There was no sign of rising fish, which made me think the trout were probably smarter than the four of us who had come to fish for them; the trout at least had sense enough not to thrust their noses into the cold air, which was more than we could say. Even the sagebrush on the surrounding hillsides looked brittle and frozen. But we had paid dearly for the privilege of fishing, so there was nothing left to do but try it. Mercifully, by the time we got on the water the temperature had warmed enough so that we could cast without clots of ice forming in the rod guides, although that was about the weather’s only concession.
I quickly noted my three companions were all chironomid fishermen. That can be either a positive or a pejorative term, depending on your viewpoint. The usual chironomid fishing technique involves determining the depth, either by physical measurement or use of an electronic device, then tying on a leader of sufficient length to reach within a foot or so of the bottom. A weighted chironomid pupa imitation is attached to the end of the leader tippet and a floating strike indicator is fixed to the leader butt, which is attached to a floating fly line. The angler casts the whole affair as far as it is possible to cast such a rig, sits back to wait while the fly sinks, then hunkers down to stare at the strike indicator, waiting for it to dip suddenly beneath the surface—the signal that a trout has taken the suspended imitation.
In the hands of someone who knows what he’s doing, this can be a deadly method, and it was evident my friends knew what they were doing; they were all soon playing fish. But that method of fishing never has been my cup of tea; I enjoy casting, especially to rising fish, and I like to keep moving, trying to take fish in different places or by different means. In other words, I like the exercise involved in fly fishing, and the sight of motionless, hunched-over chironomid fishermen seems the antithesis of that. They look frozen even when it’s warm. Not much exercise in that.
But to each his own. I fished in my usual way, first prospecting unsuccessfully for rising fish, then trying various fly patterns in various places, using different retrieves and fishing at different depths in hopes of finding a combination appealing to the trout. I never had a touch, while my comrades continued hooking fish steadily.
The morning passed coldly and our foursome went ashore to eat lunch. We gathered at a picnic table—an amenity thrown in by the management at no extra charge—but when we sat down I noticed all my friends were careful to keep their distance from me. I understood why; they had been watching me, knew I hadn’t hooked a fish all morning, and feared whatever ill luck I was suffering might be contagious if they got too close.
Afternoon was a repeat of morning. My companions kept catching fish on chironomid imitations and I continued catching nothing. After a couple more hours of this, I began to hear the meter running in my head; I had paid a hefty sum to fish this lake, time was running out, and my investment was running out with it.
Maybe that’s a hidden menace of private lakes: If you pay a lot to fish and catch nothing, the idea of all that money going to waste forces you to do things you wouldn’t do otherwise. That, at least, is what happened to me. Feeling the onset of desperation, I searched deep in my tackle cache and found a small package of adhesive-backed foam strike indicators. The package had never been opened, but I opened it then. Next, using my anchor rope, I measured the depth where I was fishing, tied on a leader tippet long enough to reach within a foot of the bottom, knotted a chironomid imitation to the end of the tippet, pinched one of the adhesive indicators onto the leader butt, and cast the whole arrangement as far as I could. After that I “assumed the position,” hunkering down to stare at the floating indicator. Despite the evidence all around me that the method worked, I didn’t have much confidence in the result, mainly because I’d never before tried fishing this way.
One thing I discovered early on: If you sit motionless staring at a strike indicator, it doesn’t take long for the cold to seep through multiple layers of clothing until you begin to feel it in your bones. I wondered what would happen first: Would the strike indicator disappear under the surface, or would I fall victim to hypothermia?
Suddenly the question was answered: The indicator dipped. I lifted my rod and felt the weight of a heavy fish. Grateful for the opportunity to stand up and move, I played the trout, which fought as well as it could given the frigid temperature. After it was subdued and released, I cast again, and within moments the whole process was repeated. After that I landed two more trout and missed several others before the anemic early winter sun dipped below the horizon and we quit fishing before frostbite could set in.
Those four trout were the most expensive I’ve ever caught. They also remain the only ones I’ve ever caught using that particular fishing technique.
Things went a little better when my son and I spent a couple of days fishing a different private water, my birthday gift to him. This was a very scenic lake, occupying a natural rock amphitheater carved by an ice-age flood. It was in the middle of nowhere, so isolated from civilization that a small band of wild horses had adopted it as their watering hole.
We had been told to expect rainbow up to twenty-four inches plus occasional brown trout even larger. What we found were many rainbow from sixteen to twenty inches, but nothing larger. We also caught many fingerling bass. It turned out the lake’s owner, in a colossal case of misjudgment, had planted bass in the lake because he thought the trout needed more to eat. What happened instead is what usually happens when bass are stocked on top of an existing trout population; the bass quickly overpopulated and began consuming the lake’s natural feed stocks, leaving less for the trout, and that’s why the trout’s size was decreasing.
We had a good time, but I figured the lake had only two or three years left before it would no longer be worth fishing, unless the owner figured out a way to get rid of the bass.
