Fish always get bigger in memory, they say, and for me it doesn't stop there: streams also grow in size after I've been away from them for a while. There have been occasions when I've gone to streams I haven't fished in years and found them to be about half as large as I remember them. Two years ago while driving back from Traverse City, I stopped at the Middle Branch in Osceola county, a stream I hadn't fished since '93. I remembered it being 20-25 feet wide, with lots of open runs. But that night I found it rarely stretched more than 15 feet across. Alders and protruding branches of oak and aspen pressed in on those "open runs" I remembered. Of course, the last time I'd been there I'd been spin fishing, and hadn't been too concerned about casting room. I'm not saying the Middle Branch couldn't be fly fished up in its troutiest parts, but it would take more strategy than I had energy for that night.
I wanted to get out of the house last night, so I gathered my gear and drove to a favorite spot on the Huron. I expected it would still be high from last week's rains, and it was. Places usually knee-deep in midsummer would have reached to my shoulders. One alternative was to drive home, get my boat, and go to a lake, but thoughts of assembling it in temperatures still close to 90 nixed that.
Another option was to find a small stream, since they recover from rainfall more quickly than large ones, but there are few such streams worth fishing around here. Cloud Creek, one hour away, would be an option in drier times, but having been outfitted as an agricultural drain, it recedes more slowly than streams three times its size. There was, however, a stream near Flint, stocked with brown trout, that I'd done very well at the few times I fished it. I lived in the area during my first year at Michigan State, and had been pleasantly surprised to find this resource so close to home. Unfortunately, I discovered it only about a month before I moved to Lansing. That would have been the summer of '96. Since then I've thought of going back a few times, but wasn't sure the drive would be worth it, especially with good smallmouth fishing close by on the Huron. Last night, I had no reason to stay close, so by a little before 7, I was northward bound.
When I got to the creek, I found the bottom was visible (in spite of the stream still spilling into the woods at points). Encouraging. Unfortunately, a large willow spread completely across the creek just in front of a bridge, covering a run I remember being productive. I knew there was a tree there, but didn't remember it sprawling that way. True, the last time I saw it was 13 years ago, but the heavy limbs out over the water would have been there the last time I was. And most of the creek couldn't have been more than 12 feet across. In my mind I envisioned it at closer to 20.
I remember quartering wet flies in front of the bridge, casting down and across the stream without any particular difficulty, but last night the best I could manage was a short flick that passed my fly below the large willow and above the box elder next to it. I put the fly in the trees about half the time. There is a nice riffle a little ways up from the bridge, and I seem to recall laying dry flies up into its seems with careful overhand casts. I still could--if ideally positioned slightly left of center at the bottom of the riffle. Then, I was good for a cast up to ten feet, with a cast going in the trees from time to time. That might well have been the case thirteen years ago, come to think of it, but that's not the memory that stands out.
I ended up lobbing streamers along some of the timber, getting a quick bump at one point. It didn't take long to cover the fishable water. About twenty yards on either side of the bridge, brush almost completely encloses the stream. That much does fit with my recollections, but I wish it was the part of the memory I'd gotten wrong.
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