A good-sized rainbow trout had moved into the eddy created by the anchored driftboat, about 20 feet downstream from where I sat in the stern. As I watched, his head twisted to the side and his mouth winked white. A minute or so later he did it again.
Idly I broke off a bit of tuna from my sandwich and dropped it into the water.
The trout moved into its path and sucked it in.
I fed that trout several bites of my sandwich. Each time he ate, he finned a couple of strokes upstream, moving closer to the source of this tasty new nourishment, until he hovered almost in the shadow of the boat.
Why not? I thought.
Moving very slowly lest I spook him, I picked up my rod, unhooked the #18 PMD dry fly from the keeper ring, and impaled a piece of tuna on the hook. I dropped it over the side. As it drifted toward the trout, a little surge of current caught the leader and jerked it sideways, and he turned away to let it pass. I stripped some line off my reel, shook some extra slack out through the guides, and tried again. The trout ignored it as it passed over his head.
So I dropped my tuna-PMD a bit farther upstream and guided it so that it drifted directly to the trout’s nose. This time he opened his mouth and ate it.
I remained sitting in the stern as I played, netted, unhooked, and released him.
“Nice one,” yelled Andy, who had turned to watch. “What’d he take?”
“Nothing you’ve got in your fly box.”
I was, I admit, a bit embarrassed. Catching trout on bait—even something as exotic as a chunk of white albacore lightly dressed with mayonnaise, salt and pepper, and ginger hackle, and impaled on a size-18 dry-fly hook tied to a 14-foot leader tapered to 6X—is generally thought to require luck and patience, not skill and knowledge. Most of us would rather be considered skillful than lucky. Bait-fishing is for barefoot boys with cane poles and worms and more time than skill—which, presumably, is why grown-ups give up dunking bait in favor of casting flies.
And yet … to catch that big rainbow, I had to locate him, avoid spooking him, and present my bait so it would drift to him in a perfectly natural manner—all of which required the same skills that fly fishermen value.
“Okay,” I said to Andy. “It was a short cast but a tricky presentation. He took a tuna fish sandwich. And I’m proud of it. You got a problem with that?”
“Nope. I think it’s kinda cool.” He grinned. “You know, even with your expensive graphite fly rod and your fancy neoprene waders, you’re still a barefoot boy at heart.”
Back when I was a barefoot boy, the only fishing outfit I owned was a hand-me-down 8-foot South Bend fly rod, a Pfleuger Medalist reel, and a kinky HDH floating line. I could cast, if that’s the word for it, anything with that rig—bass bugs, streamers, dry flies, spinners, miniature Jitterbugs. Mostly, though, I fished with worms. Trial and error taught me how to rollcast so that the worm would not come unhooked, and how to lob a bobber or split shot a considerable distance.
When I fished for trout in our lazy local brooks and streams, an unweighted worm on a fly rod usually did the job. I figured out how to flip the worm up into the head of a pool and steer it through the fish-holding lies. I intuitively understood the importance of keeping my line off the water so that the worm would tumble along with the currents. I had never heard the word “drag,” but I could have explained it to you. I watched the place where my leader entered the water, and the slightest hesitation or twitch triggered my hook-setting reflex. Sometimes it meant I’d hung up on a rock or sunken log. More often, it was a trout.
In heavy currents, it made sense to clamp a split shot or two onto my leader to get it down to where I figured the fish were lurking. I wanted to feel the lead bounce and tick off the bottom. The fish I caught that way told me when I was doing it right.
Back when I was a barefoot worm fisherman, I kept most of the trout that I caught. When I cleaned them, I liked to poke through the gunk in their digestive systems. Most of it was unidentifiable, but I always found bugs in their various stages of metamorphosis—nymphs, pupae, larvae, and adults. The scientific studies I’ve read confirm my personal, non-scientific conclusions. Aquatic insects make up about 95 percent of most trouts’ diets. The remaining 5 percent is comprised of small fish, crustaceans, and what the scientists call “other inert materials,” stuff like pebbles and twigs and cigarette butts.
