A Tale of Two Fishermen

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us..."
--Charles Dickens

This man was likely a fly fisherman. Spring brings with it new hope, but winter's tendrils still cling to the landscape. Ice melts, but temperature fluctuations and limited insect activity can make for highly technical fishing.

"Make a 60-foot cast to within about 3 feet of the bank just left of the sagebrush," Cody said as he guided me into a pod of thick rainbows in shallow, crystal clear water. I launched a tiny chironomid pupa up into the shallows with my left hand since the wind was bearing down from my right. I am not left-handed.

The strike indicator on my leader was bouncing all over on the waves, and I was watching for the slightest abnormal pause or twitch. It slowed down almost imperceptibly as it drifted with the wind, and I set the hook. "This could be a small fish," I commented as there wasn't much of an initial reaction. That's when 125 yards of line peeled off my reel and left me within 25 yards of having my entire line and backing ripped by a stillwater rainbow trout. Sixteen minutes later a hen that was unremarkable in most dimensions except that she was 3 inches thick across the back was in my net.

The fishing was challenging, and we made hundreds of casts that went unrewarded. Still, the sun was out and we were throwing small flies to big fish.

When they took our offerings, long duels were the norm.

After about 12 hours of difficult fishing, we had 24 fish over 20-inches in the net, and felt like things looked more like the Spring of hope than the Winter of despair.

These trout leave a bite mark on the soul, and sometimes other places too. Thanks for reading.

Some Dude's Fly Rod

In Robert Frost’s poem The Wood Pile he describes how lifeless logs attempt to warm a frozen swamp as best they can with “the slow, smokeless burning of decay.” This phrase aptly describes a stillwater flyfisherman in the icy clutches of Utah’s winter, exerting the full force of one’s will power in the hope that it will somehow influence the hard water to retreat.

This year it must have worked, because Piute Reservoir began the ice-off process during the third week of February and was completely ice-free by the 25th. It was my hope that nearby Otter Creek Reservoir was also sporting some soft water because it lies at the same elevation some 15 miles away and is among my favorite spring fisheries. Either way, it was time to put fly to water.

Otter turned out to be locked up tighter than a dog that has gotten into the cheese curd with 12” of ice and solid edges! The lake was full of unrealized potential, just like this rustic Chevy across the street at the RV Park.

The town of Circleville is home to the Butch Cassidy’s Hideout Motel & Café. There are many who live in ignorance of the Circleville Classic Breakfast which is offered there for under $8. The meal stars a bone-in ham steak so voluminous that its half life in the digestive tract approaches that of Uranium 235 (703,800,000 years).

Piute is not a lint-flicker’s Mecca, having very little structure to concentrate trout populations. Fish tend to be sparsely distributed and the best tactic is to plane out across the lake in a herculean effort on the oars, stopping every several hundred yards to flail a cast in all directions. Still, it was FEBRUARY and there was open water. It was time to net the first soft water salmonids of the year.

In the end fishing was slow, and we netted 37 trout between the two of us in a full twelve hours on the water. The fish seemed to prefer leech patterns in red and black as a general rule, although a frontrunner for the biggest rainbow of the trip fell to a drifted chrionomid.

Days without a fishing incident: 0