Low water can also be a problem, particularly in drought years like 1988 and 1995, or when the power company forgets its corporate responsibility toward the health and well-being of the fish. The river looks ugly and exposed at these times, and if hot weather kicks in you’ll see dead rainbows. But this is exceptional—most years, July is perfect.
Between high water and low, there are at least five or six weeks each season when the river is completely unfishable, making for what is in effect a closed season within the open one—and yet when it’s over, when the level goes back up or falls back down, the fishing can be the best of the entire year.
That partly because of the difficult, sometimes dangerous water conditions, partly due to the fact that it’s inhabited by wild and moody trout, the Connecticut is not a river for beginners or the casual once-in-a-whiler. It’s a river that is constantly asking you to reach—reach with your cast, reach with your patience, reach with your wit—and someone who is inexperienced may find they’re being asked riddles they’re not quite ready to solve. The two most common fishing situations here are casting to rising trout in slow water where a single clumsy cast is enough to drive them sulking back to the depths, and fishing fast, turbulent pocket water where it can be hard not only to hook fish, but to even detect their strikes. Then, too, wading is difficult at the best of times; there’s that high water which will hold the timid in close to the banks, or the low water where the rocks become covered with weedy slime.
Does this mean it’s a river for experts? No, because in all my years of fly fishing I’ve never encountered an expert, have come to believe they don’t exist. The good flyfishers I know are the ones who, competent with the basics, put most of their energy into many hours of local investigation; the best flyfishers I know add to this large resources of intuition, the kind of imagination that likes to tinker and probe, excellent vision, a gentle way with water, the gift of attention—or, in short, qualities that have nothing whatsoever to do with expertise, but everything to do with grace.
That a five-weight rod with backbone is what you want to be fishing with here. The Connecticut offers a lot of variety; a hundred yards of fishing might call for drifting midges in slow water at the top of the run, dredging stoneflies across the bottom when you reach the middle, flicking attractors in the choppy shallows where the current picks up. Because of the size of the river, the depth, you frequently get into situations where you’ve waded out to your limit, cast to your limit, and yet still need a few feet more—and the only way to do this is by having in hand some extra graphite oomph. I fish with an Orvis Henry’s Fork, their jack of all tasks, but find myself vowing each year to switch to a ten-foot rod, not only for the extra power, but to hold more line clear of the current and cut down on drag.
I’ve gone up and down in this respect, but always come back again to the five-weight. A two-weight is a delight to fish, but the trout are seldom close enough here to make it practical, and in slow water where the light line would work best you want to bring in trout fast so as not to spook the next one waiting on line. I’ve gone up to a seven-weight in high water, one of those stiff, expensive, high-tech jobs, but find it simply too much rod; it crosses that crucial border between stroking the rivers back and flailing it.
And I always carry a spare—a cheap pack rod I stick in my rucksack with my lunch. Perhaps it’s only me, but I find graphite rods surprisingly brittle—I’ve broken two or three in as many years. But then again, I’m an aggressive, absentminded caster, am always asking of my rods too much, and they tend to answer, with a little sighing sound, by breaking at the ferrule.
That when it comes to flies you would be well advised to carry a large assortment of the usual old reliables, but then spend all your time trying to discover which particular pattern the trout prefer as their flavor of the month. For there is a flavor of the month, or rather, a flavor of the season—we’ve discovered this again and again. What makes it interesting is that this flavor will vary from year to year so when you start on the river in June, last year’s flavor means little and the search has to start all over again. (“You don’t want vanilla? How about cherry vanilla? Maple walnut? My, you’re fussy today, little fella. Mint chocolate chip?” . . . I bite my tongue, dig out another scoop, wait for that appreciative and greedy swallow.)
