Last night, I got back from a week up north with Kristine, absolutely the antidote for the axieties over a lost future discussed below. Hiking, fishing, swimming, paddling, berrying. I'll have a few stories and pics up this week, but for the fishheads, I'll start with a quick rundown of the fishing.
We began the week in Petoskey, and on a couple mornings there, while Kristine slept in, I snuck out of the tent early to try a nearby creek had heard some good things about. It was a truly beautiful piece of water, extremely clear, thick with downed brush, with heavy woods of maple and hemlock behind the bankside cedars. Nearly every bend contained a pool that was at least waist deep. On my first visit, I saw a handful of trico mayflies on the wing, as well a few small tan caddis. Fish were rising here and there, but targeting them was difficult. I had begun working downstream, but the narrowness of the creek made it hard to stand out of the trouts' visual range. Feeders would usually go silent as I moved into position, despite my wading as slowly and quietly as I could. I was able to hook and land a nice brown in a spot I was able to approach from behind the cover of an overhanging maple branch. That pool was littered with sunken timber, and to steer the fish away from some of it, I had to wade in, soaking the bottom of my vest. No matter. That rinsed away some mud dried on from a previous outing.
After releasing the fish, I turned around and worked upstream. I took another brown, a iittle over legal size, on a nymph drifted along an undercut bend just above where I'd entered the water. And that was the last fish of the day. I encountered several more rising fish, at least one of which looked sizeable, but I couldn't convince any to munch my flies. I'm not sure what they were eating. There were no more tricos about, and the rises were gentle ripples on the surface, not the splashes one would expect if trout were eating the caddis that fluttered about.
I returned the next day to try and crack that riddle and failed. There were fewer feeding fish, and fewer flies evident that day. While I took another small brown on a nymph, I never got another strike. Strangely enough, that makes me want to return there all the more. It is a lovely stream, and may be worth a trip next season.
On Wednesday, we drove down to Grayling, where we would spend a couple days canoeing and visiting some trails we had hiked in other seasons. While there, I took the opportunity to fish the trico hatch on the north branch of the Au Sable, the river that runs straight through the center of the Shu-niverse (bad, I know, but I couldn't resist).
I must have written in praise of this tiny insect at some point last year. Tricos can be frustrating to fish and sometimes near impossible to see, but they show up nearly every morning between mid-july and early September, the fish respond readily to them (if not necessarily to fisherpeople's imitations), and straighforward spinner or dun patters will do the job. After chasing the big nocturnal bugs of June that may or may not show on a given night (or may show in a different part of the river than you've chosen to fish), and may attract fish only in some weird crippled-emerger-trailing shuck form which you can't imitate, this predictable daylight hatch is a welcome change, even if it doesn't always bring up the largest fish.
I fished the North Branch at two different points last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. On the first two mornings, the fishing was tough. The hatch was strong with lots of feeders up, but I only landed two respectable fish each day. Lots of missed strikes and brief hookups, but far more drifts over pods of ravenous feeders who didn't so much as nose my fly.
On Saturday, the hatch began later, and took longer to build to significant volume. But, perhaps out of frustration with having their breakfast delayed, the fish were more receptive to my efforts. In about an hour and a half on the stream, I landed six trout of at least legal size, and tussled with lots of others. Though I fished a number of spots, all the good fish I landed came from two runs. I caught them in the way I think I've caught 75% of the fish I've ever landed on tricos--on my knees, directly to the side of them, no more than twelve feet away.
This hatch requires you to consider your approach, and the way you relate to the stream, more than most. Occuring as it does in bright sunlight, when the water is low and clear, and after trout have been pressured by fishermen for three months or more, it demands that you minimize your profile and your disturbance of the water. It requires you keep your false casting (with all its showy, colorful motion above the fish) to a minimum, and to put the line on the water as gently as possible, with the leader fully unfurled. I've heard it said that if you want to be a really good fisherman, you should learn to master the trico hatch. At this point I'm no more than a senior apprentice, but I think I'd agree with that. Success in all sorts of fishing requires that you work on the fishes' terms. Many situations will accomodate some fudging, a little sloppiness for the sake of convenvience or fatigue, but almost never the trico hatch, that little white curse of late summer.
Tags: Fishing; Fly Fishing
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