Trout Eyes

by William G. Tapply

  In the dark, you learn to judge the size of a fish by the timbre and volume of the slosh it makes when you first hook it. On our second night my partner Pat, standing 30 yards downstream from me, landed browns of 25 and 29 inches in rapid succession. The second fish, he estimated, weighed about 12 pounds. I heard the sloshes his trout made. I believe I hooked a couple that big.

  * * *

  The water levels in the Norfork vary dramatically. The flows are unpredictable and at the whim of the Corps, but generally speaking, when Norfork Lake is high (as it usually is in the spring and early summer), the times of high water are more frequent and longer-lasting.

  When both gates are closed, the river resembles a placid spring creek. It flows low and crystal clear, and you can navigate all of it in waders. There are riffles, runs, and pools, and everywhere sight-fishing opportunities for nymphing trout. Mayflies, midges, and caddisflies hatch on low water, offering the best chance for hatch-matching dry-fly fishing.

  Even when the Corps is running a lot of water, they generally shut it down at night. Swinging streamers and wet flies through low-water currents at night is fun and deadly. At daybreak the trout become active on midges, and it’s worth switching to a sight-fishing setup.

  They blow a siren to announce the opening of a gate and the release of water from the dam. Don’t hesitate. Get the hell out of there promptly. In a matter of minutes the gentle little Norfork Tailwater is transformed into a big brawling river. On high water it looks daunting and unfishable, but, in fact, the fishing can be terrific then.

  John Gulley has developed a lethal method for catching the big fish that rub their bellies on the riverbottom in high water. You brace yourself in the bow of his specially-designed motorized Norfork boat. You’re rigged with a San Juan Worm or a Glo Bug, a split-shot the size of a mothball six inches up the leader, a bulky strike indicator ten feet up from the fly, and a 6- or 7- weight rod. Heave it (you don’t really cast this rig) up into the current seams and through the runs and along the edges of the sunken grass beds, while John maneuvers the boat to maximize your drift. Mend constantly and, when the indicator darts under, as it will frequently, set the hook with a sharp sideways jerk.

  When only one gate is open and the water isn’t quite so high, muddlers and woolly buggers on sinking lines, and even floating cranefly imitations, will take some of those big fish. Cast toward the banks, along current seams, and over grass beds.

  * * *

  It’s tantalizing to know that on any given cast you might catch a 12-incher or a 12-pounder. The big ones are there all year, but you don’t have to be a big-trout fanatic to enjoy excellent year-round fishing on the Norfork. The river is stocked frequently, and there are always loads of fish in the 13- to 19-inch range.

  Winter: Snow and freezing temperatures are unusual in the Ozarks. Most days you can fish without discomfort, and in the winter the river runs low for long periods of time. Midges hatch every day, offering excellent sight fishing with larva and pupa imitations and sometimes dry flies. Norfork trout feed on sowbugs and scuds year round. On the right kind of day, you’ll find superior dry-fly fishing to a blue-winged olive hatch.

  Spring: In March caddisflies begin to show up—first blacks and olives, and toward April, green and tan bugs—along with comfortable fishing temperatures. The BWOs and midges continue to hatch, and sowbugs and scuds remain important. In May and June come excellent mayfly hatches—sulfurs (sizes 16 and 18) and pale morning duns (size 20).

  Summer: The high July and August temperatures in the Ozarks, coupled with oppressive humidity, often make daytime fishing on the Norfork uncomfortable. Then it’s time to go night fishing—always with a local angler or guide who’s familiar with the river and its trout as well as the whims of the Army Corps. Big tailwater trout feed day and night, but in the summer they are particularly active after dark on low water. Local nightfishing specialists look for overcast. They stay home on bright moonlit summer nights.

  Autumn: Tourists come to the Ozarks in the fall just to view the spectacular foliage. Fishermen come to the Norfork to catch aggressive, spawn-minded brown trout. Sight fishing with nymphs on low water remains productive, but in the fall faststripped streamers work well under all conditions. The gorgeous foliage and the comfortable daytime temperatures are a bonus.