To my knowledge, neither of the lakes just mentioned ever has been open to the public, but I was invited to fish another that had once been a popular public fishery. I hadn’t fished it when it was open to the public but several friends had, and they were bitterly resentful when the lake’s owner closed public access and made it a pay fishery. I sympathized with their feelings and thought of refusing the invitation, but finally decided that wouldn’t change anything; it would merely deprive me of a day’s fishing. So I accepted.
The lake was at a fair elevation in the eastern foothills of the Cascades. Since I had been invited to fish, I had no control over the timing, and the date fixed for my visit seemed awfully early to me. That judgment was confirmed when I arrived at the lake and found patches of snow still visible in shaded areas around the shore. The lake itself also had just completed its spring “turnover,” leaving the water murky and full of gunk stirred up from the bottom. No insects were hatching and no fish were rising, and under the circumstances it didn’t seem likely we would see either one. The opaque water also made it impossible to see what the bottom was like or gauge the depth, so I started fishing blind.
A small, sheltered bay seemed promising, so I anchored near the mouth and started casting toward shore. I was using a large black fly, thinking it would be visible in the murky water, and after only a few casts I had a hard strike. The fish was a good one, although it didn’t jump or run very far, and I was easily able to bring it to hand, slip the barbless hook from its jaw, and watch it disappear back into the murk. I judged its weight at four pounds or more.
All I knew about the pedigree of the rainbow trout in this lake was that, like trout in most private waters, they had come from a commercial hatchery. Their ancestors undoubtedly had once been wild, but after generations in the hatchery most of the wildness had been bred out of them; they no longer fought with the violence or reckless abandon of wild trout. At least, this one hadn’t.
Neither did the others I caught that day. None was as large as the first, and some were dark with spawning colors, doubtless suffering sexual frustration from the lack of any spawning stream flowing into the lake.
Around
midafternoon I heard a laboring diesel engine and was surprised to see a hatchery truck lumbering up the road to the lake. This, it seemed, was trout-delivery day. The truck backed up to the shore and the driver got out, attached a big transparent plastic sleeve to a valve on the rear of the truck, and placed the sleeve’s other end in the lake. He opened the valve, the sleeve filled with water, and suddenly the truck was vomiting two- and three-pound rainbow trout down the sleeve into the lake. I’ve seen this quite a few times but it’s always interesting to watch. It’s also a little unsettling, because it’s a reminder that you’re witnessing the final step in an industrial process. This is not how nature intended lakes should be filled with trout.
But that’s mostly what we now have in private waters: domesticated trout for domesticated fishermen.
The wave of the future? Better get used to it.
ON THE WILD SIDE
THE WILD Steelhead Coalition is an organization whose purpose is preservation of wild native runs of steelhead, many now endangered and some, sadly, already extinct. I strongly support the coalition’s objectives, so when I was asked to speak at one of its meetings I gladly accepted the invitation.
I enjoyed the meeting, but experience as a guest speaker has taught me it’s sometimes difficult to judge how your remarks are being received by the audience, and this was one of those times; I came away unsure if I’d done very well. Several months later, however, I got the answer—an invitation to be the keynote speaker at the coalition’s annual general meeting.
On that occasion the audience and I were definitely on the same page, connected by a mutual regard for wild steelhead and a shared commitment to save those remaining. My remarks also eventually reached far beyond the listening audience; the coalition posted them on its website and later they were published in a pair of magazines circulated among fly fishers.
Looking back, I think the words I spoke that evening also might serve as an appropriate and hopeful conclusion to this book. After all, it began with a fish; it seems only fitting it should end with another.
Here’s what I had to say:
It seems only yesterday that I last spoke to this group, although it was actually nine months ago. I want to thank you for inviting me back, and I’m especially glad you invited me to join tonight’s celebration of the miracle of wild steelhead.
For that, as I perceive it, is the reason we are here. We come from many different walks of life and a great diversity of backgrounds, but a love for wild steelhead is the one thing we all have in common. It has given us this opportunity to visit with old friends, hear some outrageous fish stories, share a good dinner, try our luck in the raffle, and risk our fortunes in the auction, all to benefit the cause of preserving wild steelhead.
And that’s as it should be. But I think there’s a bit more going on here than that. The love we all share for wild steelhead is a complex and mysterious thing that defies easy explanation or analysis. After all, what else could compel us to stand for countless hours in cold rivers, often under rain, casting endlessly in the single-minded hope that perhaps the very next cast will result in the thing we most desire: the shock of a heavy strike or the thrilling sight of a graceful rise.
Not very many people understand this. To be charitable about it, most people think we’re crazy. And if you’re honest about it, you’d probably have to admit there have been times when you thought so yourself. The truth of the matter is that we don’t really understand our own behavior very well.
But I don’t think insanity is the answer. I think there are some perfectly rational reasons why wild steelhead have such a magnetic hold over us, why they command us to pursue them with dogged devotion even under the very worst of conditions. And those reasons are what I propose to talk about this evening.