I don’t recall ever finding an earthworm in the belly of a trout I caught on a worm, nor do the scientists report that earthworms are a significant part of trout menus.
And yet the history of fishing proves that trout eat worms whenever they come tumbling along—not to mention San Juan Worms (which theoretically imitate aquatic worms), Glo-Bugs (which anglers like to believe “imitate” salmon eggs, but which I’ve found effective in waters where no salmon live, and in mid-summer, when no fish of any description are spawning), and inert materials such as feathers and fur arranged on fish hooks to resemble—at least to the angler’s eye—mayfly or stone fly nymphs.
Why do trout eat earthworms—and twigs and pebbles and Glo-Bugs and tuna fish sandwiches? Why, for that matter, do they eat our clever imitations of subsurface aquatic insects? In the case of worms and tuna, perhaps it’s because they smell edible—although in neither case can the odor be familiar to the fish.
Glo-Bugs, San Juan Worms, and nymphs, we like to believe, look like actual trout food. When we catch trout on these lures, we congratulate ourselves on successfully “fooling” them by imitating what they like to eat.
When trout are feeding selectively, as they sometimes do (though probably less often than we think), it may help to imitate what they’re eating. Most of the time, though, I believe any barefoot boy who can drift a worm—or even some inert material such as a Glo-Bug or San Juan Worm—onto a trout’s nose without drag, will catch it. Trout use their mouths the way we use our hands—to feel and test and explore their world. They are always hungry and always curious, and they’ll bite down on anything that looks remotely edible.
I’m pretty sure that Bighorn rainbow had never eaten canned albacore tuna before I shared my sandwich with him. But he was curious, and it probably smelled good. So he tried it, and he liked it, and he looked for more. Still, when I impaled a piece of tuna on a hook, he refused to eat it until I managed a perfectly drag-free drift.
I suspect I could have caught him on a nymph or Glo-Bug or San Juan Worm or some other inert material, too. But I’m rather pleased that I persuaded him to eat a piece of my sandwich. It reminds me that I haven’t forgotten what I learned as a barefoot boy.
Fear of Midges
Back when we were just starting out as trout fishermen and couldn’t get enough of it, Art Currier and I would pick the first likely weekend in late March or early April to break our winter famine. We’d lash my canoe onto the roof of Art’s station wagon and head for Cape Cod, where the ice melted off the ponds several weeks earlier than on our local waters. We’d paddle around the shoreline of Scargo or Flax or Peters, trolling Mickey Finn and Dark Tiger bucktails, and we generally caught enough trout to make us happy.
If we had one of those particularly delicious, gray, misty days—a “soft” day, we called it—the wind would lie down entirely and the pond’s surface would go as flat as a black mirror. Then, almost always, the trout would start rising. Hundreds of trout. Thousands, maybe. Every fish in the pond, it seemed. It looked like hailstones were falling all over the surface. These were not the splashy, energetic rise forms we were accustomed to seeing on our New England freestone streams. They were dainty sips, trout just kissing the surface, mere pockmarks on the flat water, and the first time we saw them, we assumed they were made by chubs.
We took this phenomenon as certain evidence that our pond was full of hungry fish, and the fact that we seemed to catch way fewer of them when they were rising like this than when they weren’t didn’t discourage us. Once in a while one of them would latch onto a bucktail, but typically we had our worst luck when the fish were most act
ively and visibly feeding.
When the breeze kicked up again, our luck usually improved, so that was our strategy: Wait for some wind.
In those days, Art and I were both just starting at the bottom of our fly-fishing learning curves. We figured a pondful of feeding trout should hit any fly they saw, and when they didn’t, we shrugged, called it bad luck, and kept on trolling.
We had no first-hand experience with selectivity. It made no sense that hatchery-reared, pellet-fed brook trout would discriminate among all the edible stuff they might find in a pond. All we knew was that they ate trolled bucktails almost anytime, just like the stocked fish in our streams seemed happy to gobble any bushy dry fly that drifted over them.