  * * *

  I was embarrassed to tell my guides and the other local folks I met in Norfork, Arkansas that I knew very little about the Norfork Tailwater. But they didn’t seem surprised. The big White, half a mile wide and a hundred miles long, and the nearby Little Red, where the current world-record brown trout was taken, get most of the publicity.

  The Norfork Tailwater is only 4½ miles long, and even under a full head of water, it’s barely fifty yards across. But it is perhaps the most interesting trout river I have ever fished. Its face changes constantly—high to low water, high to low light, day to night, season to season. It is loaded with trout, and especially with large trout. The current state record brook trout, a 5- pounder, was taken from the Norfork in 2002. No one would be surprised if the next world-record brown trout lives there.

  And there are all those 10-plus pounders sloshing around out there. I can still hear them.

  20

  Trout in the Land of the Big Feet

  On the morning of our fourth day in Patagonia, we tugged on our waders and packed our gear for a forced march to the other end of the big lago, where we hoped to find some trout and a little shelter from the wind.

  We knew the trout would be there, but the prospect of escaping the wind did not seem promising. Whitecaps were rolling across Lago Trolope. Now and then a gust of that legendary Patagonian gale would lift clouds of spindrift off the surface. This was the wind that had caused Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s single engine plane to fly backward. The British travel writer Bruce Chatwin described it as “stripping men to the raw.” He meant laying bare their souls, but it was also possible to imagine this wind peeling off a man’s skin.

  Wind, of course, is the big enemy of fly fishermen everywhere, but after a few days in Patagonia, we’d begun to conjure with it. It was a constant, unrelenting variable, and you just dealt with it. You looked for a little lee. You put the wind at your back. You kept your backcast low and your hat in your pocket, and you cupped your flybox against your chest when you opened it the way you’d protect a match to light a cigarette.

  There was no evidence that the wind bothered the trout.

  We were hoping for some dry-fly action. There were flats at the far end of the lake. At mid-day in the late summer, according to Martin, mayflies sometimes hatched off those flats and, when they did, if they weren’t blown away first, big browns and rainbows cruised around and gobbled them off the surface.

  We clambered up and down hills and over lava rock, we slogged through mud, and we detoured around clumps of scrubby jarilla bushes. It was a muy grand lago. A long hike in waders.

  A few miles to our west, so close in that vast empty landscape that you felt you could reach over and touch them, the Andes that demarcate the Argentine-Chilean border jutted up suddenly from the plains like the jagged spine of some halfburied prehistoric skeleton. A rumbling snow-streaked volcano loomed over the head of the lake. Off to the east, the windswept desert rolled away to a horizon made blurry by clouds of windblown dust.

  In Patagonia, you don’t worry about fishing pressure. You worry about disappearing. Whether you’re standing in a river or hiking around a lake, the landscape has a way of reminding you how far from home you are, how puny, how insignificant, how isolated. It makes you want to hug your friends and stick close to your guide. The writer Nicholas Shakespeare said, “Travelers from Darwin onward have noted how this bleakness seizes the imagination. Patagonia’s nothingness forces the mind in on itself.”

  Everything in Patagonia seems outsized. When Magellan explored the region in 1520, he reported that the typical native person was “so tall that we reached only to his waist,” and so he called the
region Patagoni—“Land of the big feet.”

  High above us, three condors were circling on their ten-foot wingspans. I told Martin they probably had their eye on us.

  “Condors are no worry, man, as long as you stay alive.” He pointed down at the mud. “But watch out for Senor Puma.”

  I squatted down and examined the paw prints. They were the size of my big-arbor fly reel, bigger than life, like the condors and everything else in Patagonia.

  * * *

  Lago Trolope forms the headwaters of Rio Trolope, an intimate trout river by Argentine standards that in many places reminded me of my beloved Paradise Valley spring creeks. R. Trolope meanders through private ranchland for about fifteen miles, opening in two places into lagoons before joining R. Agrio, a pretty river that’s sterile and fishless due to centuries of sulfurous eruptions from the still-active Copahue volcano. At the little bed-and-breakfast in the village of Caviahue, where we made our headquarters, the rumbling of the volcano was a constant that made our sleep uneasy the first night, but thereafter faded into the background.