Before venturing any opinions of my own, however, I thought it would be prudent to see what others have had to say about this subject, so I began with a review of the literature of steelhead and steelhead fishing. This didn’t take very long because, sadly, there aren’t many books about steelhead. In fact, if you compare what has been written about steelhead with what has been written about Atlantic salmon, you quickly find a great disparity. Why should there be such a great difference?
Well, one obvious reason is that the history of fishing for Atlantic salmon goes back much further than the history of steelhead fishing. People have been fishing for steelhead only a little more than a hundred years while the roots of Atlantic salmon fishing date back well before the founding of the republic. So the Atlantic salmon fishermen have had a lot more time to write books than we have.
Another reason is that in the early days of steelhead fishing there was great confusion over the difference between steelhead and Pacific salmon, and those who wrote about it often said they were catching salmon when actually they were probably catching steelhead.
But those aren’t the only reasons; the angling historian Paul Schullery has offered a couple of other interesting explanations. He notes that “fishing-book publishing was essentially an Eastern industry; publishers knew the Eastern market and rarely showed interest in the Western market. Something like that may be self-perpetuating; fishermen who grow up with no books about their fishing may well not learn to see fishing as a reader’s sport.”
Another reason, he says, is that “if you look at the … biographies of famous pioneer steelheaders … you’ll notice that a great many of them were blue-collar workers; this was a different social group than the one that gathered along the shores of the exclusive salmon rivers of eastern Canada, and it was a group much less likely to have the leisure and inclination to write books, especially books of gracious, companionable prose.”
I think Schullery is probably right in his assessments, which suggest that steelhead fishermen have always occupied a lower rung on the social ladder than East Coast salmon fishermen. But I don’t think we have any reason to feel badly about that; on the contrary, our western tradition of public waters has made steelhead fishing available to just about everybody, and ours has become a truly egalitarian sport—which is much more than you can say about Atlantic salmon fishing. If the price we’ve had to pay for that is fewer books about steelhead fishing, then I still believe we’ve gotten the better end of the bargain.
But let’s take a look at some of those books and see what they say about the appeal of wild steelhead. The short answer is: not much. This is especially true in the early days. Most of the first writers on the sport were preoccupied describing the appearance and habits of steelhead and their legendary fighting qualities. For example, Zane Grey, the famous western novelist, provided this description of the first steelhead he ever saw, captured by another angler on a visit to Deer Creek in 1918:
“It was a strikingly beautiful fish, graceful, symmetrical, powerfully built, with great broad tail and blunt, pugnacious nose. The faint pinkish color, almost a glow, shone from a background of silver and green.” The fish weighed only four pounds, but the man who caught it said “you never could have made me believe he didn’t weigh twice” as much.
Grey, like most other early writers, seems to have assumed the steelhead’s appearance and game qualities were the reasons why people fished for them. Neither he nor they bothered to inquire any further.
In The Western Angler, published in 1939, Roderick Haig-Brown provided an even better description of the steelhead, but his focus, too, was mainly on its appearance and habits, not on its emotional appeal to anglers.
Another Canadian writer, Francis C. Whitehouse, praised the fighting qualities of wild steelhead in his 1945 book, Sport Fishes of Western Canada. “The steelhead is an instinctive leaper, and on a fly it will put up an amazing performance,” he wrote. “The wild rushes, as if to leave the pool downstream, however, are usually ‘bluff;’ but if [the fish] actually does so, in some of our rivers, it is just too bad!”
For Whitehouse, as for other writers, the fight was the thing, and he didn’t offer any other explanation for his regard fo
r steelhead. But a year later, in 1946, Roderick Haig-Brown returned to the scene with his marvelous book, A River Never Sleeps, which almost single-handedly made up for all the previous void in steelhead literature. This book gives us more quotable passages about steelhead than I think can be found in all earlier books put together.
Here’s one of my favorites: “The steelhead, with the brightness of the sea still on him, is livest of all the river’s life. When you have made your cast for him, you are no longer a careless observer. As you mend the cast and work your fly well down to him through the cold water, your whole mind is with it, picturing its drift, guiding its swing, holding it where you know he will lie. And when the shock of his take jars through you to your forearms and you lift the rod to its bend, you know that in a moment the strength of his leaping body will shatter the water to brilliance, however dark the day.”
Nobody ever said it better. But even that vivid description begs the question: What is it, besides the way they look and the way they fight, that we love so much about wild steelhead?
John Atherton, better known as Jack, was an artist and angler who published a highly praised book called The Fly and the Fish in 1951. Atherton is remembered mostly as an East Coast angler, but he lived for a time on the Pacific Coast and devoted a chapter of his book to steelhead. And he had this to say about them: “It has always seemed to me that the best fish is the one I am fishing for at the time. But if I could invariably have my choice of locality, river and type of fishing, I am inclined to believe that my favorite would be a fresh-run steelhead in a clear, fast stream. For sheer high explosives on the rod they can hardly be surpassed, and if one eventually beaches this streamlined dynamo, it is mainly due to the grace of the good Lord and a strong wrist.”
A Fly Fisher's Sixty Seasons Page 19