You can read the rest of this story right here at The Drake Online with its fresh new look. Its an older story from last year or the year before but well worth the re-post here for the obvious reasons.

I sympathize with “The Junkie”. I know the pain of his addiction. Literally, I can still feel it in my elbow on my stripping arm from the last two trips up north. Tennis elbow has a partner in the world of fly fishing and it doesn’t come from casting. It comes from the answer to questions like this one:

“Dude, how is it that we are using the same fly and the same rig and you’re getting twice the hook ups on the same amount of follows?” He said.

“Strip faster.” I said.

Now I’m paying for it everytime I get the milk from the fridge. Streamer fishing for a few days from a boat can be tough on an old guy like me.

A couple of my Hatchless friends, among others, jokingly (I think) chide me for liking to tie and to use small flies, particularly dries, while fishing. I thought I would take the time to explain why I do so and in the process, possibly bring some people over to the dark side, even if just occasionally.

Fishing for me is an escape from my daily life. I’m a stay-at-home dad (SAHD, for short) by choice. I quit my job as a public librarian to be with my children full time, and while I love them dearly, Daddy needs some alone time once in a while. That’s one of the reasons I picked up fly fishing. It allows me peaceful time away from making breakfasts, lunches, and dinners; time away from vacuuming; time away from laundry; time away from resetting the Mac from Mandarin back to English; and time away from helping to brush tiny teeth and wipe tiny butts.

Another reason I took up fly fishing is that I grew up spin fishing for bluegills and crappies and trolling for walleye and salmon with my family. When spin fishing, my dad would always tell us boys to stop fiddling so much with the gear and “just let it sit there a while.” Huge spoons and J-plugs being pulled behind a boat for hours while the sun has yet to come up, or is just going down, is fun in its own way, but I wanted more. More fiddling around. There was nothing wrong with hauling in fifty good-sized perch or especially, twenty-five to thirty-pound coho and chinook. That was awesome. Still, I wanted more.

More what? Well, I wanted to see the fish taking the bait. Okay, then why didn’t we just go bass fishing with poppers? I don’t know—we just weren’t bass fisherman in my house. We viewed walleye and salmon as the best fish and type of fishing. Growing up, I always viewed bass fishing as a Southern sport complete with the accompanying accents. (I am, by the way, a total Southern-accent bigot for some bizarre reason, and that may have contributed to my lack of bass fishing as well. I do tie and use small poppers for smallmouth now.) Seeing a cork bobber dip was as close to seeing the take as I ever got until I began fly fishing, and everyone knows that’s no fun.

Then there is simply my personality. I am a person mired in minutiae. As a former English teacher (seeing a pattern yet?) I automatically analyze everything I see and hear—I always have. I once got the crap beaten out me in my own backyard, practically with my mother’s permission, by a neighborhood buddy for insisting that he enunciate the -gs at the ends of his present participles (I was about ten or eleven). I also am a bit of a gearhead and tinkerer. No other human has worked on my Jeep in six years and I have built everything from the deck attached to my house to my own USB car charger for my iPods and PDA. (I don’t split my own wood or make my own transistors; however, don’t think for a moment that I haven’t considered those.)

Again, what does this possibly have to do with fly fishing, and particularly, dry-fly fishing tiny flies? In my view, there is no point in fly fishing if one isn’t going to tie his own flies, and  again, I want to see the take. To me, a size ten hook is big and a fourteen is perfect.  I have yet to see a bug on the water that is as big as, or looks like, the old hard-sided Samsonite luggage I see some guys tossing. I am also a weight bigot. I absolutely refuse to add split shot to a leader. (Actually, I have done it once or twice, but I felt dirty.) My younger brother, with whom I go steelheading whenever possible, just loves this about me. I do add weight to the nymphs I tie, though I rarely fish them. I’m much more likely to use a hare’s-ear parachute dry than a hare’s-ear nymph.

I guess what it all boils down to is that I just want to see that damn strike so badly that I’m willing to give up catching many fish (and quite likely larger fish) for catching ones that will make me happy. If that means I only get a few eight to ten-inch trout, so be it. (I will resort to weighted nymphs to avoid being skunked entirely, but I’ll be damned if I ever use a woolly bugger again.)

Anyone who thinks a #26 parachute pseudocloeon or a #22 tricorythodes spinner won’t catch a decent-sized trout, I have a test for you: let me stick one of those little bastards into your lip and pull on it. I have a feeling you’d follow wherever I led.

As for the fishing… eh… not so great but with a few high moments. Like I said we only managed to catch a few fish at night and missed a few more but there is always the one that makes standing in a river at midnight worth the trip. I went out alone one night for about an hour and a half and got myself in position to cast to what sounded like a few good fish. After several drifts with a hex and no takers I switched to an iso and started throwing parachute casts downstream to a fish I heard slurping. Less than a half dozen casts and my line went tight. It was of one of those moments that I have heard about so many times in the past. You hear the slurp and then in less than a second you’re on to a fish that in my case I wasn’t expecting. Unfortunately for me, as fast as it happened was about as fast as it ended. It was a good fish and I know this because it bent my 5wt. to the butt without much effort from me, i.e… my dumb ass didn’t set the hook, and it sounded like a toilet flushing when it rolled and then, BINK, it was gone. Maybe the hook set itself because the fish broke me off which made me feel a little less like a dipshit. In hindsight getting broke off is probably better than getting a fly thrown at me in the dark. Did I mention how dark? I’m pretty sure it was a new moon and where we were there isn’t exactly a lot of city lights to brighten the sky.

As far as this hatch, the hex, goes. I have made several attempts to connect with it and have basically decided that if you’re not there for a week you are wasting your time. This is not to say that a trip up North is not worth it, it always is. Its just that in my experience with this hatch, limited as it may be, its tough to be in the right place at the right time if you don’t “know” the water. Probably well worth shelling out the coin to hire a guide for the night and take notes for next year. Or, the next several days. Whichever the case. Hopefully next year it’ll be the latter. Hard part about the whole thing is anteing up when you own your own drift boat. Even harder is when your “crew” owns two and a jon boat that would do the job just, well… nearly as well. What the hell. Its just fishing after all. Nobody died and everyone has a good time regardless.

The rest of the trip also brought a few surprise fish though I’m not entirely sure why I found these guys surprising.

That’s a happy Thomas J with a couple of good Au Sable smallies.

As I said, I’m not sure why I was surprised because I have caught warmwater fish on this stretch before even further up stream. It souldn’t have been a surprise but for whatever reason it was. Tom was hitting the “scum lines” hard in search of who knows what and these guys were the result. Not worth complaining about in the least.

I’ll finish with a few more pics from the trip.

This is Kwakerz learning why “trolling” with a sink tip and drinking whiskey might be a bad idea. He wanted to save that fly.

Side channels are a great place to escape the canoe traffic in the main flow.

Hands down. One of my favorite runs in the Trophy Water.

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fuckn haxxor