  The five of us—four Boston shrinks and one New Hampshire ne’r-do-well—had been lured to this northwestern corner of Argentine Patagonia by the opportunity to cast flies into a virtually virgin trout river. According to Martin Carranza, our guide and outfitter, the Trolope had only been “discovered” a few years earlier, when an off-course Andes skier reported spotting this delicious-looking stream to his friend Gustavo Southart. Gustavo, a trout-fishing enthusiast and all-round competent person (Martin calls him “Chris” after Christopher Reeve, whom Gustavo resembles both in appearance and in his Superman conditioning and all-round competence), got permission from the rancher, who owns all of the land surrounding the lake and the river, then fished its entire length.

  The river, Gustavo found, held a healthy population of good-sized trout. Mostly rainbows, but plenty of browns, and the occasional brookie, too. Some of the browns were very large.

  Gustavo shared his find with his friend Martin, who bargained with the rancher for exclusive guiding rights on the Trolope.

  We were just the third party to fish there with Martin and Gustavo.

  With people, virginity is an either-or proposition. But with trout rivers, it doesn’t get much closer to virginal than that.

  * * *

  We left snowy Boston at two on a Friday afternoon in the first week of March—dead winter still in New England—and 24 hours later we were in Patagonia. It was a complicated itinerary, changing planes in Miami, a nine-hour overnight flight to Buenos Aires, a headlong taxi ride to catch another flight from a different airport on the other side of the city, two more hours in the air, then a half-hour’s drive to Junin de los Andes, our first destination in Patagonia.

  Flowers were blooming. Birds were singing. It was summertime in the southern hemisphere.

  Junin de los Andes is known and famed for its nearby trout rivers—Rio Chimehuin, R. Malleo, R. Alumine, R. Collon Cura. Miles and miles of freestone trout water so pure you can drink it. The walls of the little inn where we stayed were plastered with photographs of both famous and anonymous anglers hoisting the 20- and 30-pound trout that they’d taken from these waters. I recognized Joe Brooks and Al McClane.

  Jet-lagged and sleep-deprived, we fished the Malleo, the smallest and most intimate of the area rivers, that first afternoon. I wandered upstream by myself and stumbled upon a flat pool where some fish were rising, and once I figured out that trout are everywhere trout and don’t feel obligated to eat the first thing you throw at them no matter how far you might have traveled to get there, I caught a few. They were fat, healthy rainbows ranging from a foot to about 17 inches long.

  We fished til dark, drove back to the inn, and walked to a nearby restaurant, where I made several discoveries:

  1. If you can’t speak Spanish, no matter how clever you are with your hands, you cannot communicate with Argentinians outside of Buenos Aires. I depended on Martin and Gustavo to translate for me and quickly learned how to order what for me are the restaurant essentials—grand cafe solo (large coffee without milk) and agua sin gas (non-carbonated water). All the rest remained a mystery.

  2. In Buenos Aires restaurants, the steaks are thick, juicy and tender. In the Patagonian villages, the beef comes overcooked, unchewable, and tasteless. I’d looked forward to Argentinian beef. It was my biggest—my only—disappointment.

  3. The local wines, on the other hand, lived up to their billing.

  4. When in doubt, order Parrilladas, an Argentinian mixed grill consisting of hunks of goat meat, lamb, pollo, various sausages, and, yes beef. A big grill mounded with charcoal-broiled meats is placed in the middle of your table, enough for seven hungry men. Everybody helps himself. The goat was pretty good.

  5. Patagonian breakfasts consist of juice and coffee and a variety of breads and buns and scones with marmalade and jam. Not an egg or a rasher of bacon in sight.

  6. In Patagonia, no merchant accepts American money. Most towns have outdoor ATM machines that dispense pesos from U.S. bank cards. The exchange rate was about three pesos to the dollar. Dinner at a restaurant—salad, entree, coffee, dessert—cost about 20 pesos.

  7. The local people are uniformly friendly and open, and if you can say hola, buenas dias, por favor, and gracias, no matter how amusing your accent, they will smile and try to help you.

  8. You can arrange with your cell-phone company for service from Argentina, but you’ll pay several dollars for every minute, even when your call doesn’t go through. Public phone service, on the other hand, is a thriving business in the Patagonian villages. Go to one of the little storefronts, sign up for a booth, dial 001 and the number, and you can talk to New Hampshire for ten minutes for about three pesos.

