One of my favorite trips of the year is my late summer visit to the Au Sable trophy waters--it's given me some of the best days of fishing I had in some seasons. I've had some of those magical days when I can pull two or three trout from every riffle I ply with iso or ephoron nymphs. Flying ants falling into the river all afternoon and trout feeding on them in every smooth run, just like during a mayfly hatch. I've fished heavy midday hatches of BWOs, and ephoron emergences at dusk that ranged from good to spectacular.
Other times it's been a bust. Drifting all afternoon in my pontoon without getting a strike. Short strikers all day long. Or waiting in vain for the ephoron hatch. While I've never had a complete skunking, I've sometimes managed only one fish in the net.
Wednesday fell somewhere between feast and famine. Got on the river around 2:30, having spent morning and early afternoon working (I've become one of those people who takes a laptop into the woods...still beats working at home). Started at the riffle below Loud's rest stop, where I've had some very good days. Some feeders showed at the lip of the riffle and along the edges of the V falling down from it, and got some of them to strike on an ephoron soft hackle. Alas, they turned out to be chubs. After an hour I did pull a 12" brown out of a pocket below the riffle.
Next I went down to 2 Fish Flats (a private name for a spot that as far as I know has no public one), which yielded 3. Then it was One Fish (not sure what other feature to name it by), which lived up to its name precisely. I've wondered whether I ought to dub some hole Fifty Fish. One day years ago 2 Fish Flats very nearly approached that.
Ate supper in the woods, then went to a spot below Perry Creek to wait for the ephorons. When I got there a little after 7, some trout were rising to BWOs. The feeding wound down around the time I'd switched to a light leader, but I still fooled one rainbow. No ephorons emerged at sunset. I was waiting with the emerger tied on, and when I saw a solitary rise downstream, I thought I'd work it through the run anyway. The only subsequent rises I saw were when fish smashed my fly--three rainbows and one solid 14" brown. "Smash" is no exaggeration here--my fly would be gliding along with the current when I felt a hard pull, immediately followed by the sight of a trout thrashing on the surface of the river. There is nothing quite like that experience to draw you fully into a moment of your life. Buddhism offers that admonition to "be here now"; hooking and playing a substantial trout offers no other option.
Between the last day of my UP trip and the Mio run this week, August has been the best month of my season, meager as it was by the standards of most fishermen, including myself, or at least the self who used to get up north twice a month in summer. Almost makes seeing the close of summer worth it.
Back to school Monday. Into the maw of the working year once again.
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