One Fish, Two Fish, Nice Fish, Hog

hog

There is a hierarchy to the words you use to describe landed trout. It’s a loose hierarchy and probably depends on what waters you are fishing. For me, fish are sorted into the categories of dink, not bad, good fish, nice fish and hog. It is socially acceptable to describe your own fish as a dink or not bad and maybe even to call one of your own fish a good fish, but for nice fish and hog it is more appropriate (and satisfying) to wait for another angler to call your fish ‘nice’ or ‘a hog.’ None of these categories really work on a small brookie stream in which a 10” fish is as big as it gets.

A dink is self-explanatory, it is anything bigger than a fry to about 9 inches. If it’s been a slow day and one of the few fish you’ve caught, then a dink is a welcome sight. It’s a fish and you caught it, you’re not skunked. Dinks can be kind of fun, they come in quick, but sometimes they go nuts on the end of the line and they still merit at least a glance at them before you through them back. Maybe they have nice colors, or you want to check if they still have their parr marks. A friend of mine had taken a trip to Montana and had a disappointing day; they hadn’t caught many fish and the few they had were mostly dinks. Their guide was trying to make the best of it and when my friend pulled in a dink, the guide said, “that’s nine inches of turbo!” with false enthusiasm. It kind of summed up the whole experience for him. Dinks happen.

A good fish is a trout that you’re not embarrassed to land. Its length is from about 11 inches to 14 inches. If you’ve been fishing for any length of time, you’re probably not going to want to take a picture of a good fish, but as you land a good fish, someone in the boat will probably say, “I’ll take that all day” and mean it. A good fish will have some fight and it is undeniably a ‘real’ fish. Depending on the stream and your own expertise a good fish might be a great accomplishment. My personal Everest is the lower Savage River in western Maryland. It’s a tough river with picky wild brown trout. They demand a perfect drift and the right fly. If I do manage to hook one, there is no guarantee that it will be landed. These are wild browns who will fight all the way to the net and then keep fighting. When I wade the Savage by myself and catch a good fish, I’m ecstatic. A good fish can be a great fish under the right circumstances.

A nice fish is a trout from about 16-18 inches. It’s a no doubter fish that when you land it someone on the boat will say, “that’s a nice fish,” with an emphasis on the nice. When you’re starting out, you will probably lose a lot of nice fish and when you start landing them with any regularity, you’re at the next level of your fishing game. You will probably want to take a picture of a nice fish, especially in the early days when you’re not at all sure that there are more nice fish in your future. I just got back from a trip to Tennessee and early on the first day, I landed a nice fish. A rainbow that was probably sixteen inches. We were still anchored at the put-in; the guide was rigging D’s rod and it was maybe my third cast. I pulled it in and my guide asked, “you want a picture?” Without thinking about it too much I said, “nah, but let me get a look at him before we let him go.” I hadn’t realized it, but that was a major step for me, catching nice fish stopped being this big, almost accidental occurrence and has started to be something of an expectation, but still a pleasant experience. It was the first time I had fished with this guide and it also got me some street cred (or stream cred) with him. He later told a mutual friend that D and I are good people (we tip well, so that helps). And the cherry on the cake: a wade fisher also gave me a “nice fish” as we released it; that guy is a class act, whoever he is.

A hog is a big ass trout that puts up a fight. Most of these still break me off or come unbuttoned. A hog can be 19” long if it’s a fatty, but I would argue that any trout 20” or more is a hog. I don’t land many hogs, but I’m starting to hook them with regularity, which I take as a good sign. I’m sure there are people out there for whom 20” is nothing special, but I hope I never become one.

On our recent trip to Tennessee we had a couple of run ins with hogs. The first was a brown that slammed D’s midge at the end of her drift just as she was picking up to recast. It must have thought that the fly was an emerger that was getting it away because it hit that fly hard. D went from gently recasting to fighting a hog in a second and did pretty well, but the circumstances didn’t favor her. The fly was already well down stream and she never really got a great hook set. The brown jumped a couple of times and we could all see that it was at least 20” and absolutely a hog. With each jump me and Sam, the guide, would each let out a big “woah!”. It broke off though and we were just left with the memory and the adrenaline. The second run in with a hog happened that same day; it was late in the afternoon and we were getting close to the takeout. Fishing had slowed down considerably, and we were all chatting comfortably when my indicator went down and I set the hook, but then my line didn’t budge. I had hooked a stump, but then the stump shook its head. “I think this is a nice fish,” was all I got out and I started to wind in the slack to get this fish on the reel right away. I never saw it, but it took off right at the boat. I was reeling to keep up, but it was hopeless, he went straight at me, under the boat and used the slack to shake my #20 midge off in a second. In retrospect, I should have just stripped in the line by hand and worried about getting him on the reel once I had him under more control, but I didn’t. I’m always haunted by these kind of encounters, the ones where you never even see the fish, or only get a quick glimpse of it before it disappears forever. Those kinds of fish take on a mythic quality and become legends you tell yourself so that you’ll be ready next time. They become your own personal Loch Ness Monsters.

The next day, I had my final encounter with a hog during our trip. We were fishing with Patrick, one of my favorite guides on a stretch of water we both really like. There are some big fish in this water, but not in high numbers. You don’t get a lot of strikes, but when you do, it’s likely to be a nice fish. It keeps you on your toes. There’s not a lot of talk in the boat, everyone is concentrating on the fishing, getting a good drift and making sure you don’t miss the hook set. D had landed a few nice fish already, but I hadn’t. I had missed two strikes and the morning had gone on long enough that a slight panic was setting in. Too early to worry about getting skunked, but if it went on much longer, I might get some razzing from Patrick and some pitying comments from D. I was about 30 minutes from the dreaded “do you want to take my spot at the front of the boat? I don’t mind.” Shudder.

