Hex Trip '05, pt. 2

The whole time I was up north this week, weather radio was predicting dire storms. Never happened, although I understand one large storm passed just to the south. It was clear and very warm the whole time. When I fished in the afternoon, I left the waders in the car and waded in swim trunks and a pair of old running shoes.

Daytime fishing at this time of year can be hit or miss. Some days you find fish responding eagerly to attractor dries or small grasshopper patterns. Others, you just get some casting practice. I used my afternoons this trip to explore some other areas of the Boardman, with mixed results.

Tuesday afternoon I got on the river at the Shumsky road access. The river is about 50 feet wide there, and runs swiftly over a gravel bottom. The water was extremely clear, so I tied a whispy 6X tippet to my leader and worked upstream with the usual midsummer searching patterns. Not a single hit. And none when I worked back downstream with wet flies. All the same, the water looked like it held some possibilities, and I will try it again at some point.

The evening was no better, from a catching standpoint. I took a position just a bit upstream from where I had fished the night before, where the river was narrower and had a bit more character (deep holes, undercut banks, log jams, etc.). There were also more fishermen out, and by 8:30 I had been boxed into a run just above a jam. I saw fewer bugs that night, and only heard one feeder. Got three hits from it, but no solid hookup. Probably a dink.

My only spot of luck for the night came when a couple fishermen passed me as they left the river. I decided to walk out behind them, since I had only a vague recollection of the trail I had followed in. And actually, callng it a trail is an exaggeration--it was more like a series of random openings in the thickets of spruce in the river bottom. The three of us did get lost briefly, an experience which would have been worse if it happened when I was alone. But by midnight, I was back in my car, minutes away from a campfire and a nip of Wild Turkey.

It seems I have to get lost in dense woods mere yards from a roadway once on every hex trip. Amazing, isn't it, that you can find yourself stalled in an opening in the brush that seems to offer no way out, though you obviously found a way in.