May when Marshall Dickman and I decided to meet at the Farmington River in Connecticut. We knew the Hendricksons had come and gone and the sulfurs were yet to arrive, but the forecast was for a pleasantly warm, sunny spring day, and the river was always full of fish, and we were pretty sure we’d find some of them rising in the long pool downstream from the highway bridge. Farmington brown trout were always picky to the point of aggravating, but we guessed we’d catch a few of them. We usually did. Besides, Marshall and I would have each other’s company. That was always good.

  In other words, we were looking forward to an average day on a river that was no stranger to us. We knew what to expect, and that’s what lured us there.

  Mid-afternoon found us sitting on the bank watching the water go by and trying to decide whether we should wait out the usual four o’clock doldrums, when the trout took their siestas, and hope for an evening rise, or climb into our cars and head our separate ways home.

  We decided to postpone the decision by running nymphs through the long riffle under the bridge.

  So we changed over to bead heads under strike indicators, and not surprisingly, we began to pick up an occasional fish.

  Not surprisingly, also, I’d worked less than half of the riffle when I busted off my whole setup on an underwater rock. So I stripped in, held the end
of my leader in my mouth, tucked my rod under my arm, and went prowling through the pockets of my vest.

  When I went to tie on a new length of tippet, the leader I was holding in my mouth seemed to have stuck between my teeth. I gave it a tug… and a hunk of bridgework popped out of my mouth, plopped into the riffle, and disappeared into the depths of the downstream pool.

  What it cost me to replace that dental bridge would easily finance my decidedly above-average dream trip to New Zealand’s South Island.

  That afternoon of trout fishing on the Farmington with Marshall last May could never be considered average. It was the most expensive angling experience in my life.

  Same Time Next Year

  It was shortly after the arrival of the New Year—the snow drifts around the north side of my barn stood 8 feet deep, and the red stuff in the thermometer outside my kitchen window was barely half an inch tall—when I got an e-mail from Skip Rood. In the “subject” space he had written “Second Annual Big Lake Smallmouth Trip,” and it had been copied to Art Currier. It was just what I needed.

  This is what Skip wrote:

  Hey Bill and Art—Time to start thinking about our second annual excursion to the Big Lake. It’s never too early to get these things etched in stone. I’m looking at sometime the first week in June, which I think we’ve learned is when the smallmouths should be onshore and vulnerable to a well-cast Clouser or, even better, if we’re lucky, a well-burbled Tap’s Deer Hair Bug. You guys check your calendars so we can zero in on a date and also a rain date. I suggest Tuesday of that week, with Wednesday for backup, but we can do whatever works for you. Meanwhile, tie a bunch of flies, oil your reels, retie your leaders. I’ll be tinkering with the motor and scraping the rust off the hull of the Old Boat.

  The previous year—our First Annual Big Lake Smallmouth Trip, I guess we can now call it, though we didn’t call it that at the time—we’d launched Skip’s ancient aluminum rowboat in the last week of May. Too early, as it turned out. Spawning urges had not yet impelled the smallmouth bass to move into the shallow water. Along the drop-offs in the vodka-clear lake water, when the light was right, we could see the big females cruising near the bottom in 10 or 12 feet of water—too deep for practical fly fishing. We figured that in a week or so we’d find them in the shallower water along the boulder-strewn shorelines and over the gravel bars. We nailed a few of the smaller males who’d already ventured into spawning-bed territory. But the fishing was way slower than we all remembered it from the Old Days.

  Actually, for me, this wouldn’t be the second annual Big Lake smallmouth adventure. More like the twentieth or twenty-fifth, except there was a twenty-year gap in the middle.

  When my parents retired over forty years ago, they chose a little house on a hillside in central New Hampshire for its proximity to excellent grouse and woodcock habitat, and especially for the deeded access to a sand beach on the Big Lake, where grandkids could swim and womenfolk could sunbathe, and the fly fishers in the family could launch a square-ended canoe.

  In those days, the Big Lake saw more fishing activity when it was sheeted with ice than after ice-out. Villages of ice-fishing shanties sprang up when the ice was thick enough (and sometimes before— and after—that). Snowmobiles zoomed around, liquor was drunk, and lake trout, cusk, and the occasional landlocked salmon came up through the ice.

  During the part of the season reserved for sensible people— from ice-out in April until the end of September—you’d see a few anglers trolling along the drop-offs for salmon. They used fly rods in the spring and lead-core lines in the summer. The Big Lake held a healthy population of landlocked salmon. Mostly, though, the lake was a playground for water skiers and speed boaters.

  Access to a convenient launch site appealed to my father because he happened to know that the Big Lake was just about the best smallmouth-bass lake in New England, and he’d fished most of them at one time or another.

  Best of all, nobody fished the lake for bass. We had it all to ourselves, and we hoarded our secret.

  So driving from my home in Massachusetts to my parents’ house in central New Hampshire and spending the weekend that followed Memorial Day on the lake with my father in his canoe became an Annual Trip. We loaded his 17-foot Grumman with two fly rods, one box of streamers and one of deer hair poppers, and ourselves, and we putted along the Girl Scout camp shoreline. We circled the islands, Dad in the stern steering the little 2-horse Evinrude and trolling a debarbed Edson Dark Tiger bucktail, and me up front, raking the shoreline with one of his deer hair bugs.