Then the indicator went down and I set the hook. A solid set and instantly the line was alive with something substantial on the end of it. Hallelujah, it sped off upstream away from the boat, not towards it. The fish put itself on the reel by taking off away from me. Then it started peeling off line and then I was close to my backing. It was hauling ass up stream, into the current. Finally, I got it to slow down and when it came back at me, I was able to keep up with it. Each run, I was able to reel in more line and each run it ended up in a little shallower water than the last time, now it was just below the surface, running under the boat, but not so deep that I couldn’t control it and then Patrick got it in the net. I had caught the hog. Now, if God forbid, Patrick dropped the net or it slipped out, that was on him. I had caught the hog. I had witnesses. But Patrick of course, didn’t drop the net, we got the fish in for the pics and to measure it. A fatty shaped at 21”. Not any kind of record, but a no doubt hog, my first real hog if I’m being honest. I hope there are bigger fish in my future, but I doubt there will be ones that I feel as good about. For once, we got my little Nessie in the boat and I have pics to prove it.

Bartleby

So, that’s Bartleby, our new 8-week-old mutt. We broke down and got a new dog. We had visions of immediately hitting the water and the woods, but alas. Bartleby is a puppy and I had forgotten how much work and attention puppies require. Also, he’s scared of everything and I mean everything: plastic bags, a rubber ball, a magazine and once his own tail. He’s slowly getting confidence and exploring his world, but it’s going to be a long time before that dog is riding around with us in our canoe.

We wanted a short-haired male dog this time because Millie was a long-haired female. We wanted the opposite of Millie so that the new dog wouldn’t invite comparisons. Bartleby is definitely the opposite of Millie, Millie was part chow and she had this calmness, even as a puppy, that Bartleby does not. Millie would have these brief bursts of playfulness, but a lot of the time seemed to be watching the world with a gimlet eye.

We’ve only had him a couple of weeks, but his personality is there. Bartleby is just a goofy dog. He’s a beagle and whatever mutt and had been moved about every two weeks before we got him. He still hates riding in the car, I’d guess because ever car ride has meant a new home, new weird smells and new people to get to know. He also hates walks, they freak him right out. We live in the city so a walk means cars and people and lots and lots of smells. For now, a walk means that I carry him to the end of the block and put him down and we race back to the house. We’ve taken him to the park a couple of times and he’s slowly, slowly getting to see its appeal. But even these short little excursions wipe him out; we come back from our walks and he crashes hard for hours, the house is becoming the safe space where he can process the kaleidoscope of data that the city street presents.

The ultimate goal, of course is to make Bartleby a fishy dog. One who will come along on the canoe or on hikes in the mountains to fish for brookies; a dog who will chase a stick into the pond at out cabin and then flop down on the porch while we sip bourbon and watch the sun go down. All that’s a pretty long way off right now. Like I said, I had forgotten how much work puppies are and I had forgotten how much work we put in to Millie. We trained her 20 minutes every day on the basics: come here, sit down, drop it, and how to walk on a leash. And the peeing, I forgot about all the peeing in the house, never mind that Bartleby soiled a Persian rug not two inches from a stain Millie had made at the end of the last century when I went through this last. Right now, it’s pretty hard to imagine Bartleby doing much fishing any time soon.

I realized that I was going to have revise my expectations for Bartleby’s evolution into a Dawg the day I came home from the store with a squeaky ball for him to play with. I called him over and dropped the ball on the floor in front of him which is when he let out a whimper and went to hide under the sofa. Okay, so maybe we should hold off on any hikes in the mountains until Bartleby is a little more confidant around a rubber ball.

But I still remember the first time I caught a fish in front of Millie. She was sitting up on the bank with D and I pulled a bass out of the water. She had that look that dogs get that says, “I’m impressed.” I can’t wait for Bartleby to see his first fish, I just hope it doesn’t send him yelping for the shelter of the underside of the nearest sofa.

Salt

car

I’m heading to Belize this week for my first attempt at saltwater fly fishing. The trip fell in to our lap, the manager of the local Orvis texted me that two people had dropped out of a TU group trip to Belize and would D and I be interested? The price was very reasonable for what you got, four nights, 3 full guided days, and meals, beer and rum included. Plus, you got an Orvis H3 rod (man, are they ugly rods). I prepped myself to plead my case to D, but when I asked her if she wanted to go, she just said, “yeah, that sounds awesome.” Oh, how I love that woman.

Since then, it’s been like kids waiting for Christmas: it seemed like it’s taking forever to get here, but also, it seems like it’s snuck up on us. I’m writing this on Monday and we leave Saturday morning. It’s here, it’s happening; now what? I mostly fish for trout and bass and I’ve never been what you’d call an elegant caster. I can usually get the fly where I want it to go, but it’s rarely pretty. I’m a better caster when no one’s looking and when I’m not thinking about it. Now, I’ll be trying to cast farther than I ever have to on my home water brookie streams and in front of a bunch of strangers. This is where I plan to make use of the complimentary rum.

The trip is intended for beginner saltwater anglers, so I just need to relax and focus on that first fish on the fly in saltwater. After that, the next fish and the next. Being the kind of guy who thinks too much, I’m kind of worried that I’ll like it too much. That I’ll become one of those annoying guys who can’t enjoy regular fishing-hole fishing. The kind of guy who caught a muskie once and now can’t shut up about it and for whom brook trout and smallmouth no longer have any allure. “I don’t even bother with these local streams anymore, let me tell you about the bonefish, he’s a wily opponent. Did I ever mention they time I fished Belize? Hey, where ya’ goin’?”

