Leo Suchy fishes a new stream
There is this small stream, not so far away that it would take too long to travel there, but not so close that you´d just drive up to it and take a quick look. I had never been there, but I had wanted to go there last year, and the itch remained to someday go fish that stream. It was March, I had a week off from work, and the itch got stronger. "I´ll go fish that creek next week", i texted my friend Björn. The answer was obvious:"Buy two tickets for Tuesday!" We had talked about fishing this stream last year, but after a quick search on the web the statement "totally overgrown from June to Fall" had scared us off. We´re both in the state of an intermediate beginner concerning our skills with fly rods, so the idea of too much bankside vegetation hadn´t been too appealing.
So I called the guy from the local club who is in charge for the day tickets and he offered me to either pick them up the Tuesday morning, or, if I could find the time, come the afternoon before to pick up the tickets and he would take the time to explain some details of the small stream.
I took it as an opportunity to dig out my motorbike, which had been in a state of hibernation/neglect over the winter months. After about fifteen minutes of trying, begging and cursing, the old girl finally started up and I was off to the little town behind the mountains. Driving there was as spectacular as it gets when Google´s directions tell you to "go straight for 25 miles, turn left, and go another 20 miles straight".
After about an hour I arrived at the guy´s house. There was quite a crowd of people in the garden and it took me a moment to ask my way through to Mr so-and-so with the tickets.
"Let´s have a short walk at the creek", he said when I finally found him. I apologised for interrupting the party, but he told me it was just his wife´s birthday, and since birthdays come once a year, that party wasn't too special today.
Standing on a bridge with a little bit of a view on the village and the stream he told me to avoid walking on the left side of the bank behind the last houses downstream, as there are cows on that pasture. I asked if they would be agressive, he laughed and said:" no, they´re just curious and will follow you around all the time, which gets annoying. But be aware of the nutrias, as they dig holes in the bank. We had one guest last year break his leg."
A trout swam by below us, and since I hadn't seen that many fish this season, I got a little excited. "Meh, just a small one. You´ll catch bigger fish here tomorrow", the guy said.
Half an hour later I was off on my way home again, the tickets safely somewhere in my leather jacket, cruising along at quite a fast pace, as I still wanted to fish my creek at home this evening before it got too dark. So I was in a little bit of a hurry when I got home, tossed the tickets on the kitchen table, put away the helmet and jacket, grabbed a rod and a fly box and made my way across the intersection towards the next-door creek. With high hopes for some dry fly-action I spend a few hours at my creek, but there were no rises, and also no answers to various nymph. As the light faded, I went back home, tossed all the necessary gear into a box to be ready in the morning and went to bed.
Björn picked me up the next morning at seven o´clock. He had been on the road for almost an hour, since he lives a bit farther away from my hometown. After a quick stop at a bakery we loaded my box with rod, fly box, net, sunglasses and other bits and pieces, as well as my hip boots and a cooler filled with cola, water and sandwiches into his car and drove off.
On the road we discussed the plans for the day, as well as other more or less fishing-related stuff. While I went through all the information I had gained the day before, I wondered if the tickets were in said box in the trunk or on my kitchen table at home. Trying not to worry him, I asked Björn to pull over when possible, so I could check if my sunglasses were in the box. "Dude, we´re halfway there, I wouldn´t go back now for anything", he said...
When we finally arrived at the village, there was rime on the meadows and the air was still quite cold from the night. Together with the feeling of an upcoming cold(from not wearing appropriate clothing on the motorbike), I instantly regretted not bringing a jacket on this day. The tickets were in the box, by the way...
We strung up our rods, put on our hip boots and walked to the stream.
The water was crystal clear and we had a good view of the sandy bottom and the weeds that waved in the current. "I don´t see any fish", I said, and just in that second three shadows darted off from under the bank. Okay, so there were some fish, obviously, so we each tied on a nymph and started casting. Within minutes, Björn was playing a small brown trout, whilst I was trying to shake my nymph out of a bush on the other side of the bank. Ten minutes later, I had a trout on the business end of my line, and he got his fly tangled in another bush.
We decided to head upstream, as we were on the upper end of the village, where the small stream came out of a forest. We tried to avoid wading as much as possible, since the stream waas about ten feet wide at best, but with trees, shrubs and bushes up to the edge of the water, most often the only way ahead was to wade, which always resulted in shadows racing for cover. At least there were plenty of fish! We tried to fish both at the same time, but the only way this would work was if one of us passed the other one on the bank, which resulted in spooking every trout in casting range. After a few attempts to pass each other we pretty much gave up on this idea and took turns in either fishing or standing behind the one who´s fishing, trying not to miss anything whilst also trying not to get hit by a fly. It took a while to get familiar with the concept, but eventually we got it sorted out. A trout or two were caught, but nothing to write home about so far.
