the dharma blog

I went fishing yesterday. Rainy.

I had planned to fish all day, maybe ’til dark. When I woke up it was raining. Andy, Gabe and Wade had crashed at my apartment and they were planning to play paintball in the afternoon. We sat around for a long time chatting and waking up. Gabe slept through it all on the loveseat. Somehow, he always ends up sleeping on the most uncomfortable piece of furniture wherever he goes. The rain was steady and nobody seemed to really want to go out in the wet.

I for some reason was convinced that the meteorologists would be right: the rain would subside by afternoon.

At about 11:30 they departed for Stillwater to see what could be done about paintball and I headed for Wisconsin trout streams. It rained hard the whole way.

I thought that the upshot was that I’d get a good, quiet day on the river because everyone else would decide to stay home. Even that was not to be. I went to three access points and all had 3-4 cars parked at them. Finally, I went to my favorite access, which, though also one of the most popular, presents a downstream stretch to the next bridge longer than anywhere else. Even if there’s a lot of cars at the bridge, I can always get my own piece of stream if I walk a mile.

It was raining when I parked. I took my time suiting up and marched off into it with my hood up and hat low over my eyes.

I went a ways downstream. I ran into two guys headed back toward the bridge. It seems silly that we just said “Hi” and kept walking without acknowledging the absurdity of fishing in that kind of weather. But, there was probably nothing that could be said about it.

Right by where I had to cross the stream for the first time I saw another guy sitting on the bank. He was friendly and told me that there was a blue-wing olive hatch, something which surprised and excited me. With all the rain coming down I hadn’t seen any bugs, but once I started looking I started seeing a few here and there, dodging the raindrops somehow.

I kept walking. If he was working his way dowstream I didn’t want him to bump into me, for his sake and mine. I was getting pretty warm and I took off my jacket and kept walking. I was wearing a chamois shirt that I’ve found sheds water really well and heck, this rain was going to stop any minute, right?

At a favorite tailout of a riffle, I saw fish rising. They were really porpoising as they rose, and there were doing so frequently. It might have been that I could only see the porpoising rises in the choppy, rain pocked water, but it was like that all afternoon. I had planned to go further down, but this spot was too tempting.

I tried nymphing for a minute because that’s what I already had tied on, but I was intrigued by the idea of fishing dry flies in a steady rain so I tied on a pretty big, bushy blue-wing olive pattern that Gabe tied.

No takers.

Compared to a few weeks ago, these fish were selective. I tied on a smaller and more traditional BWO pattern and begin working that over the feeding lane across the river from me. I couldn’t see the fly whatsoever in the water so I experimented with a small bit of indicator putty up the line from it, but even then it was difficult to detect a strike. Eventually I just tried to follow the general area where it must be drifting and if a fish rose anywhere near it I’d strike in the hope that it had been rising to my fly.

It wasn’t.

Finally, I tied on a size 16 — smaller than the first, larger than the second — and that seemed to be what they wanted. It wasn’t long before a good fish smacked it. Upon feeling the sting of the hook it leapt out of the water and the line went slack. Enough for my heart rate nonetheless.

I worked up the short stretch of water where all the fish were rising and after a while got one on. It felt big but as I brought it in closer I started to suspect I had it foul-hooked… They feel bigger when you’re pulling them through the current sideways. Sure enough, when I finally got it to hand I discovered the fly was hooked in its dorsal fin. I pulled it out and slipped it back into the river. It wasn’t a bad fish, but it wasn’t a fair catch. I don’t quite know how I hooked it in its back when it was striking on a fly on the surface, but I did.

The rain was heavier now if anything. I kept expecting someone else to come walking along because I hadn’t walked down as far as I intended to but nobody did.

I put my jacket on once my shirt soaked through, and even put my fingerless wool gloves on too. My fingers were half-numb, pruney, and having more and more difficulty trying to do anything like tie knots.

I wasn’t going home until I had gotten a fish.

If there hadn’t been so many rising fish right in front of me, I might have said “Screw it” and headed back to the car, but this was not going to stand. I had now had on one fish and landed one foul-hooked, landing one fair should not be that difficult.

I continued to fish.

It was really very frustrating. I couldn’t see my fly, I didn’t know where it was as it drifted past the fish, the fish seemed very picky because I know I put it right over a number of fish’s noses a number of times and they completely ignored it. I have a theory that they may have been feeding on a feast of crippled mayflies. These flies had hatched, but as soon as they had gotten to the surface they’d been nailed by the big heavy rain drops. Dead or dying, they just continued to drift and made for a plentiful meal for the trout. I didn’t have any crippled-by-raindrops Blue-wing olive patterns so I just let my fly get beat up and then, finally,

fish on.

He was no shark, but he was a fish and he stayed on. Amazing how a 10-inch trout can fight. When I brought him to hand I found my hook lodged in the top of his mouth a little ways back. He had a small mouth and it was a small surgery to remove the hook and get him back in the water. I think he was okay.

I had gotten my one fish. Time to go home, right? Not quite. I kept casting, kept my fly drifting. There were a few fish that looked to be of good size still rising and I really wanted to get one. I noticed that they seemed to rise once, then rise again very quickly, and then they wouldn’t rise for another minute. I couldn’t get any one fish’s pattern down, the rain made it hard to concentratte. I thought that if I was a smart fisherman I’d see a fish rise and get my fly on its nose straight away and he’d take it on his second rise. That wasn’t happening.

After deciding I wasn’t going to crack this riddle any more than I had, and when I started getting pretty miserable from the cold, the rain and the wind, I decided it was time to be done. I walked slowly back to the car.