Looking back, it seems stupid that we didn’t purse our lips, exchange meaningful glances, mutter “midges,” add 2 feet of 7X tippet to our leaders, and tie on some fly the size of a comma. We’d read about midges, and we knew that they were ubiquitous on our New England trout waters. If those writers were to be believed, midges were important trout food.
So why, when the pond went flat and the trout began rising, didn’t we try to figure out what they were eating? Why didn’t we lean over the gunwales of my canoe and study the water? Surely we would have seen that its surface was scummy with buggy specks, and if we’d only picked one up on a fingertip and studied it, we’d have seen that it had a simple black body and a pair of laid-back transparent wings, and we’d have concluded that this must be what all those trout had come to the top to eat, and, based on our poor success in catching them, that they had targeted midges to the exclusion of everything else, including trolled Mickey Finn bucktails.
I suppose we were arrogant in our ignorance. Maybe we were just incurious. We were certainly inexperienced, and we were suspicious of all the highfalutin theories we read in books and magazines. We scorned those writers who spouted Latin and verbally dissected insects and debated arcane details of fly color and design. We thought they gave the trout way too much credit. They seemed to want to make it all more serious and complicated than we knew it really was. Trout fishing was straightforward and simple.
We didn’t believe in midges.
So we just kept trolling.
Art and I learned from our fathers, whose own fly-fishing learning curves spanned the 1930s and ’40s, when the tiny insects that we now know trout thrive on were neither understood nor appreciated. Vincent C. Marinaro (one of those fishing writers that Art and I, regrettably, sneered at), in his important 1950 book, A Modern Dry Fly Code, wrote: “In those early days [before World War II] I could not take advantage of the marvelous small-fly fishing that prevailed on the limestone waters, simply because I did not have the tools for the job. I was frequently galled to the core when I found good trout feeding incessantly on minuscule insects for hours on end and I could not make a fair try for them because I did not have flies small enough or gut fine enough to handle them properly. The very small hooks in sizes 22, 24, and 28 and very fine gut in 6X, 7X, and 8X were not available.”
Marinaro was way more observant and persistent than most anglers, and he lived on a lush limestone meadow stream (the Letort in central Pennsylvania) that gave him an ideal trout laboratory. He virtually discovered minuscule trout food (he misspelled it “minutae”)—midges, jassids, ants, beetles, and Baetis and Trico mayflies.
Most fishermen—I include my father and most others of his generation—didn’t even notice these nearly microscopic insects, and they would have rejected their importance if they had, simply because without fine tippets and tiny hooks, the information had no utility. It was, in that respect, arcane and worthless.
Most anglers—including, belatedly, me—discovered the importance of minutiae only after we had the tools to imitate it.
My laboratory was the Swift River, a tailwater that empties the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts. The waters of the Swift run frigid year round, and its bottom is mostly sand and silt and mud, making it inhospitable to mayflies. But when I started fishing there, I was entranced by the fact that I always found large rainbows feeding off the surface. Those fish had no interest whatsoever in my usual assortment of dry flies. I just couldn’t catch them, and I was forced to look closer—closer than I’d ever bothered to look before.
I saw drifting on the Swift what Vince Marinaro saw on his Letort: ants, small beetles, and especially midges. What else, thought I, could those trout be eating?
It fascinated and obsessed me, these big fish eating such tiny bugs, and I haunted the Swift. For the first year or so I refused to give in to them entirely. The idea of using a floating fly that I couldn’t see offended me, and I doubted that it would work. So I compromised, fishing with beetles and ants in sizes-16 and -18 on 5X tippets, smaller and finer than I liked to go, and I began to catch some trout.
I was converted entirely one soft March afternoon when I found every fish in the Y Pool sipping off the surface, and I couldn’t interest a single one of them. I bent close to the water and saw midges. Really tiny black midges, barely half as long as one of my size-18 ant imitations.