  * * *

  On our second morning in Patagonia we drove northwest from Junin de los Andes to Caviahue, our headquarters for fishing Rio Trolope. Five hours across the Patagonian desert, and except for a lone gaucho herding a flock of sheep alongside the road and three scattered, sleepy villages, the landscape was empty—just flat basalt plains and distant mountains punctuated with mesas and buttes and arroyos and a few cottonwood-lined streams. Our first long view of Patagonia. Awesome, beautiful, desolate, unforgiving. Seeing it forced me to imagine how the earliest settlers might have felt when they rolled onto the endless plains of the American West with the purple Rockies rising on the faraway horizon.

  We settled into our little Caviahue bed-and-breakfast in the shadow of the rumbling volcano, then drove to the ranch for our first look at Rio Trolope. We hiked upstream and waded our way back down. We threw streamers on 6-weight rods and sink-tip lines and hit fish in all the likely places—current seams, eddies, pools, brush-lined cut banks. They ran from about 14 to 20 inches, mostly rainbows. I rolled a brown in a bend pool that stopped my breath. He showed me a broad buttery flank that reminded me of the photos on the wall at the inn.

  Andy hooked one that jumped several time before it came unbuttoned. Five or 6 pounds, we guessed.

  The upper section was classic pool-riffle-run water. It twisted through the low hills and showed a different face at every turn. As the sun sank and we worked our way back to where the truck was parked, the river flattened out and became distinctly spring-creeky—slow, flat, and deep.

  Here and there a fish rose to some unfamiliar sparsely hatching mayfly. “Gray All-Day Duns,” Martin called them with a smile. I couldn’t identify them, either, but an Adams or a bluewing olive imitation did the job. He said this mystery mayfly hatched intermittently throughout the late summer (February and March).

  The moment the sun sank behind the Andes, the air temperature plummeted. But the wind persisted. This was Patagonia in late summer. It didn’t stop the fish from feeding, and it didn’t stop us from trying to catch them, until it was too dark to change flies.

  We explored other sections of the fifteen miles of R. Trolope during the three days we were there. We found the greatest concentrations of
trout in those long slow pools where the reedlined banks were high and the water ran deep. We had most of our success twitching cone-head woolly buggers and bunny flies and Gartside soft hackles along the bottom.

  Toward the end of each afternoon, we found some fish rising to Gray All-Day Duns and, at dusk, just for the fun of it, I liked to throw a big Serendipity against the reeds and chug it across the surface like a bass bug. Those rainbows would come slashing at it. Dead-drifting an elk-hair caddis with a prince nymph dropper worked well top and bottom.

  * * *

  “Bigger fish in the lago,” Martin had promised. It kept me going during that long hike.

  There wasn’t much lee at the far end when we finally got there, nor did we spot any fish rising in the chop. So we put our back to the wind and muscled woolly buggers over the dropoffs and caught many trout. They did seem to run bigger in the lake—16 or 17 inches on average, with some creeping into the plus-twenty-inch range.

  Martin disappeared around a point of land. When he came back he held up his hand and made biting motions. Rising fish. He waved us to follow him.

  The dark-bottomed flat was as big as two or three soccer fields. Here the wind was blowing the tops off the rolling waves, and it took a minute to distinguish the whitecaps from the boiling, slashing trout. I bent close to the water and saw the brownish mayflies—size 16, I estimated. I guessed Callibaetis. Martin identified them as Mahogany Duns. His favorite all-purpose dry fly, a parachute pheasant tail, imitated them. So did my parachute Adams.

  It took a while to figure it out. First, I had to wade in up to my knees to feel steady on my feet with that great wind trying to knock me on my face. Then I had to abandon normal flycasting and go with the roll cast. With the wind at my back, it took just a flick of the wrist to roll-cast 60 or 70 feet. I gave up the idea of targeting any particular one of those big cruising trout. Throw it out there, let it bob on the rollers, and pretty soon a trout would come along and eat it. More often than not, the fish struck when the white-winged dry fly was drifting down the far side of a wave and I couldn’t see the take.