By 10 I was back in camp and oddly, was not hungry. I packed up my tent, read for a bit, and still was not hungry by 12:30. But an afternoon of fishing lay ahead, so I gulped down a can of Trader Joe's bean salad before donning my waders and working a stretch of the Boardman just upstream from the campground.
This area was much like the river above Shumsky Rd., but narrower and wilder. No cottages along the banks, though many kayakers shared the water with me. Fishing different attractor dries and small streamers, I caught one brook and one brown trout, both small. By 3:30, the density of kayakers had grown to a point where fishing was difficult, so I called it quits on the mainstream and headed east to the Boardman's South Branch, just upstream from the Forks campground. Small water, but generally open enough for comfortable casting. Brook and brown trout from 6-9" inches jumped on my Adams in most pools and runs I worked. It was an ideal midsummer afternoon of fishing, in my book. Sometimes small really is beautiful.
I got off the South Branch a little before 6:00, planning to head to the nearby village of South Boardman for dinner, then back upriver to fish the hex hatch at dark. Dining options in S. Boardman proved to be limited though, even by rural northern Michigan standards. There was a diner, which was closed. And there was nothing else. I seemed to have happened upon the one town up north without a tavern. There was a large faith-based "Addiction Recovery Center," which may or may not have been a coincidence.
The problem, aside from my now acute hunger, was logistical. I could find someplace to eat in the other direction, back toward TC, but that would take me far past where I wanted to fish at sunset. I could drive nine miles north to Kalkaska, but, again, I would have to backtrack a long ways to fish. Or...I could drive nine miles north to Kalkaska, eat there, then continue eastward to fish the Big Manistee, where I had heard the hatch was still going. I had done well there in the past during the hex, and the drive home from there would be shorter as well. So it was farewell to the Boardman, back to the more familiar Manistee, with a 6" pizza at the Kal-Ho Lounge along the way.
Around 8:00, I waded into the river below the 612 bridge and headed for the spot I had fished last summer, a long bend in the main channel where the river divides among several grassy islands. The islands are a long wade down from the bridge, which helps discourage other fishermen, or so I had thought. Last year I fished three nights here in complete solitude, which almost never happens on the better-known rivers during the hex. Not this time. Around 9:00, two fishermen came wading along and set up at the bottom of what I had thought of as "my" beat. Shortly after they arrived, three more fishermen came. Two perched at the top of the bend, the third continued down and stopped about 30 feet below me. About what I'd usually expect, but disappointing nonetheless.
The bugs did not disappoint. By 10:15, they were on the water in force and good fish were beginning to slurp them down. Getting them to slurp a hook proved difficult, though. Often, once the hatch has been going for several days, fish become extremely picky, wary about jumping on the first bug that drifts over them. From all along the bend, I heard lots of fly lines swishing in the air, but no reels whining against the pull of big fish.
I was standing on the outside of a large sunken log. Fish were rising at both ends of the log along its inner edge. I would work the fish at the bottom of the log for a while, then they would go quiet, and I would cast to those above until they went into hiding. By then the fish below would be back in the game and I would return to them. I continued this pattern the whole night, scoring a brief hookup and, just after 11:00, hooking solidly and netting a 15" brown. No one around me did much better. The gentleman just below me landed one trout and lost another at the net. The rest of the people fishing that bend got blanked.
Thus the maddening vagaries of the hex hatch. These big bugs tempt fishers with the promise of normally wary big fish transformed into heedless gluttons. Sometimes they deliver. Sometimes they just don't show. Sometimes the fish stage their banquet but refuse you a place at the table. And the plans for "next year" begin brewing.
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