On the way home I stopped at a shop and bought packets of size-24 dry-fly hooks, and that night I squinted through the magnifier on my vise and fabricated my own version of those Swift River midges: four or five fibers of black deer hair lashed down at the back, folded forward, and tied off behind the hook, with the tips cut to length and flared like legs. It was a simple—simplistic, really—fly, more suggestive than imitative. But the size and the color were about right, and to my eye it more or less resembled what I’d seen on the water. The next day, when I went back, the trout agreed. I caught half a dozen of those hefty 16- to 18-inch rainbows on flies that were utterly invisible to me.
What I’d always loved about dry-fly fishing was the visual: watching a high-floating fly drift down to where I’d seen the swirl of a rising fish, anticipating the intersection of fly and trout, then seeing the fish poke up its nose, open its mouth, and suck in the fly.
This midge business was different, and in its way, even more thrilling. Marinaro said it best: “ To see a trout rising to something invisible, to fasten a diminutive No. 22 dry fly to the gossamer point and cast that fly to the trout, judging the accuracy of the cast by following the line, to see the gentle swell of the rise again when the obscure No. 22 should have floated over the desired spot, then to tighten and discover the connection with a lunging trout is the most exotic experience that can befall a fly fisherman. Let it happen a thousand times or ten thousand times, the novelty of the event never palls, never loses that quality of breathless expectancy.”
My Love Affair with Spring Creeks
I fell instantly, passionately, and irrevocably in love on the sun-drenched summer morning more than twenty years ago when I saw my first Montana spring creek up close.
It emptied into the Yellowstone River just south of Livingston. The jagged Absaroka Mountains, still snow-capped in August, filled the sky. Warblers and finches flitted in the willows and cottonwoods that lined the banks, and swallows and waxwings swooped low over the water. Whitetail deer tiptoed down to the banks to drink. Paradise Valley, they called the area. And no wonder.
I stood knee-deep in the chilly water. It flowed slow and slick, braiding and eddying subtly around patches of green water weeds. Flotillas of Pale Morning Duns were drifting all around me. Within easy casting range, a dozen large trout snouts were lifting rhythmically to suck them in… and I couldn’t persuade a single one of them to eat my fly.
A lifetime of casting to naive hatchery trout on eastern freestone streams had not prepared me for this. This spring-creek fishing, I thought, was the Real Thing. I found it utterly addictive.
I’ve returned to Montana every summer since that day twenty-odd years ago, and I’ve always scheduled a day or two on one of the three legendary Paradise Valley spring creeks—Armstrong, DePuy, or Nelson. On a few heady occasions I’ve accepted invitations to try lightly fished creeks that flow through private ranch land.<
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Healthy spring creeks provide ideal trout habitat. Their consistent year-round temperatures encourage trout to feed and grow large through all four seasons. They are fertile, fostering lavish weed growth and heavy populations of aquatic insects and other trout forage. Spring-creek trout eat insects their whole lives. You can catch truly monster spring-creek trout on tiny dry flies.
I’ve learned that every spring creek has its own style and personality. They are big and small, wide and narrow, shallow and deep, swift and slow, straight and twisting. In some creeks, the trout are sparse and small and skittish; others harbor dense populations of snooty big ones. Each creek presents its own challenge.
I love them all.
Spring creeks and the savvy wild trout that thrive in them always test my skills. They continue to make me a better angler.
Montana trout guide Bob Bergquist estimates that about nine hundred spring creeks flow through his state. Virtually every river valley is laced with them. Montana river valleys make prime farm and ranch land. Spring creeks feed the cattle and irrigate the crops and infuse the major river systems with cold, clear water. They range in size from trickles to full-sized streams. Most of them harbor some trout.
But left to their own devices—and to the uses of ranchers and farmers—few spring creeks are worth fishing. Because they generally rise in land with little gradient, their nature is to flow straight, flat, slow, and shallow. Their bottoms become silty and produce few aquatic insects. They offer meager cover or spawning habitat for trout.
Every Day Was Special Page 7