Before going on the water last Thursday night, I ate a quick bankside dinner of warmed-over cioppino (an Italian seafood stew) that I had made the day before. Maybe eating what fish eat would help me think like a fish, I hoped. This was admittedly a long shot, as few Au Sable trout eat shrimp or crab, let alone tomatoes, garlic, and oregano. Passing a bear track in a patch of open dirt on my way to the river, I hoped these flavors held little interest for the local forest creatures either.
I fished at the same place I had that afternoon. Just as when I had arrived there in the afternoon, a few trout were rising just beyond the access stairs, but I was unable to draw any strikes from them this time. I waded into the riffle just above, where, again, two trout were rising. They ignored me also, so I decided to stop beating the water and just wait for the hatch to begin.
I didn’t wait long. About ten minutes after settling in to my vigil at the head of the riffle I noticed a few ephron duns fluttering around. No additional feeding began, so I just kept watching. When the two risers next to me were joined by two more, I tied on an ephron emerger and began swinging that in front of them. No response at all. Trout began feeding elsewhere in the riffle, so I turned my attention to them, with the same results. Au Sable trout had never scorned my ephron emergers like this before.
I noticed a large number of duns were now floating down the river. I tied on the dun imitation with no better results at least at first. Reeling up to take stock of the situation once again, a voice called to me from the bank—some other fisherman wanted to know if I was going to fish down from where I was. I shook my head, and he and two wader clad buddies clambered noisily into the water below the stairs.
I was a little irked by their presence, but that quickly passed. The riffle was soon boiling with rises, and I hooked and landed a nice brown as soon as I resumed casting. “Hey! That guy’s got one!” exclaimed one of my new neighbors. A splattering sound, not as loud, came from the direction of the speaker, and one of his companions gave a booming estimate of the size of the fish on his line. At this point, the hullabaloo was just an embellishment to the action on the water, a mildly humorous and tolerable sideshow. The Three Stooges play Mio.
I caught one more brown, and had a few missed strikes, all to the accompaniment of whining reels and whooping voices from below. Then almost as soon as it began, it was over. All was silent, on the water, and above it. I checked the surface of the river with my vest light and saw spinners everywhere. I was sure the trout would make the shift eventually and that the catching would resume. It turned out I was wrong. The situation prompted a surprisingly brief and muted conversation from the gentlemen below me, after which they waded to the bank and climbed the stairs wordlessly.
They might have been more attuned to the happenings of the river than I was. I waited another fifteen minutes. Spinners were still thick, but there was not a sound of feeding anywhere. Could the fish have had their fill on the duns alone? Hard to believe, but for whatever reason, the fish never reactivated. Soon I traced the path of the Three Wise Men, and returned to my camp at Meadow Springs.
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