two days on the river the month before without catching anything at all. People say, âWell, itâs nice just to get out.â But when youâre not catching anything, a heron flies by with wings creaking like a wooden pump handle, and a kingfisher ratchets over the water, and a beaver with its hair slicked back swims at you and spots you and pounds the water with its tail as it dives, and a robin flies back and forth across the river with something in its bill on each return trip, and a cedar waxwing stops in midair to snatch an insect, and a white gull flies along the river course and disappears around a bend, and two woodcocks go up, one after the other, from a patch of alders, and bluets and violets and purple trilliums and swamp buttercups bloom along the bank, and it all seems vaguely to make fun of you. Iâm not really there until I catch a fish. I reached the car, finally, and took off my stuff and drove, soaking wet, to another place on the river without stopping to eat.
The West Branch of the Ausable contains lots of different kinds of water, from rapids to dammed-up narrow lake to waterfall flume to deep pool to slow, semi-marshy meadow stream. Actually, thatâs almost in reverse order. The riverâs upper reaches, near the town of Lake Placid, flow over mud-and-sand bottom through a level valley, sometimes past an expanse of potato fields. I had seen big fish rising on that upstream section the year before. It is thirty or more river miles from Au Sable Forks, about twenty by car. I parked behind several other cars at a one-lane bridge over the river. Fly fishermen were standing in the water upstream and down. I walked a long way upstream and emerged from the brush and
saw another fisherman. I continued until I couldnât see anyone. I was hoping to coincide with a hatch of the big mayfly called the green drake. A big hatch or spinnerfall of green drakes can make the river percolate with feeding trout.
As soon as I stepped into the river, a mayfly disengaged itself from the surface film and flew waveringly by me. I snatched it from the air, saw that it was a green drake, and ate it. Mayflies taste a little like grass stems, and have a similar crunch. Once, I was fishing the Sturgeon River, in Michigan, with my friend Don when drakes began to hatch, and the trout fed so eagerly, chasing insects five feet across the surface and coming clear out of the water and slapping logs with their tails and gulping and splashing, that we got hungry, too. We began to grab insects from the water and the air. They were like hors dâoeuvres, little winged shrimp. They left a bitter aftertaste and a dryness, but no other ill effects, and they do fill you up.
This time I saw no drakes after that first one. The black-flies were as bad here as downstream. On my way I had passed a man fishing in beekeepersâ netting. I fished listlessly and hopelessly. Two guys came by spin-fishing from a canoe and politely dragged it through a shallow channel rather than disturb the deep channel where I was. They asked if I was having any luck (thatâs what you ask, Iâve found, in the East; out West, the query is âDoinâ any good?â), and I said no, and they said theyâd just started. Hours later, I still hadnât caught anything. At least the wading here was easier than in the rapids. I ambled with the current, waist deep, half buoyant, bouncing along like someone walking on the moon. I got out and went through brush when I neared other fishermen. The river began to take on that sort of metallic color of a river with no fish in it. I kept casting out of nerve reflex and
changing flies faithlessly. The guys in the canoe paddled by again; they had been downstream and were now just cruising around. At my question, the guy in the stern reached down, fumbled for a moment, and, with both hands, lifted one of the biggest rainbow trout I had ever seen. It was two feet long, its belly sagged, its
The West Branch of the Ausable contains lots of different kinds of water, from rapids to dammed-up narrow lake to waterfall flume to deep pool to slow, semi-marshy meadow stream. Actually, thatâs almost in reverse order. The riverâs upper reaches, near the town of Lake Placid, flow over mud-and-sand bottom through a level valley, sometimes past an expanse of potato fields. I had seen big fish rising on that upstream section the year before. It is thirty or more river miles from Au Sable Forks, about twenty by car. I parked behind several other cars at a one-lane bridge over the river. Fly fishermen were standing in the water upstream and down. I walked a long way upstream and emerged from the brush and
saw another fisherman. I continued until I couldnât see anyone. I was hoping to coincide with a hatch of the big mayfly called the green drake. A big hatch or spinnerfall of green drakes can make the river percolate with feeding trout.
As soon as I stepped into the river, a mayfly disengaged itself from the surface film and flew waveringly by me. I snatched it from the air, saw that it was a green drake, and ate it. Mayflies taste a little like grass stems, and have a similar crunch. Once, I was fishing the Sturgeon River, in Michigan, with my friend Don when drakes began to hatch, and the trout fed so eagerly, chasing insects five feet across the surface and coming clear out of the water and slapping logs with their tails and gulping and splashing, that we got hungry, too. We began to grab insects from the water and the air. They were like hors dâoeuvres, little winged shrimp. They left a bitter aftertaste and a dryness, but no other ill effects, and they do fill you up.
This time I saw no drakes after that first one. The black-flies were as bad here as downstream. On my way I had passed a man fishing in beekeepersâ netting. I fished listlessly and hopelessly. Two guys came by spin-fishing from a canoe and politely dragged it through a shallow channel rather than disturb the deep channel where I was. They asked if I was having any luck (thatâs what you ask, Iâve found, in the East; out West, the query is âDoinâ any good?â), and I said no, and they said theyâd just started. Hours later, I still hadnât caught anything. At least the wading here was easier than in the rapids. I ambled with the current, waist deep, half buoyant, bouncing along like someone walking on the moon. I got out and went through brush when I neared other fishermen. The river began to take on that sort of metallic color of a river with no fish in it. I kept casting out of nerve reflex and
changing flies faithlessly. The guys in the canoe paddled by again; they had been downstream and were now just cruising around. At my question, the guy in the stern reached down, fumbled for a moment, and, with both hands, lifted one of the biggest rainbow trout I had ever seen. It was two feet long, its belly sagged, its
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