Fishing in Real Life II
Summer is nearly gone. The salmon are in the Pere Marquette and that means the river is overrun by hoards of local and out-of-state fishermen. The Muskegon is still running low and warm. So all I can think about right now is fishing some small, spring-fed creek for wild trout.
Overall, this summer has been reasonably good for fishing. Some very nice fish came to hand – all of them brown trout and most of them on the Pere Marquette in the dog days of summer. There’s few things that compare to the sight of a healthy brown trout slipping back into the river.
In-between there were plenty of smaller fish caught, many of them wild brook trout. To make up for what they lack in size, most of these small fish come from the most intimate, beautiful creeks in Michigan. They have the most stunning colors and markings, and they pop off at a dry fly with unbridled exuberance that can’t be matched by a big, fat brown trout sipping flies in a backwater. Little brookies just smash your dry fly with passion.
Each summer I head up to the South Branch of the AuSable in mid August to celebrate my birthday with my dog Capone and anyone else who has the patience and foresight to come along. It’s a trip squarely focused on fishing and watching the Perseid meteor shower.
This year it was just me and the dog for the first day, and my friend Eric came up for the remainder. We never did catch the Perseids thanks to nightly cloud cover, but we did enjoy the better part of a fine bottle of Canadian rye under a dark cloudy sky the first night
During the day, we caught a reasonable number of small, wild brook trout mostly on olive soft hackles and on tricos during the morning hatches and spinner falls. Pone wore himself out running the banks chasing frogs, squirrels, and a random porcupine.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday quickly evaporated and it was soon time to head home. Eric had to be home earlier, so he left before noon while I headed over to beautiful Deward to fish the Upper Manistee.
It was there that I found myself stepping into a video from the Orvis Friday Fly-Fishing Film Festival. Within the first 15 minutes, I landed three nice brown trout that were hungry for late summer grassoppers falling from the sedges on the banks into the river. Each one had the stunning markings of a three-year old trout. And each one slipped back into the water unphotographed by a fisherman too taken by the moment to bother with a camera.
Further up the river the brown trout were few and smaller and the brook trout took over the hunt for wayward hoppers. The smaller brookies could not fit the #10 hook adorned with deer hair into their mouths, leaving the fun for bigger brook trout in the 10-inch range.
Wading my way up the river, I eventually realized that the day was growing long and that I had wandered more than a mile from where I had parked. Reluctantly I turned around, walked back through some very august fields, and returned to my car.
Thinking about the last time I had been to Deward, I realized that sometimes you actually do get lucky and catch fish that look like the ones in the videos. But thankfully, unlike the videos, there is no sound track other than the wind in the pines, random screaming blue jays, and the sound of the river returning some long-borrowed water back to Lake Michigan.
