Stockerfest Initiation

Every spring, the state dumps some of its hatchery broodstock of rainbow and brown trout into the Huron river in the Proud Lake State Rec Area (about 45 minutes from me) and holds a fly-only, catch and release season from April 1 until the last Saturday of the month (the regular trout opener). Locals call this event "Stockerfest."

I've thought about fishing it before, but other things often got in the way, and I usually took a steelhead trip up north around the beginning of April. Besides, I didn't think fishing in the suburbs for dumb, tank-raised trout could be all that fun. But after I fished Stockerfest for the first time yesterday, I think I could learn to like it.

Conditions for clear-water trouting were ideal yesterday, overcast with an intermittent light mist. You have to hike a mile from the parking lot to the river, though I didn't mind the trip. If someone plunked me down there and told me I was in northern Michigan, I might have believed them. White pines and spruces checkered the hardwoods on the ridges rising up from the Huron's flood plain. I passed marshes still mostly frozen, and the trail alternated between solid ground, deep muck, and packed snow. I could hear heavy traffic in the distance, when it wasn't lost in the sound of wind in the treetops.

The trail let me off at bridge over a small coffer dam in the river. Looking in the water as I crossed, I saw at least fifty large trout fanning in the tailrace. You aren't allowed to fish within 100 feet of the dam, of course--they have to keep this halfway sporting. But there were still lots of trout in sight below the signs marking end the 100 foot zone, lined up between the bubble line and the bank on the deepest side of the river. I heard that small streamers work well on the stockers, so I tied on a black and tan muddler and in about ten casts I'd hooked up with a fat rainbow, a female of, by rough estimation, 18 inches. These really are the proverbial fish in the barrel, I thought, but that opinion changed quickly. I drifted that streamer and several others through the run for close to an hour and never had another hit. I switched to a copper john nymph under an indicator and quickly took a 14" rainbow, a tatty male whose fins and tail had likely been targets of larger and toothier tankmates. So nymphs were the secret, I figured. But I didn't get another hit on a nymph, either swung or under the indicator. A couple of trout did come up and slap at the indicator, and I wondered if I should have tried dries.

I worked a good way down river, the visible trout thinning as I got farther from the dam. Though I rarely sight fish, it's hard to quit once you start--no matter how fussy the fish are, seeing them in front of you creates a belief that catching them is only a matter of time. Yesterday that was clearly a matter of a long time, but I still waded through long stretches where I couldn't see fish, in spite of some of them holding promising cover.

I cast to a pod of fish who weren't willing to play at all, but the next batch I sighted provided steady, if often vexing, entertainment. Casting small streamers again, I had four sizeable rainbows chase them to within ten feet of me before turning back. Unfortunately, each would only give chase once, even though I changed streamers several times. A little further down, I saw a large female lurking just underneath overhanging alders. I drifted the streamers and a couple different wet flies by her, and she did slide out to inspect them a few times, but fell back to her post after each. On one drift when she'd ignored my leadwing coachman entirely, I lifted the rod to prepare another cast only to feel the line stick. I looked out over the water and saw a copper flash just below the big rainbow. After so carefully stalking a visible fish, one I hadn't seen had slammed my fly. A couple of minutes later I slid a 17" brown into my net.

At the point when I released that fish, my feet had been numb for most of an hour. My stomach was growling, and I reflected that I could be home by suppertime if I left then. Those two considerations were all the the inducement I needed to forgo working the rest of the fish I could see, and so ended my first visit to Stockerfest. Wild trouting it isn't, and Proud Lake, for all its nordic charms, isn't the UP either. Yet while driving home, I didn't think about what I was missing. Rather, I was grateful for finding a new outdoor pleasure, and an engrossing one at that, near at hand. I would end my day where I began it but in a better place nonetheless.