In preparation for this trip, this past weekend I went fishing for brook trout in a skinny mountain stream in the Virginia mountains. I thought it would be a nice bookend to the week, start it with a brookie, end it with a bonefish (actually, in my imagination, I end the week on a tarpon, but I thought that sounded grandiose so I typed bonefish). It was a nice little brookie trip. Early in the season there is this one window in the afternoon when you catch all your fish, but you never know when it’s going to start or stop so you need to pay your dues and fish out each cast and get the skunk off the year.

The week before there had been this fierce wind storm. Trees were down all over the woods, including a few across the trail. I had nowhere to be so I just started walking upstream until I felt the edge of the workweek was off and started throwing my fly. I resisted the urge to start fishing right away and just waited for some sense of calm to come over me. Slowly, the work thoughts stopped. I got to this one pool and remembered that last summer a snake and I surprised each other there and I had let out a yell that they probably heard up at the ranger station 3 miles away. Seemed like as a good a place as any to get started.

I caught my fist fish of the year on a sweet little cast over a fallen tree and through a tunnel of branches. It was one of those moments when you just know you’re going to catch a fish and she’s right where she’s supposed to be. It was such a nice cast that I immediately got overconfident and put the next cast into a tree with my back cast. The universe maintains its balance.

Now it’s Monday and I’ve completed work on this big project I’d been working on. My job has gone from this intense work pace to this weird calm before the next crisis. My goal is just to tread water and maintain things until I can get on that plane this Saturday. Don’t let anything fall apart, but don’t start turning over rocks looking for trouble. Just get through the week and pretty soon, you’ll be sipping rum and throwing Christmas Island Specials to bonefish and permit. Now, I just have to make sure the universe plays along, no big moves, at least not for the next five days. Come Saturday it’s put your phone into airplane mode and hope there’s no signal on the flats. My deputy is a capable young man who I’m sure will figure it out (whatever it is). Just get to that boarding time and then the biggest problem you face is whether you want to hit the bar or the pool first when you get off the flats.

I was kind of complaining about how crazy work got in February, but I was secretly pleased. I’ve always enjoyed my vacations more when the first twelve hours are spent in this kind of frazzled stunned silence from being overworked. I think I like the idea that I’ve deserve my treat and that no one who’s been watching can question that I’ve earned it. I like how the tension slowly, slowly seeps away until it dawns on me that I’m relaxed. There are phases to it: there’s the hurry up and relax phase when I can’t get my mind to settle and I try to do too much; then there’s the “this is nice,” phase when I have to keep pointing out to D that we are in fact, relaxing; and then there’s the just being phase, where it all just feels normal and right and there’s no need to point out much of anything. One of my favorite vacation memories was me and D sitting on a beach when I was on a break from Iraq just watching a ship travel from one side of the horizon to the other; that’s it, just sitting there drinking beer and watching a ship go by, but more than ten years later and I remember it clearly. What had come before had been hard and what was coming next would be too, but today there was no expectations for me, but to watch that ship; I remember the color of the beach chair I was sitting in.

Part of what I like is the juxtaposition of work stress and fly fishing calm. I like that it’s chilly and a little snowy here and that’ll I’ll board a plan in the dark and in the 30s and step off in to Caribbean sunlight and the low 80s. I love that I’ll go from having to decide what to do about a problem employee on Friday to having to decide between the fish or beef on Saturday. Soon I’ll be in a place where as long as I don’t hook D, the guide, or myself, the trip has been a success. Then, it will be over and I’ll be back in the stress. The universe maintains its balance.

Rivers I’ve Met

mist

There are a couple of rivers I feel like I know pretty well, or at least that I know better than other rivers. I think to really know a river you have to experience in all its different moods; during all four seasons; during high water; during drought. For just a brief moment, I can hold all of a river in my mind as this living thing. The water, the birds, the fish, the snakes; for just flash, it’s all one thing that we call a river. Then it all dissolves back in to the components that make a river, the rocks, the pools, the riffles, the occupants. Maybe I should have called this piece, “Rivers I have loved” because there are rivers that I know and in the knowing I have grown to love them, but that title strikes me as pretentious and I don’t know if the rivers love me back.

There are a couple of rivers, streams really, in the Shenandoah National Park that I’ve come to know well. Streams snake all through the Park, so you pick a couple and get to know them. At first they all seem pretty similar, but the better you get to know them, the more unique they become. This one is fast and talkative, this one is slow and shady, that one has a lot of mushrooms along its upper reaches. Once you’ve picked a couple you’ve earned the right to call them your favorites and irrationally like them more than others.

One river that I feel that I know pretty well and that I love above all others is the South Fork of the Shenandoah. It’s big and ungainly and dirty in places, but if you know where to go, it’s as wild and free as any river. I read once that the Shenandoah river system (North Fork, South Fork and Main Stem) are some of the oldest rivers in the world. I don’t know if it’s true, but it gives the ‘Doah a quiet dignity. Some folks may abuse it, but it’ll be there long after they’re gone and it knows a thing or two.

Whenever I’m anywhere near the South Fork, I’ll check in on it. There are a couple of boat ramps that I’ll drive to and just kind of hang out to see how it’s doing, let it know I’m doing okay. It’s as close as I get to religion. I’m a Shenandoahist, I believe the world would be a better place if people behaved in a way that was in the best interest of the Shenandoah river system. Once we got them squared away, we can spread out to the rest of the world. Couldn’t hurt and you can sleep in on Sundays if you want, I don’t care.

I was standing on a low dam looking over the South Fork one winter day when another car pulled up. A woman and a man got out. She walked over to me and said, “we’re visiting from China and we don’t want to fish or swim or anything, we just want to look at the river.” I said, “good for you.” My first Shenandoahist converts. After they drove away I realized I was wearing green pants, a tan collared fishing shirt and a green ball cap. They thought I was some kind of park ranger and they were making sure they didn’t have to pay a fee. I’d like to think that when they got home, they told everyone how laid back American officials are and that there are apparently no fitness qualifications whatsoever.

