The Fish That Dance Beneath Those Sparkling Waters

After an early spring of frustrated days of casting fly after fly into unforgiving waters, I can, at last, dispense some words of wisdom to those spring fishermen of the meandering and plentiful rivers of Vermont and New Hampshire. Have patience.

Have patience because the stocking trucks will eventually arrive. If you’re lucky enough, they will even dump bone-headed hatchery fish into a river near you, saving you the trouble of driving to find them. If you peruse the Vermont website, they will even tell you the exact size of the fish being dispensed into your local river, to the decimal inch. What is a 9.3″ fish, anyway? The New Hampshire authorities are a little more circumspect, but here’s another hint… they dump a lot more fish than their compatriots in Vermont. They just don’t give you the precise statistics.

I will preface the following comments with this disclaimer – I am by no means an expert fisherman. I am, however, a fast learner and someone who pays attention to things that interest me. I also learned my beginning lessons of fly fishing in the West. I was the beneficiary of a patient tutor, who repeated a few important maxims to me in the course of waiting while I fumbled through my knots and pondered the difference between leader and tippet. “90% of their diet is underwater,” he explained as I complained about nymphing when we could be casting dry flies. He smiled and shook his head as I insisted on the purity of dry fly fishing as he pulled fish after fish out of a Colorado river using nymphs and a “strike indicator” (fly fisherman for bobber).

Eventually I relented and studied what he was doing. Cursed and swore when I repeated his motions without catching a damn thing. Waist deep in frigid waters a 6 hour drive from home, no waders. No fish. The high country of southern Colorado. Absolutely beautiful. After a few days of learning to mend line and make sure of a dead drift, it finally began to happen. Fish. And not just any fish, but big, fat fish. Full of vitality and color and fight. I held the first one in my hand, and there were rolls of fat rolling over my fingers. They don’t stock the river we were fishing. Native fish… wild fish… wary fish. A good day for me was catching two. But they were big, and the wildness of the country and the river was as much of a reward as touching a denizen of the watery underworld.

And so, when I returned to my home state of Vermont after more than 15 years away, you might understand that my expectations had a distinctively western flair to them.

In April, with the water temperatures finally breaking 40 degrees, I began to test the waters with no luck. The nymphs that had worked just fine out West snagged no waiting lips. The days were empty. And of course, I began to doubt myself. I had heard and read about the discriminating fish of the eastern waters, that could only be fooled by a perfect presentation by a skilled practitioner. But there was this, too… as I patrolled the local waters, I wasn’t seeing fleeting shadows of fleeing fish. It was as if the waters were just strangely empty.

The first suggestion of a different state of fishing came when a friend listened to my mentioning of fishing in late April and responded that I was fishing for “holdovers.” This was new to me, but I found it again mentioned in a worn edition of a guide to fishing Vermont’s waters (copyright 2001) that some pitying person had bequeathed to me. After some study, it became clear that they were talking about stocked hatchery fish that had, somehow, miraculously survived the winter. A few weeks later, over a beer with a stranger in Chester, I heard him say that there weren’t any fish in Vermont rivers anymore. The Williams, the Saxtons, he said… all used to have fish when he was a kid, but he hadn’t pulled a trout out of them in years. They don’t stock them, he said.

And it appears that this is the case. The rivers of New England are dead zones. Perhaps some lingering brook trout wriggle in the top waters at the heads of hidden creeks, but the big waters are inhospitable to trout. Be it warming waters, pollution, fishing pressure, or a deadly combination of these elements… without the state dropping fish into the waters, there would be no trout here.

And this, my friends, is an incredibly sad statement. What has this come to? There are no native trout left?

As a fisherman, it lessens the experience. What glory is there in fooling a fish that grew up on protein pellets and brushing fins with his neighbors? What skill in catching such a fish? What satisfaction in hooking a fish that would not survive the winter anyway? There is something wrong with the world when the skilled fisherman is the one who keeps abreast of the stocking report or who has inside information about where and when the trucks have been sighted.

