The fishing game

Posted by philip on September 26, 2009

Rusty and i hit one of our favorite rivers yesterday with the kind of weather that fishermen dream of. It was cloudy all day and in the 70’s with a gentle breeze. We knew the river was going to be lower than we’ve ever fished it before and the Army Corps of Engineers that manages the dam and flow rates had just dropped the river by 50 cfs the day before, but decided we wanted to see the river low so we could better understand some of the deep pools. Normally, this river runs at around 300cfs, and they have whitewater releases in the 1000 cfs range. We fished it at 148cfs and it proved to take some of the fun out of this river.

She runs through a gorge and drops in elevation a fair amount over her 10 mile course from the outflow to the confluence of another great river in the area. Huge bolders and deep fast pools are what this river is all about. On our last trip to this river, Rusty stumbled on a “hot” fly pattern that produced a lot of fish for us. We hit the river armed with this fly en mass. We walked about 1.5 miles down river from the car and got in at one of the big holes that produced good fish on our last trip. Right off the bat Rusty landed a 19″ beauty of a bow.

We thought this was an indicator to the day to come, but it didn’t really work out that way. We landed a few more fish each over the next few hours of fishing and I think we each had some nice fish on, but it wasn’t the numbers from the last trip. We left pondering the situation and what exactly had caused the change in the fish’s behavior.

Thus the great fishing game continues. There are so many variables in flyfishing. Everything from weather, stream flow, water clarity, water temperature, time of year, the amount of sunlight during the day, insect activity and possibly even moon phase, play an important role in our days on the river and our success. Dealing with these factors only helps to enhance the challenge of the sport, and make it all the more desirable to attempt to master. It’s what makes flyfishing so great, and why so many pursue it as a sport.

We definitely both felt that we’d rather fish the river with a little more flow than it had yesterday. Just when we thought we had figured out a few of it’s secrets, this river showed us that it is a force to be reckoned with , and that it isn’t done throwing us curve balls. Whether it was the 1 day drop in water flow the day before, or that there were quite a few more people on the river yesterday than usual, or that the air temperature had dropped slightly over the last days, the fact of the matter is that the river didn’t produce as good as it has in the past.

I think we can only hope to come to terms with the reasons, and not necessarily master them. We can take the factors into consideration, and formulate reasonable decisions around them, but we can never fully understand them or overcome them. The largely unknown nature of trout is what makes them one of the most difficult fish to take on the fly, and why we pursue them at such length.

Philip Light