I like that I’m getting to know this river, and as I do, realizing that I really don’t know anything. The more I know, the more I understand what I don’t know (someone put a dollar in the metaphor jar). I’ve arrived at a couple of observations on my own that are almost surely kind of obvious. It’s fun being a 21^st century explorer who refuses to look things up. I get to name and discover things that have been named and discovered for centuries.

Among my inane revelations: after the South Fork has been blown out, two days after the herons return to hunt, the streamer fishing will be amazing; and when you first start seeing the red bud in the forest, the brookie fishing will be good in the afternoons. One that was told to me, but that I want embroidered on a pillow: “when the dogwood leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear, it’s time to start fishing for bass.” Translate that one into Latin and you could chant it at Shenandoahist mass, if we weren’t all out fishing and skipping church.

One of the things I like about fly fishing is that you hang out in the river and that if you do that enough, some pretty cool things happen. It’s this aspect of fly fishing that is the hardest for me to convey to non-anglers. I’d imagine it’s the same for hunting, spend enough time in the woods being quiet and something cool will happen. I remember standing quietly in a stream as a beaver floated right over my feet, he never knew I was there. Or the time we saw an osprey take a trout that I would have been thrilled to catch.

If you start to experience those things and a lot of little ones that don’t sound like much when you write them down, it begins to feel like you’re in some secret society. That you’re being shown how things really work. Fly fishing is my entry into this secret society. It’s my reason for being in the river and it gives me a way to interact with the river in a way I wouldn’t if I was just going for a walk. I start to notice the fish, then the bugs, then the birds and I start to blend in to it all. For a moment there, I’m just another part of the river. It never lasts long, but it’s there for a flash. You can try to put a name on it if you want, but there’s no point. It happens, you know it when it does and you miss it when it ends.

I’m usually alone when I’ve experience these flashes, but it can happen when I’m with my wife D. It can never happen for me if I’m with a person who can’t shut up for a minute; someone who finds it all too much and has to fill the quiet with BS. I tried to introduce my brother to fly fishing and he just couldn’t let go and in my experience you have to let go of a lot before you get good at fly fishing, mostly you have to let go of ego. It’s hard, you’re probably going to suck at it; for most people, it’s a pursuit that involves a lot of failure before you have that success. You have to let go of your baggage, just be in the water.

I’m probably the wrong one to try to teach my brother fly fishing. There’s this weird defensiveness that creeps in to the relationship, a hostility from growing up together in an abusive and dysfunctional home. Sometimes it seems like my brother is still seething from things that were justifiably bad, but it’s been decades. Let’s go fishing, let that BS go.

Easier said than done, of course. Sometimes I wonder if he’s just seething when I’m around, a reminder of a bad childhood. I’m trying to give him access to my secret society, but I feel the weight of not letting go, the frustration at not being immediately good at something, the anger and resentment and I immediately know that not only he won’t be experiencing one of these flashes of, whatever, today, but neither will I. There’s too much to unpack and not enough time. I can’t get there with him and I want to get there more than anything else, so I’ll have to leave him behind. Maybe he has his own secret society that I can never join. I hope so.

My wife, D is the only other one I’ve been able to get to join up. I had been fly fishing for about a year when I got her to try it. She points out that before I invited her to try fly fishing, I had tried everything in my power to find another fishing buddy: my brother, some people from TU, and this one guy I met on Facebook (I might have to write that outing in a separate entry, it got weird). Finally, I asked her to come fishing with me.

She had bait fished a lot as a kid with her gandpa and picked it up much faster than I did. She’s good. Sometimes it’s annoying, but mostly I’m sincerely glad for her. Last year in Montana we were fishing with a guide who hadn’t said much all day (D thought he was stoned) and out of the blue he said to my wife, “you have such a pretty cast.” Because he hadn’t said much all day, we both kind of jumped.

D and I have been together a long time. I’m fortunate in that I can say I’m happily married. It’s amazing how many I people I know who can’t just say that without some hemming and hawing, “we’re happy, but…” D and I are happily married and because of that, we don’t have to do a lot of unnecessary chitchat. We’re completely at ease with each other and don’t fill the space between us with a bunch of BS.

I remember one time, D and I were sitting on the bank of the South Fork, looking at the river. We weren’t talking. We were just watching the river and the trees go from crisp to fuzzy as the sun set. It was summer, and it was probably around nine. As it darkens, you realize the far bank of the river is kind of vague and then sometime later you realize that you can’t really see the far bank of the river anymore. And then, BAM! a bald eagle came down from the sky and snatched a squirrel out of the tree in front of us and took off down the river with it squeaking in its talons. Then the quiet returned and the river kept flowing.

Guides I Have Known

driftboat

I fish with guides and I fish by myself. I tend to use guides when I’ve traveled a ways to get to the water. We’ve been to Montana a couple of times and did floats with guides for everyday of the trip. I figure that if I’m going to fly to Washington State, rent a car and drive three hours, I might as well try to get the most out of the trip and hire guides. Also, I might hire a guide for new water than pick his brain about spots where I can fish on my own. One of the hardest things about new water is figuring out where you can legally access the water. The last thing I need on my day off is some conflict with a local.

Closer to home, I have two guides I use regularly for floats; one for the South Fork of the Shenandoah in Virginia and one for the a couple of rivers in Tennessee. We try to get out with both of them a few times a year and we look forward to the floats for weeks ahead of time. Right now, I have a float with my Shenandoah guide on the books for April and with my Tennessee guide in May. Not only do we catch a lot of fish when we float with these guys, we also have a blast. They’re both very different people. CT, the guide I fish with a lot in Virginia is a retired park ranger. Patrick, the guide from Tennessee, is a young guy in his twenties, just starting out in life. But what they both have in common is that they give a damn. They sincerely want people to have a good time on the river, while respecting it. The care about their clients and they care about their rivers.