The first year I fished the Connecticut it would have been foolish to use anything on the surface besides small Light Cahills. For that endearingly reliable stenacron canadense was everywhere that year, and if they started to slow down in midsummer, then something very similar took their place; it was as if the river were sending up an airy ginger-yellow froth to gladden man and trout. I came back the following season armed with dozens, but went the entire summer without seeing anything on the water but caddis—small brown-gray ones that came off the water in unbelievable numbers. Other years it’s been the darker mayflies or caddis again, only this time in white or olive. I don’t have enough entomology to explain this phenomenon, but whatever surface pattern you discover early seems to be the one you’ll be fishing five months in a row.
There are some more specialized considerations. Emergers are worth trying; quite often, especially in slow pools with little current, you’ll see trout rising to what seems thin air. For a long time I thought they were sipping midges, but even something as small as a 24 wouldn’t interest them—they want a meaty emerger that never quite manages to break the surface film, and they want it fished with a tantalizing little twitch just as it comes into view. There are times when they are feeding on midges, and when this happens you might as well bite the bullet and go right down to a 22 or 24—18s and 20s are hardly worth bothering with. You would think it would be a good terrestrial stream, rushing past meadows overhung with trees, but in ten years of fishing I’ve never caught anything on a grasshopper or beetle, though I keep trying them, especially when not much else is happening. Every August there is a hatch of flying ants that lasts the length of one afternoon; I’ve always managed to be elsewhere that day, with timing that is impeccable.
I’ve had a lot of success fishing attractors over the years, though my friends laugh when I tie one on. To a generation weaned on match the hatch, these gaudy generic patterns are infra dig, the feathery equivalents of Big Macs . . . but I like them for that reason, spend so much time fussing, it’s fun now and then to fish in sheer bad taste. The Royal Wulff is my favorite; it seems to provoke a response from trout that doesn’t depend on color and silhouette as much as it does something chemical—if they want it, they want it, and I’ll never tire of seeing that splashy all-or-nothing kind of rise it provokes. If Wulffs aren’t working, I’ll put on a Schroeder’s Hare’s Ear Parachute, which has the nice trick of vaguely resembling a caddis and vaguely resembling a mayfly, combined with that Hare’s Ear kind of nondescriptness fish love. If neither of these are working, then I’ll switch to a Yellow Humpy, more out of my perverse sense of humor than anything; I’m convinced fish strike it out of their own sense of humor (or to bulk up on roughage?), thinking it harmless, showing off.
More? I like Zonkers, but they don’t work up here. Muddlers take hatchery trout, Woolly Buggers take natives. Hornbergs are a waste of time. Stonefly imitations are useful. Wet flies are definitely worth trying, too, particularly Hare’s Ears or Cahills. As mentioned, the trout up here have a sense of humor, and appreciate a little movement in a floating fly; you should be fishing caddis sloppy, for instance, with all the crosscurrent drag you can muster. I’ve never seen a river where trolling works so well, by which I mean dangling your line absentmindedly behind you as you wade upstream. This always seems to get a bite, even from water you’ve fished carefully for an hour with no success. Why? No explanation, other than the trout’s ironic take on life—and a trout’s sensibility is nothing if not ironic, especially a brown’s.
That it’s a beautiful river to float with a canoe, taking you away from the road, away from the competition, in and under and through a tunnel of maple, ashy sumac, and
birch, a bower of vines laced with moving water that is to the rockier; faster stretches of the river as the Amazon is to the Madison. Even if it wasn’t for the beauty, a canoe can take you to water that can’t be reached wading, especially those characteristically deep, slow, featureless pools that even to an experienced eye look fishless. In spring, there’s enough inertia in the current so that you’ll be fishing downstream all the way on a moving ramp that allows for no second thoughts, but later in the summer the current slows, and with a little paddling you can backtrack to spots you missed coming down or those pockets deserving of being fished twice. Still, even in these conditions you’ll often be casting downstream to rising fish; this is extraordinarily difficult, especially when there’s not enough current to give the fly any movement, so you have to drop it on their noses without spooking them. But what I like about a canoe (or even a drift boat) is that it makes you into an angling version of mounted infantry—transports you pool to pool in luxury, then lets you climb out and do the harder fighting on foot.