  We never counted our catch or measured or weighed the fish. But my mother, who was a big fan of fishing, from a spectator’s point of view, demanded a full report, and she insisted on precise numbers. So at the end of an afternoon on the lake, Dad would say, “We’ve got to submit a report to your mother. What do you think?”

  I’d shrug. We always caught a lot of bass. “Three dozen, maybe? Four?”

  “She’ll suspect we’re guessing if we give her an even number,” he’d say. “How’s forty-three sound to you?”

  “Actually, that sounds very close to the truth,” I’d say. “What about size? That was a nice fish you picked up off that point.”

  “A four-pounder,” he said. “Let’s call it three pounds, fourteen ounces.”

  And so it went, year after year, always on that same first weekend in June, for close to twenty years. I got married and had children, and when they were old enough, they joined me and my father in the canoe. Three generations of us. The first fish each of my three kids caught was a Big Lake smallmouth bass on a Dark Tiger trolled from Grandpa’s canoe.

  My parents grew comfortably older in their house on the hillside, the Big Lake kept producing world-class smallmouth bass fishing, and we never saw anyone else fishing there for them. It was, for me, an Annual Trip that I could count on.

  Nothing is forever, of course. There came the day when Dad and I carefully fished one of our favorite shorelines and elicited just a few half-hearted swirls. It was puzzling. We could see the saucer-shaped spawning beds. It was prime time.

  When we got near the Girl Scout camp shoreline, we saw that two boats were working it. They were sleek craft, built for speed, with two men perched on stools in each of them. They were peppering the shoreline with spinning lures.

  There were more bass boats circling our favorite islands and other shorelines that day. We figured that the areas where we saw no boats had already been raked with treble hooks.

  This was our first encounter with a bass tournament.

  We turned around, beached the canoe, and went trout fishing.

  That night Dad said, “No more. I’m not competing with those guys. It was good while it lasted. It’s never going to be the same.” And that was the end of our Annual Big Lake Smallmouth Trip.

  Almost twenty years passed before Skip talked me into giving the Big Lake another try.

  If this excursion to the Big Lake with Skip and Art was to become a true Annual Trip, we’d have to zero in on a regular date for it—say, the first Tuesday in June—and mark it on our calendars, not just for the forthcoming season, but for all the seasons into the foreseeable future.

  I love spontaneous excursions, those times when the air smells right and the urge to fish is irresistible no matter what other plans you might’ve had for the day. And one-time-only adventures—trips to far-flung, exotic destinations such as (for me) Patagonia and Alaska, Labrador and Belize—are delicious to plan beforehand and to savor for years afterward.

  Annual Trips are special because, well, they are annual. They come around at the same time every year. You can count on them, anticipate them, prepare for them. Fishing the same waters at the same time each year, you collect memories and accumulate wisdom. You have an idea of what kind of weather to expect, where the fish might be found, what they might be eating. Your memories of the red-letter days spice up your expectations. In the months before the Annual Trip, you tie the flies that you’ve
learned you’ll need, and you invent some new ones based on memories and theories from previous successes and failures.

  One of the great advantages of establishing Annual Trips, according to Skip, is that they preempt non-fishing spouses from questioning, “Another fishing trip?” Get the dates written down in the winter. Mention the annual event in casual conversation. Weave it into the fabric of your life, like birthdays and Mother’s Day.

  The second Tuesday in June, as Skip had predicted, proved to be Prime Time for Big Lake smallmouths. The fish were in the shallows, eager to slash at our streamers and deer hair poppers, and although we didn’t count, if I’d had to submit an honest report to my mother, I would’ve said, “The three of us caught thirty-four bass. The biggest was three pounds, one ounce.”

  No, it wasn’t the old days. The fishing was slower, and the fish ran smaller, and we did encounter three or four bass boats. But it was an excellent day on the water with old friends.

  After we hauled the Old Boat out at the launch and prepared to climb into our separate vehicles, Skip said, “Next year, same time, same place, right?”

  Art nodded. “Our Third Annual Big Lake Smallmouth Trip. You bet.”

  “Etch it in stone,” I said.

  Counting Coup

  The first tarpon I ever cast to inhaled my fly, and when I slammed the hook into its jaw, it launched itself into the air in one of those breathtaking tarpon leaps you see in photos and believe must have been staged. It exploded from the sea like a 5-foot missile, shaking its tail and rattling its gills. Seven times it leapt, with barely a pause between jumps. It came out of the water so close to the boat that I imagined I could read the offended dignity in its big round eye. I swear it looked straight into my soul. Since I had little—okay, none whatsoever—experience in fighting 80-pound fish on the fly rod, when my tarpon decided to put distance between us, I passively held onto my rod and let it run against the drag of the reel. When my line had disappeared into the distance along with about 50 yards of backing, I could feel the big fish slogging around shaking its head, and all I could do was hold on.