We did a float with a guide once in Arkansas and for lunch, he got out a camp stove and made this elaborate meal on the shore. It was nice, but a little weird. It definitely established who the sports were and who the clients were. Both Patrick and CT have a much more relaxed approach to lunch, Patrick has some sandwiches from a local gas station and some chips you can choose from and with CT, we just bring our own lunch. In my opinion, the best lunches on fishing days are simple and eaten in the boat while staring at a rising fish that you plan on casting to as soon as you’re done eating. Lunch is a chance to catch your breath, go take a leak and then get on with it.

Both Patrick and CT are the kind of guys who likes to stay busy. I asked CT what he did on his day off one time and he told me, “I was going to go fishing, but I didn’t feel like dragging the boat out on my one day off this month, you know what I mean?”

Me: “yeah, I could see that.”

CT: “so instead, I just grabbed my chainsaw and cut up this dead ash tree to lay up some firewood for the winter, you know?”

Me: “No.”

Both Patrick and CT seem to be as happy as either I or my wife are when we land a nice fish. Patrick’s a highly technical trout fisherman who enjoys talking fly tying and presentation strategies. CT does some wade guiding for trout in Virginia small streams, but we usually fish with him out of his drift boat for smallies. Like I said, he’s a retired park ranger and a lot of the float is just him telling us stuff he knows about the history of the Shenandoah Valley, the ecology of the river, the names of trees along the bank, or some crazy story about a tourist doing something dumb from his ranger days.

Maybe because we’ve been fishing with CT a long time, or because we’re fishing for smallies and the occasional bluegill, CT floats are relaxed. We know we’re going to catch fish, probably a lot of them, and let’s all just take what the river gives us. D and I have been fishing with CT a few times a year for about four years now and it’s as comfortable as it gets. It’ll usually start out with him saying to me, “get one off that gravel bar while I rig up D’s rod. You think the Nats are going to make the playoffs this year? Hey D, how’s your dad doing?” and we’re off. No lie, I have had hundred fish days on a CT float. The South Fork is a numbers fishery, but they’ll be some nice ones in the mix. One time, my back cast hit the water and when I came forward with it, there was a bluegill on the line. Bass fishing is convincing yourself you’re a hotshot and trout fishing is about taking a big old ose of reality.

With Patrick, the quarry is browns and bows. The rivers we fish in Tennessee haven’t stocked brown in over 20 years, so if you catch one a brown in either river, they were born wild and free. Both rivers have stocked rainbows and also wild bows. One river in particular has a population of beautiful wild rainbows and you know as soon as you see one in your net in didn’t grow up in any tank. D, Patrick and I all enjoy these wild bows. Their colors are amazing, deep red stripes, green backs and sides that are almost bronze colored. Their fins are crisp and they fight all the way into the net and then keep on fighting. You catch a couple of those then hook in to a stocky twice its size and you know immediately, the stocky gives up as if it gets that the deck has been stacked against him since day one. Get a stocky to the boat and he’s all beat up, fins rubbed smooth, no color and they look like they should have jailhouse ink and be smoking a cigarette. Patrick calls them junkyard dog fish.

As a trash talker myself, I really appreciate Patrick’s ability to give me grief. Last year, I broke off a big beautiful rainbow, easily 25 inches. We could see it in gin clear water feeding with a bunch of smaller trout. I had picked off some of the smaller ones behind the hog and was going for the big boy. Patrick told me that when I hooked him, he was going to take off like a rocket and in this shallow water, he’d break off pretty easy if I didn’t let him run. Then I got him to eat my fly and he took off like a rocket in shallow water and broke me off. I had him on just long enough to realize that I had hooked him against all odds, then I was holding slack line in my hand.

D said, “oh, sweetie, I thought you had him.” Patrick said, “don’t worry about it, you’ll get another shot like that in about 20 years.” We decided it was a good time to break for lunch. Twenty minutes later, halfway through my sandwich, Patrick asked me how old I was. I told him fifty. “Okay,” he said, “so in 20 years, you’ll be 70, you’ll get another shot at a fish like that sometime in your early 70s. That’s if you can still get out on the water. Yup, sure would have been nice to land that fish. I have the camera right here, good light, would have been a good pic.” Patrick’s smart enough to figure out who he can talk trash to and who he can’t. Another angler, I’m sure he would have been, “don’t worry about it sir, I couldn’t have landed that fish, it was good angling just to hook him.” I take it as a compliment that he was busting my balls.

I booked my trips for next year with both Patrick and CT the day after that float.

Spiritual False Cast

Savage River

You can make yourself crazy over casting. You can worry about it so much it ruins your fun. Fly fishing becomes some kind of angst ridden battle with your demons. If you’re not careful you can go from trying to get more accuracy and distance to your cast to wondering why your high school gym teacher seemed to have it out for you. And the more you try, the worse you get. There’s an old baseball cliché that seems to apply to casting: don’t try harder, try easier.

In baseball, the epitome of trying easier has got to be the Nationals’ 3rd baseman Anthony Rendon. He just goes out there and hits and fields and runs the bases. He looks like he’s having fun and he seems like he knows he’s got it good. Playing baseball is a pretty good way to make a living, even if the season is 162 games long. Everything about Rendon’s approach to the game seems to say that he knows there are people out there who have jobs that require them to work long hours and do sometimes dangerous work, or to sit in a beige box all day to feed their family and that he gets to play baseball.

Same with casting, you’re on a river, casting a fly. It’s pretty. Even if your boss is a jerk, the odds are that he’s not going to be able to find you here in the middle of the stream and give you a hard time. You are as far away from your problems as you can get. Unless your problem is that you can’t seem to catch a fish. Then, being in the middle of a stream with a fly rod and failing can begin to look like a big fat metaphor for every other problem in your life.