Spotting a canoe, shuttling around cars, can be an awful waste of time. Our trick is to lock a rusty old mountain bike to a tree where we’re going to take out, and then the youngest, most energetic of the duo (defined as the one highest from catching the most trout) pedals back five miles to our starting point to fetch the car.
That on this kind of river with its wild, strong fish, it’s insanity to fish with a 6X leader; hubris to fish with a 5X, prudence to fish a 4X, caution to fish a 3X, sloth to fish a 2X . . . and optimism to fish a IX.
That it’s a good river on which to hit for the cycle, take a rainbow; brookie, and brown, even do it on three successive casts. The rainbows will be the most common of the trio—if you catch ten fish, seven will be rainbows, two will be browns, one a brookie. The best of these will be wild fish, which becomes apparent the moment you tighten on them—no stocked fish will fight like that. The river is stocked and stocked fairly heavily, but only in those spots where the truck can back up to the river without sliding in. This allows you to avoid the industrial fish entirely, not suffer the embarrassment of catching those three-pound brood fish New Hampshire likes to dump into the river to inflate its reputation—salting a gold mine that is already full of fish.
What fish these wild ones are! The rainbows thick and full-bodied, their pink taken up by muscle so it’s more of an added enhancement than it is a definite marking, their gills having the healthy red shading you see on their cousins out West. The browns, butter-colored just like they’re supposed to be, with that iridescent spotting I can never see without wanting to stroke. The brook trout, small but willing, the river s original inhabitants and so always welcome, particularly in autumn when the males, to my eye, take on the most fluid, delightful color nature can create—those coral fins, those copper bodies!
In all the years I’ve fished here I’ve never been able to come to a definite conclusion as to which locale each variety prefers. Browns, of course, are said to favor slow water, but I’ve also found them in the heaviest current, albeit with a rock or log nearby to absorb the worst of the brunt; rainbows, going somewhat against their usual grain, are the fish you find rising in those slow, lazy pools, even in summer; brook trout can be found almost anywhere, but seem to favor best those scooped-out hollows downstream of islands, where they’ll congregate in happy schools, caper about like kids on recess.
That some of these fish will be big—that the Connecticut is a big-fish river, with all that implies regarding mystery and excitement and keeping you on your toes.
This is important. Many rivers have the gift of charm; only a few have the gift of depth. The Connecticut is one of these, and much of it comes from the sense you have, even without immediate evidence, that there are big fish lurking about. Those deep back eddies that, judging by their appearance (their swirling vortices that swallow branches whole, let alone flies) must be bottomless; the logs sticking out of the water like the sharp outerworks of an unconquerable fort; those stretches so fast and deep and unfishable they function like a combination wildlife refuge, nursery, and old-age home where trout may flourish unbothered by man. All these create a certain aura—and if they aren’t enough, then there are those grainy black-and-white photographs that show up in the newspapers just often enough to keep things interesting: ten- and eleven-pound browns, held up by someone who’s caught them on Rapalas or worms.
One morning last summer, fishing further downstream than we normally venture, my pal Ray Chapin caught four fish, two rainbows and two browns, the smallest of which was nineteen inches long. Had anyone else, I wondered, anyone else in the continental United States, fishing the same day, taken such a glorious quartet? I don’t think so, and if you qualify that to east of the Mississippi, almost certainly not.
Hearing of these fish, seeing them on the end of someone else’s line, drooling over those pictures, I began to feel more than a little bit left out. Here for four or five solid seasons I’d been working hard to get to know the river, grasp its secrets, and now I couldn’t help feeling it was time for the river to repay my devotion and grab hold of me. A big fish would do nicely in this respect, acting as the emissary, the embodiment, of the depth and gravity I’d sensed in the river right from the start.