After about an hour or so we got close to the upper end of the stretch and found a shallow pool with several trout in it. Most of them we guessed at about eight inches, whilst two of them were somewhere between twelve and fourteen inches. We were standing up on the bank, about seven feet above the water, and watched the fish for a while. "Now you just cast your nymph to the head of the pool and let it drift to the big one on the right", Björn said, and I did just that. But since there were a few feet of bank between us and the stream, the drift didn´t turn out quite as planned (obviously, of course, if you have to lay out half of the line on the bank and the other half on the water, what kind of a drift is going to happen?). The trout weren´t spooked yet, so I picked up my line, and pretty much slammed it straight into the tree behind me on my back cast. After some fiddling and poking around in the tree, arguing, laughing and balming each other, the trout were gone and we decided to go back to where we started and head downstream.
The plan was to walk through the village for about ten minutes, then find an access point to the stream, and then wade and fish upstream. We agreed on taking turns, one of us fishing, the other one behind him, and each time the one who was fishing either got a fish or screwed something up, we would switch positions.
We entered the stream in a fast and shallow riffle and made our way upstream to where the water was a little slower and deeper. as we passed two construction workers, one of them told us to watch out for the blue rope at the bank, on which they had attached a bundle of lunch beers. We managed not to trip over the rope and carried on upstream.. We were both wearing the same hip boots, which are okay for the usual small stream fishing we do on our home waters, but in some deeper spots they ended up beeing a bit too short, so we had to find a way through the water, alternating from one side to the other, depending on which was the shallow side. A few weeks earlier I had finally given in and ordered a pair of breathable chest waders which should have arrived the day before this trip, but didn´t. While I still was thinking about the advantages of chest waders in this particular spot, I heard a splash behind me, followed by many words I won´t repeat now. It turned out that Björn had found a hole in the stream bottom that was a little too deep for hip boots.
After the usual joking and blaming each other, we continued the fishing. It was Björn's turn, and in front of us there was a small but deep pool with quite a strong current, and as the water was gin clear, we had spotted several big trout on the bottom, both browns and rainbows. The water was so clear that we could actually see the nymph drifting through it. After a couple of drifts, Björn had figured out where to cast in order for his fly to be washed right into the feeding lane of one of the big trout. We could see the nymph drifting along the current, then watch the rainbow quickly grab it, and the fight was on! The trout tried to escape downstream, but after a few moments it was in the net, and a few quick photos later the trout was released and it was my turn at the deep pool. It also took me a few casts to figure out the different current speeds, while Björn was having a smoke to celebrate his catch. I watched my nymph tumble towards another big rainbow, but a brown trout decided that my fly had his name on it, quickly dashed towards it and took it with confidence. Again, the fish tried to run downstream, but was convinced to come to the net, photos, release, cigarette, Björn's turn. It looked like we finally figured it out. Both our trout were about fourteen inches, so we were pretty happy about it. Björn caught another one about the same size from this pool, then we decided to head upstream.
Just as Björn had started again to complain about his wet legs and feet, my phone rang. I managed to get it out of my pocket without dropping it into the water."Hello, this is Chris from such-and-such tackle shop, the waders you ordered arrived yesterday, you can come pick them up!" Well, thanks, could have called me yesterday, but on the other hand, I´m still the one with dry underwear.
A few pools and a trout or two later we were back at the car for a quick lunch break, got rid of the sweaters and stocked up on water, because the sun had warmed up the valley quicky. We looked at the hand-drawn map that came with the day tickets and decided to walk all the way to the lower end of the three-mile-stretch of the small stream and then work our way back up. We set off and followed the stream as it left the village. The only way to stay out of, but within sight, of the water was to walk on the railroad tracks next to it. Usually this would be a very bad idea, but I knew that the track was only used on weekends in the summer months, so it would be somewhat okay to use it as a foot path.
Behind the last houses, the stream meandered through an open meadow, and since there weren´t any of the cows in sight, we crossed the meadow and took a few looks at the stream here and there. There were trout pretty much everywhere, ranging from four to about fourteen inches. Some of them were easy to spot, but most of them spotted us first and ran for cover. We made some mental notes for our way back and walked on towards the end of the meadow and into a forest. Following the stream wasn´t as easy here, but we stayed on a foot path that was also displayed in the map. After what seemed like an eternity when you´re hiking in PVC hip boots on a hot day, we reached the county road that marked the end of the stretch, made our way down to the stream and started casting to some likely-looking spots.