If you wanted fish so badly you could cast a spinner, or a worm, or you could just go buy a fish at the store. You want to catch a fish on a fly because it is so &*^% elegant! Why isn’t the fly going where I want it to go? Don’t’ break your wrist, keep the rod tip on a plane, keep all these actions together and cast. No! Not into that tree! What is wrong with you?! This is supposed to be fun, why isn’t this fun?

On July 29, 2014 during a game with the Marlins, Anthony Rendon yawned during an at bat. Seriously, between pitches he let out this big, lazy day yawn. That is not a guy who is struggling to get out of his head. That’s a guy at one with the universe; that is Buddha in a Nats uniform. To be that good and to appear not to care? That’s a perfect loop heading out over the cosmic stream of consciousness to land along the log of enlightenment to drift drag free over the platonic ideal of a trout that may not really be there. (Author’s Note: this metaphor has gotten away from me and is currently scuttling around the office baseboards; an exterminator has been called).

I struggle for that inner peace; I want it desperately and if I don’t get it, I demand to speak with the manager! You see my problem, I’m an American through and through and as such, I see journeys of self-discovery as transactional: “One inner peace, please.”

When you start out, there are so many variables. There are so many it’s impossible to figure out which ones matter and which ones don’t. There are variables that you don’t even know about. There are variables you accidentally change while trying to change other variables. That’s true when you first start out life and when you first start out fly fishing. When you first start angling, catching a fish seems like an accident. It’s like that moment in Bull Durham when Nuke Laloosh throws a perfect pitch and then asks himself, “God, that was beautiful. What’d I do?”

Try easier, that’s the key. Just put it out there and the cast is what it is. Accept that you are trying to do an impossible thing: you want your fly to drift as if it is not attached to your fly line, but it is attached. Every time you go out, you get a little better, but you are getting better at what is an unattainable ideal. Put aside the ego, put aside the drunken monkey chattering in your head; be like the trout in the current, waiting for what the river brings him. Take what the water gives you and be happy with it.

Who cares if I catch the trout? Not the trout and certainly not Antony Rendon. I hope someday that I won’t care either.

I Stink Less

mist

I still suck at fly fishing, but I suck less. I still have a long way to go, but I’m getting there. I’m getting traction in a way that I began to fear would never happen. There are all these layers to fly fishing and it is hard to jump levels. First you have to get your fly in the water and get a drift before you can hook a fish. Then you have to learn how to hook it, then how to fight it, then how to land it, then how to handle it. None of it came easy to me, probably because I never went through a bait/spin fishing phase; in fact, I’m not entirely sure the difference between bait and spin fishing, I assume they use the same kind of rods, just the lure or bait is different?

I am a slow learner and don’t take instruction well. I need to fail at something, go and brood about it and come back. What I lack in intelligence and natural ability I make up for in stubbornness and a willingness to blow off work. The way I learn is to fail, get slightly better, plateau at that level for a long time, and then claw my way up to another plateau. I guess that’s how everyone learns, but I take years to work my way up to plateaus that some people figure out in an afternoon. Like I said, I’m a slow learner.

I didn’t suck at all of it equally. I got the idea of reading the water first. I think it’s because it’s a nerdy skill that requires no physical prowess. It just requires being a brooding lump staring at the water with a dumb look on your face. Reading the water made sense to me. Because I was able to read the water, at least a little bit, I started getting in to fish, but I missed a lot of strikes and lost a lot of fish. Like an embarrassing amount of fish. Give a man a fish and he eats for one day, but teach a man to fish and he very well might starve to death before he actually lands one.

But like I said, I suck less these days. Another penny has dropped and I feel a lot more at ease out there. Now, when I’m screwing up, I usually know what I’m doing wrong. When I first started, I knew I had to work on all of it, but had no idea what all of it entailed. Now I understand what I need to work on to improve.

The latest penny to drop was on fish hooking and fighting. I was losing a lot of fish, and I was losing every good size fish. I was fighting them too long and I was not keeping enough pressure on the fish. Perversely, I got it in my head that I was losing fish because I was fighting them too hard, so every time I lost a fish, I would fight the next one even more gingerly. If I hadn’t reversed this trend, but this time next year, I would have been trying to land fish by way of sly looks and innuendo.

My problem stemmed from something I heard that I misinterpreted. I think that happens to a lot of beginners: someone with experience says something and the beginner takes the exact wrong lesson from the advice. For me it was this piece of instruction: “keep your rod tip up.” I was fighting a fish and the guide kept telling me to keep my rod tip up: I kept letting out line until my rod tip was pointing straight up, no tension on the line meant that the rod tip pointed straight up, right?

What I should have been doing, of course, was keeping my rod butt section up, so that the rod forms a nice question mark shape, which lets the tip do a lot of the fish fighting. Keep your rod tip up is shorthand for a bunch of stuff that a beginner just doesn’t know. It’s a loaded phrase that assumes that the listener has some understanding of the underlying principles at work. Like I said, I’m a slow learner so I kind of slowly had to figure it out: keeping my rod tip up wasn’t working, but the people who said it to me clearly knew a lot about fishing, so I was obviously not understanding a key point.

I’d like to say that I figured it all out and it came to me as an epiphany, but that’s not true. Finally, the right guide gave me the right piece of advice. He told me to keep my rod bent like a question mark and I told him that then my rod tip wouldn’t be up and he had this “oh, you’re a moron” look on his face that didn’t so much as drop the penny as fling it from the top of the Empire State Building onto my head.

That was the latest piece to fall in to place. Now, it’s coming together. I’m landing more and bigger fish. I still have a long way to go, but I understand now what I need to do and assuming I can live to be 170, I might be a good fly fisher someday, but today I suck less.

