Since my first days of fly-fishing, the early trout season has attracted me out of the easy chair, led me to set down the channel changer and pick up the flies I’ve tied during the winter, and head out to the water. As many of you know, I worked hard across the state to ensure that we have continued to have an early trout season, and my tradition has been to get out and observe it on Good Friday.
Partly my observance was an homage to some of the people, most now gone, who helped me through my incredibly unproductive early fishing years. In the early 1980s, several of them would bring a caravan of newbies out into the southern Driftless Area to fish streams like the Green River and Castle Rock Creek.
Most of these weren’t high-production events: We’d dredge black Woolly Buggers slowly and endlessly, and usually would snooker a few browns or brooks into striking. In 1983, my journal notes on Good Friday indicated I fished until my fingers were numb, caught a 4-inch and an 8-inch brown, lost my only Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear nymph, and reported it was a “Great afternoon on the water!”
Once in a while we’d hit a good midge emergence and have major action on Griffith’s Gnats, and it would all come together. But our expectations were so low for actually catching that it was easy to be overwhelmed if you did not (a) fall into the still-chilly water; (b) break a rod in a slip on a snowy or icy bank, or (c) have one of your party do any of the same. These catastrophes can be contagious.
Eventually, in the late 90s, we got the Natural Resources Board to adopt an early season in its present form—a wise and judicious board, unlike its present unpredictable and radical environmentalist version--and since then I’ve never missed a Good Friday as my time to reflect, appreciate just being out there, and look forward to better conditions in the season ahead.
Usually, the outing starts with a good burger at the Albertville Tavern, home of Chippewa County’s best burgers and just a roll cast from a near by trout stream whose name I forget. In early afternoon, the place is usually filling up with a hatch of Eau Claire lawyers who fill and empty a truckload of beer pitchers in a few short hours.
This time of season, the best temps for fishing usually come in the time between about noon and 3:30 p.m., which makes for a few hours of exploring, chilling out, experimenting with (and losing) flies, and maybe catching some fish.
My notes from Good Friday 2003, a late winter when our family was contending with workplace changes, physical challenges, and other (serious) distractions, meant my outing was a search for therapeutic contacts with nature. Pheasant tail nymphs finally turned out to be the trigger for trout, and as I caught them, “… I found myself admiring the colors and counting the blue-pink dots on their flanks, from 0 to 17 spots, never the same # on both sides. Some are a single wobbly row of 4 or 5, some in pairs or trios, never a predictable pattern. The other spots are a kind of yellowish, maybe with a bit of pink (like turning aspen leaves in the mountains in the fall). Some were darker, almost greenish black on the back, while some were lighter-backed. Is it the result of sand bottom versus dark holes? Bellies are the most colorful: pink, red-pink, orange-pink, almost red, tangerine—like the lip gloss department at Daytons—and I found them in the deeper and longer runs below riffles, often in the quieter water. “
After several hours, I called it a day: “Lovely, lovely afternoon. I needed that.”
Other years, fishing partners who were newer to the sport than me came along and ad fished together. “Ghilly fishing”, we’d call it, taking turns and wading the stream or walking the banks together. It’s a good way to learn quickly, though it quite often involves ongoing catcalls, teasing, challenges and just straight-up b.s.ing.
One of those teaching days in the mid-90s, I took out both my mother-in-law, 75 years young at the time, and my middle-school nephew. They both picked up casting quickly, much quicker than I had, and we worked along Duncan Creek on a lovely sunny afternoon. My mother-in-law is a great sport, a lady of style as well as one who welcomes adventures. She may have been aghast at the figure she cut in waders way wider than her petite size, but she was game as well as curious. When she caught a seven-inch brookie on a Royal Trude, she marveled at the fish, still resplendent in its fall spawning garb: “Look at those colors!” she said, “Someday I’ll sew a quilt with those colors.”
Those days are as rewarding to me as the mentor as they were years ago, when I’d go out with my own mentors. Now I have a chance to give back, to see the experience through the eyes of another angler, and somehow it always seems I get more than I give from the day. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
Many of these outings, when as my friend Lon says he reflects “in the Church Everlasting of Woods & Waters”, have provided enrichment of the spirit as well as a chance to sort out that which troubled me and mine. What better way to spend a Good Friday? They can be great Fridays.
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