Knowing the next fish that takes your fly might be five or six pounds enhances the fishing experience in all kinds of ways. It makes you think much more about tackle, measure your rod and tippet in terms of what they can do against a really strong fish; it keeps you from taking anything for granted—makes you fasten on fish more gently, knowing what kind of power you might suddenly be attached to. It makes you scan the water differently, searching out places a big trout could break you off, readying yourself for chaos. Most of all, it makes you regard the river with a double focus, appraising it not just for where the trout might be hiding, but where the big trout might lie—the effect is that of reading one of those novels or poems that work well on two levels, the everyday and the mythic, so the river is acting continuously on your imagination, expanding it in airy fantasies even while it solidifies that expectant base.
And then the river did fasten on me, fastened twice, the second time hard enough even a slippery fellow like myself was hooked. It came about like this . . .
Ray and I were fishing some pocket water we hadn’t fished before, working on the theory that on a hot summer day the trout would be hungrier and more active in current that was broken and oxygenated than they would be where it wasn’t. For once, it turned out to be the correct assumption, and with the sun at just the right angle it was easy to pick up the quick, desperate splashings as the trout came up to chase, tip, and grab.
It was a good day to be out. The water ran in those broken surges of gold that brings out the kid in you, makes you happy to be alive. Ray found a chute where the water, hitting the roadblock of a ledge, flowed in a channel perpendicular to the current’s main thrust, and he was busy taking one small rainbow after another along the rim. I stayed out in the middle, doing just as well, the trout leading me upward pocket by pocket and ever so slowly across toward the Vermont side.
I was fishing a 5X tippet, a small, heavily greased Royal Wulff. I was also half-asleep out of sheer contentedness—with a twelve-inch trout sitting behind every boulder, I felt I could go on enjoying them all day. As I came closer to the bank I had to veer back out again to get past a heavy stretch of rapids; past this, I resumed my westward inclination, to the point where I was within casting distance of the bank. Sleepy, but with my instinct still working, I became aware that the pocket ahead of me and slightly to my left was much deeper than anything I’d seen so far—deeper and longer, so there was a ten-foot wide band of smooth water extending from an upstream boulder to the head of the heavy rapids. Again, acting purely from instinct, not quite realizing the implications, I tossed my fly over, expecting nothing more exciting than another twelve-incher.
The rainbow that came up to the fly was much bigger than that. The rainbow that came up fr
om below the fly, reached for it, took it, and kept going through the surface film to the altitude of my forehead was a trout of four or five pounds. But here I’m already racing ahead of the moment itself. What I was aware of first was hardly its size at all, but a shocking and overpowering sense of reality—finding out reality, truth, was a hell of a lot different than I had heretofore thought it to be; realizing I had been nowhere near understanding the rivers capabilities to generate living, healthy, vibrant flesh, and that what I was now faced with was the sudden and overwhelming need to get back in touch with this new reality, at odds that, thanks to my casualness, were impossibly long.
Ray, who had been following me upstream, saw the fish jump and we both yelled together. It came back into the water flank first, making us both think (we discovered later when we compared notes) of the most ludicrous, yet inevitable analogy, given its splash—of a bowling ball dumped into the river from great height. I must get below him before he reaches that rapid—as in all violent situations, I was given an instant of remarkable clarity before things started to fall apart. On the first leap I managed to stay attached, but at the second—at the precise moment I remembered my tippet was far too thin—the tippet parted and that was that.
“Jeezus!” Again, we both yelled this in unison and—after standing there staring at the black hole carved in the river by the trout’s escape—waded together over to the Vermont side, immediately starting in on the yearlong analysis called what I should have done different.
It was winter before the regret softened enough that I could see I’d done something right—found what was probably the best ten yards of fishing on the entire river, a spot we were calling the Trophy Hole even before we waded back out. Again, I couldn’t get over how the smaller trout had led me over there fish by fish; it was as if I’d whispered, “Take me to your leader,” and they had responded instantly. As for losing the monster—well, there was this consolation: it’s almost impossible to practice catching fish that size, and if I’d made a crucial error it was in not recognizing the water’s potential just by looking, and changing instantly to a heavier leader.
A River Trilogy Page 41