Fly Fishing and Baseball

Pitchers and catchers reported today to spring training. Winter weather has lost it’s edge. Soon there will be streams to be fished and ballgames to watch.

In my mind, baseball and fly fishing are somehow linked. Part of it is probably because I came to them both late in life. I grew up in the DC area and we didn’t have a baseball team for 35 years. I didn’t even realize DC was getting a baseball team until after the fact. My wife and I had just bought a house in DC. I was unpacking and had the TV on. We didn’t have cable set up yet, so the only channel we got was Channel 4 (Jim Vance, RIP). They were doing a report from outside opening day at RFK where DC was getting its first team in over three decades, which was news to me.

I was off work that week for some reason so I decided to go down to the park. RFK had been a football stadium and an old one at that. Although the Senators had played here, it was never really a great place to watch baseball. I didn’t know that at the time, all I knew was that you could get a ticket for about $3 and sit anywhere in the park. I bought a bootleg Nats hat from a street vendor outside for $5 and went on in. It was kind of like the first time I fly fished, I didn’t really know what was going on, but it made sense somehow. This was going to be something I was going to follow for some undefined reason. In much the way I said to myself, “these fish seemed to like this bushy dry fly thingy in the slower water that’s right next to the fast water” I said to myself, “these guys don’t look too good, but that third baseman Ryan Zimmerman seems to be pretty good.” If you don’t follow the Nats, you might have forgotten that there was a time when they sucked, so bad, but Zim was always a highlight. Now they are always playing meaningful baseball in late summer and Nats fans are spoiled.

Both baseball and fly fishing reward paying close attention. They reward sitting and thinking and apparently not doing much of anything. Casual observers of both don’t know how to sit, think and observe fly fishing or baseball. They don’t get what’s going on so they assume nothing is. Baseball and fly fishing have taught me that just because I don’t understand the appeal of something doesn’t mean it’s not appealing and just because I don’t understand what’s going on, doesn’t mean nothing is happening.

The action in baseball and fly fishing is explosive, but each requires a great deal of set up. Where an uninformed observer sees a batter foul off pitch after pitch and it doesn’t occur to him to ask “what am I looking at here?” someone who follows the game might realize, “holy sh-t! Span and Werth have gotten this guy to throw 30 pitches and it’s still the top of the first with no outs. If we keep this up, we’ll knock him out by the 4^th!,” plus the batter is taking in data, he’s seeing all the pitches the guy has and he’s making adjustments, so are hitters waiting for their at bat; infinite layers of subtleties.

Same with fly fishing, drift that nymph, step out of the box, adjust your depth, drift again, make a mend. Data, data, data. Too much data, too many adjustments to keep track of. So many variables that when you first start out, you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s impossible to figure out what you’re doing wrong because maybe you’re doing everything wrong, but maybe you’re not doing anything wrong and the fish just aren’t cooperating. Maybe the next drift was going to be the one, but you switch flies, or one of any of a thousand things. Next time you’ll remember, I fished this stream on a day like this and the only strikes I got were in the deep runs, or in the morning, or on a dry.

Layers and layers of understanding until some of it becomes instinctive. You don’t know why you know what you know, you just do. Then you have this moment when you’re conscious of this understanding and it all goes away.

Nats

John Gierach

cabin

I recently ‘discovered’ John Gierach, if it’s possible to discover in 2016 a writer who has been putting out books since the 70s, all of which are still in print. What I mean of course, is that I finally picked up one of his books, really liked it and then became a fan. In the course of a year, I went on a tear and read just about everything of his I could get my hands on. I know I should slow down and savor them more, but I can’t help myself, I consume it all until it’s gone; pretty much the same with hot dogs. It’s also the way I smoked pot in high school, which is why I don’t smoke pot anymore.

A couple things about binge reading one writer, especially a non-fiction one: if you don’t read them in order, the timeline gets all screwed up, one day he’s living next to the gas station on the edge of town, the next he’s living in a canyon writing for his girlfriend’s paper. One day he’s talking about some big political fight he had in the past to save a river and the next he’s talking about gearing up for that same fight.

Also, and this is the same with binge watching a show, you pick up on a couple of the writer’s tricks; they’ll use the same gimmick or a joke more than once. Gierach might have written a joke in 1992 and repeated himself twenty years later, but you read them both on the same long flight.

Gierach’s writing style is deceptive in that he makes it seem easy. He’s just kind of telling a story, it almost feels like the kind of story a good passenger would tell you while you’re driving on a long road trip to keep you awake. It’s conversational and it’s so well written it seems effortless, but that can’t be true. His paragraphs are sleek, everything in them is there for a reason, like he’s packing for a long trip on a small boat and can’t waste any space on useless cargo. Chekov’s trout.

One thing I really appreciate about Gierach is that he’s not a snob about fly fishing, if it swims he’ll fish for it. I’m the same way, I like fly fishing for blue gill and bass and trout and catfish and whatever else I can catch on a fly. If I could catch a hobo bathing in a stream on a fly, I’d bring him in, take his picture and release him (rubberized net, of course). Gierach is also not a snob about a lot of other stuff, but that’s not as appealing to me. I’m a huge snob on a lot of stuff and I appreciate snobbery in others. I’m especially snobby about TV, insufferably so. But when it comes to fly fishing, I’m not a snob; primarily because I’m not good enough at it to be snobby.

Also, it seems like fly fishing is already kind of snobby to begin with, you have to work hard not to be that guy who looks like page 32 of the LL Bean catalogue on the water. Maybe it’s different out west, but on the east coast, fly fishing carries with it a little bit of baggage. I grew up in Virginia and that’s where I do a lot of my fly fishing. Sometimes I’ll get to chatting with someone I don’t know well and it turns out he’s a spin fisherman and when I tell him I’m a fly fisherman, I always want to add “I’m sorry.”