And I begin to wonder about the people that profess their own skill in finding and landing the elusive, picky trout of the east coast. I am tempted to whisper to them 90% of their diet is underwater and hand them a couple of copper johns. I wonder if describing these fish as cryptic and difficult is just the fisherman’s way of pumping his own chest.

But then again… maybe there are some hidden pools out there. The undisclosed headwaters of some long forgotten stream without a name, nestled in the shadow of the Green Mountains. Maybe there, in the deep, cool water, are some monster fish that will look with disdain at my meager copper johns and wait for something better, something more real. Who will only rise out of the depths for the absolutely perfect presentation of the correct flies. Maybe that’s the ticket.

cold river, nh

ashuelot river, nh

ashuelot river, nh

black river, vt

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Spring Fishing

The tide has turned in the last week or so. The sun higher, the days longer, the smiles coming.

About ten days ago I noted the first turkey vulture of the spring floating in, and just a few days ago an American kestrel bounced its tail and head as it came to a perch. There are robins around. The cardinals are singing, the chickadees are singing, and the machine-gun drumming of woodpeckers echoes through the hollows. The world is a dripping, warming place.

A fortuitous confluence of events put fishing on my mind. I went on a “man’s weekend” with my brother, which, in addition to the requisite amount of alcohol, meat, and fire, included ice fishing. We chipped holes in the ice with a chisel (earning our fishing and blisters) and set six lines in the ice. And I held fish in my hands… I touched at least 3 brook trout on the weekend. There’s something addictive (addicting?) about touching fish. It is a strange, magical meeting of worlds. It is reaching beneath the surface, into the void, and finding something alive, breathing, and squirming. And beautiful … it is always about beauty, isn’t it? Fish are beautiful, alien creatures.

So I touched some fish. And when I got home, I found a brand-new set of chest waders waiting in the mail. Coincidence?

With brook trout and waders on my mind, I began flipping through a book on fly fishing northern New England and stumbled upon an epiphany. Although the fishing season here in Vermont doesn’t start for another month (unfair!), the season in New Hampshire had been open since January first! The Saxtons River had tossed its ice aside a week ago… those New Hampshire rivers were similarly open. The ponds and lakes were still iced over, and the fish everywhere were just waking, but I had waders… and those brookies this weekend had taken bait…

And so yesterday, as the sun climbed through noon and smiled upon the waking world, I found myself in the Cold River near Alstead — waist deep in spring. The sun glinting off the water, robins flying tree to tree along the banks.

I would like this to be a story about me waiting patiently, working the water carefully, and finally landing a monster of a trout. But this isn’t that story. When you are relatively new to fly fishing, like me, success is measured in more subtle ways. I am no Brad Pitt “shadow casting” into the mighty waters of Montana, after all. I am that guy sitting on the bank trying to untangle yards of line because he cannot fathom the thought of tying yet another knot. I am the guy jumping and reaching to branches in hopes of retrieving a snagged fly. A day where I don’t lose a fly is a highly successful day. And I must say, this day on the Cold River was such a day.

I tried using “streamers” for the first time… In my case just a simple woolly bugger, but still, a different technique of fly fishing. And, of course, because of inevitable circumstances, I was doing it off my left shoulder and casting across quite a current. When the woolly bugger had attracted no notice, I fell back into a familiar pattern of large stone nymph with a copper john dropper. This pattern, with its accompanying split shot and strike indicator, is a whole different world of casting. It is awkward at best, and again was performed off the wrong shoulder and across a current.

And through it all, not one tangle. Not one snagged. Not a single fly sacrificed to the river gods.

And the waders… being new to this game (and cheap), I had favored jeans and sneakers in my previous fly fishing escapades. What a chump! I felt positively comfortable out there… I could walk without stumbling and I felt positively buoyant. The boots gripped the rocks like newfound lovers, my toes suffered the transgressions of not a single rock.

And through it all the spring sun was beaming down, the trees were taking their first breaths, and birds tested the warming air. Not a bad day at all.

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