After many casts, several spooked fish and the occasional tangle in a tree, we spotted a decent-sized trout at the head of a shallow pool. Since I had screwed up the last spot, it was Björn's turn and he stepped off the bank onto what looked like the usual sand bar, but turned out to be bog with a thin layer of sand on top of it. "Fuck!", he yelled, as his left leg disappeared up to well above the knee. I stored both our rods in a safe place and then tried to pull him out of the bog, but with him being a little above and me a little below what´s considered the average body weight, all attempts were futile. After a quick brainstorming we concluded on finding the least rotten piece of wood big enough to support his right foot, so he could push himself out of the mud. It worked, and he got back on safe ground, with his already wet pants now also slightly muddy. After the usual jokes about his weight and untangling our rods from the tree I had stored them in, we turned our attention back to the trout, but it obviously had decided to quit watching two grown men play around in the mud and had disappeared.
At that point we were both pretty much fed up with the forest and decided to head upstream to the meadow. This would be an opportunity to finally make some longer casts, just for variety after all the close-quarter fishing in the forest and the town. Pretty soon this turned into the usual "look how far I can cast" competition, and since we managed to spook every trout in the process, we headed further upstream. We also had under-estimated the burning sun in the open stretch, and the small water bottles we had stuffed into our pockets were already empty, we decided to skip some of the spots to quickly get back towards the town.
We entered the stream again next to one of the last houses (or one of the first, in this way), and waded upstream. The stream bed here was mostly featureless, and with no rising fish in sight we covered as much water as possibly by blindly casting upstream and drifting a nymph along the sandy bottom. It had been quite a while since the last fish was in the net, and we started to feel the exhaustion from the long walk in the hot sun, so we sat down on the bank next to a narrow foot bridge, dangling our feet in the water and took another cigarette break. We discussed skipping this part of the stream in favour of going back to the pool where we had cought the big trout before lunch, but couldn´t quite make a decision. A brown, cylindrical-shaped object came tumbling along the stream bottom and we contemplated about whether it had come frome a pine or from the rear end of a dog. At the height of this discussion, we heard the sound of a fish rising upstream, quickly forgot about the pine turd, and turned our attention to the general area from which the sound had come. About thirty feet upstream, just in front of the foot bridge, we spotted a rising fish. I quicky cut off my nymph and replaced it with a small dry fly, pulled a few yards of line off my reel and quickly made a cast. I had totally forgotten about the bridge, so I got the fly firmly stuck to a wooden beam. Bummer!
The fish had stopped to rise, I broke the fly off, and Björn made a few casts with a nymph, but didn´t get a strike. On our way upstream, I retrieved the dry fly from the bridge, put it back into my fly box and tied a nymph back on. Again we took turns blindly casting our way upstream, until we reached a spot where the slow current was sped up by a boulder on one side of the stream, and washed up sticks tangled in overhanging branches on the other side.
"I want you to cast right next to the head of the run, slightly to the right", Björn instructed me, and I did just that. "No, further to the right", he said. A couple casts later I thought I had tried every possible drift through the run, as well as hit the pile of sticks several times, miraculously without losing my fly. Björn took his turn, and after a couple of casts he got a strike and lifted into a heavy fish. "This is how it´s done", he said, as he played the fish. I finally got my net under the rainbow, which measured at about eighteen inches. "See, I told you to cast there", he said, as he lit up a cigarette. As it was now my turn, I cast again to the same spots in the run as I did before, got a strike and set the hook. "Yep, that´s how it´s done", I thought, as I brought another big rainbow to the net.
At that point, we had about two hundred yards of unknown stream and about an hour of daylight left, but we both were getting a bit exhausted and the air in the valley cooled off pretty quickly, so we decided to pick up the pace and fish only a few good-loking spots on our way upstream towards the car. We reached a shallow run with a deep pool above it, Björn landet a small trout and broke his fly off on one of the next few casts. "I´m done for today, I´ll just watch you fish the pool", he said. I got a solid hit on a nymph I drifted through the pool, but was too tired to set the hook in time, and a couple of half-hearted drifts later I reeled in and we called it a day.
While driving home, we had the usual talk after one of these days about what we learned, what we did right, what went wrong, and what´s going to come next. Björn dropped me off at home, and I just dumped my stuff next to the door and went straight to bed.
The next morning I woke up with the kind of hangover you get from days like this. We didn´t drink enough water, smoked too many cigarettes, but caught exactly the right amount of trout. The itch of this small stream was finally scratched, but it was replaced by the itch to go back again in the future.