Of course what constitutes snobbery and elitism change. Gierach writes lovingly about bamboo fly rods. He writes about them so well I can convince myself I need one, but when I look at the fly fishers now who are into bamboo – eh. I get it, and when Gierach got in to bamboo it didn’t have the same kind of elitist baggage it has now. A guy who’s always fished bamboo is different than a guy who’s “getting in to” bamboo the way some people are “getting in to vinyl records.” I’m old enough to remember vinyl and I’m also old enough to remember having to use Band-Aids to tape pennies on the arm of my record player so it wouldn’t skip. I missed coming at bamboo authentically, so I guess I’ve missed it. Plus, I’m too crappy of an angler to justify it. Louisville Slugger or $10 aluminum bat, you’re still striking out at the company softball game.

Because he writes so conversationally, it’s easy to imagine that Gierach and you could be friends. Kind of a straight middle aged guy’s version of a guy crush. He’s crusty and plain spoken and most guys like to think that they’re crusty and plain spoken, so you’d hang out and go fishing, maybe get beers later. Maybe you get to talking on a flight and what do you know, the guy you hit it off with is John Gierach. The fact is that I’m pretty much done with the new friend program. If I’m on a flight and the guy next to me starts to talk, I roll my eyes and get out my headphones. Mostly what I want out of other people is to be left alone. By that standard, John Gierach and I have about the perfect friendship, I haven’t heard a peep from him in over 50 years.

My three favorite fly fishing moments from last year

Mazda

This has been a rough winter, I haven’t been out once yet. Work, weather and circumstances keep conspiring to keep me off the water. So, sitting in a hotel lobby while on a business trip in February, here are my favorite moments from fly fishing in 2017.

Number 3: We were getting close to the take out on the South Fork of the Shenandoah and it had been an amazing day; just crazy numbers and a couple of nice fish in the mix. At one point I caught a smallie that tied my personal best and the next cast, I caught a fish that broke it. It was one of those days you find yourself thinking about on rainy January day. If anything, the day approached the too good territory: when you get greedy and stop appreciating each fish; as soon as you reel one in, you’re trying to get it back in the water so you can cast again.

At the end of the day, I unhooked one little smallie and was about to put him back in the water when he slipped out of my hands and flopped under the gap between the seat mount and the deck of the drift boat. I should have just unhooked him over the water, but I didn’t, lesson learned. We could hear him flopping around under there and then the flopping stopped. I felt bad, I try not to kill fish and I always feel like an ass when I mishandle them. About twenty minutes later, we get to the ramp and as CT is winching the boat on to his trailer, the smallie slides out from under the deck. I picked it up and threw it in the river, I figured a heron or muskie could make use of it, when lo and behold, it swam off! It was just a great end to a great float.

Number 2: I was standing in a small stream right where the trail crossed it in the Shenandoah National Park. It was early morning and I hadn’t seen another person on the hike in. I was tying on a fly and standing pretty still while I concentrated on my knot. I heard someone coming down the bank opposite where I was standing to cross the river and I looked up to say good morning to what I assumed was a hiker. Instead it was a big old black bear who had no idea I was on the other side of the stream. He was walking with that bumbling grace bears have on a collision course with me. I know black bears aren’t aggressive, but he was a wild animal and he was close, I’ve always heard you just don’t want to startle them. I said in as calm a voice as I could “hey bear, do you see me here? I don’t want any trouble,” while gently waving my arms. The bear stopped dead in his tracks, stood up on his hind legs and sniffed the air like a dog. When he stood up, I realized that he was taller than I was, that I was looking up at the bear. I could see his muzzle was grey and I remember thinking, “if this bear wanted to, he could really mess me up and there wasn’t much I could do about it.” It seemed like we stood that way a long time, but it was only a second and then that bear turned and ran, his big bear butt bobbing in the air as he tore through the brush.

Number 1: We were floating the South Holston. I was in the front of the boat and my wife was in the back. They were generating big time and the fishing was slow and the river was up, way up. We had almost decided to call it a half day, but decided to press on. We were getting close to the take out when I heard my wife’s “heh-heh.” Whenever my wife hooks a fish, she lets out this little chuckle. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big fish, or a little fish, she lets out this little Buddha-like “heh-heh,” it’s one of my favorite things about her. Anyway, I hear “heh-heh” and then the guide says, “That’s a nice fish.” So I turn around to see this “nice fish.” When I do, it takes me a second to process what I’m looking at, I can see the back of a brown trout, but it’s easily twice as wide as any brown trout I’ve seen before. I remember letting out a big “whoah!” and then we were off, the brown took off down up stream, I reeled in and just kind of hunched down (the last thing I want is to be the idiot who gets in the way and costs my wife a lifetime fish. Everything is kind of happening at once, the guide is next to my wife giving instructions, the boat is drifting sideways, my wife is in to her backing and the brown is trying to get to a downed tree on the bank, I remember that we were fishing midges on 5x tippet, then we go under a low bridge and we’re all kind of hunched over while my wife is still fighting the fish. And somehow it’s there next to the boat, still on the line, a big brown, like really big, like my wife gets to be in the local paper big.

The guide goes in with the net and then: it was gone. My wife’s line had gone slack, but the big brown was right there. The 5x tippet just kind of wore out, no pig tail indicating a busted knot; the fish just wasn’t on the line anymore. He was still right there where we could see him, but gone forever. Then my wife let out a very un-Buddha like “$%#@.” We were close to the take out by then and we just drifted along, no one made any more casts, no one said much of anything. We passed a few other boats who heard the commotion and who looked at us with curiosity, but there really wasn’t anything else to say, ““$%#@” about covered it.