In the afternoon, some drakes usually hatch in the sheltered coves, and if it’s not too windy—often it is too windy—we hunt down sipping trout and drop dry flies in front of them.
In the backs of our minds, we are anticipating the evening, hoping the wind dies and the spinners fall. It usually happens. It gets intense, hunting and chasing swirling trout, as the sun drops behind the spruce forest in the west and the moon rises in the east.
On our last evening in Labrador we linger after dark, reluctant to quit for good, all three boats parked in the Big Hairy outlet where a couple of trout are cruising in big circles, sipping fallen spinners. The moonlight catches the widening rings of each tiny dimple, and we aim blindly for them. We cannot see our flies on the water. We cannot even see the other boats. All nine of us—six anglers and three guides—talk among ourselves in the dark, alerting each other to a trout’s riseform within casting distance.
Then—I don’t know how I know, because I can’t see anything, but I do know, for certain—I say, “Got ‘im.” I lift my rod, and the trout is on.
It’s a male, 5½ pounds on Peter’s scale, which we read by flashlight.
Murmurs of “way to go” and “nice fish” and “good way to end it” drift from the other boats. Then comes the soft chatter of reels taking in line, and the outboards start up, and all three boats chug back to camp. Tomorrow morning the Twin Otter will glide up to the dock and take us back to civilization.
18
Alas, the Bighorn
Andy and I made our first Montana Trout odyssey in the summer of 1986. It took us from the South Fork of the Snake to the Henry’s Fork to the Box Canyon to Hebgen Lake to the Madison to the Yellowstone to Slough Creek to the Paradise Valley spring creeks. It was glorious and eye-opening for a pair of eastern dudes but, after almost two weeks of baking under a relentless Montana sun, fishing dawn-to-dark, driving by night, eating in the car, and sleeping in motels, we were kind of worn down. I wouldn’t say we were sick of fishing. But the edge had definitely rubbed off.
We had saved the Bighorn for the end of our trip. If the stories were just half true, we would be rejuvenated.
* * *
Bill Rohrbacher, a big burly guy with a giant mug of coffee in his hand and shy grin peeking out of his tangled beard, took one look at us and said, “You boys’re looking kinda used up. I got just the thing for you.”
We rigged our rods and wadered up, and we launched Bill’s driftboat for our first look at the Bighorn. It was one of those soft, gray, misty-moisty summer mornings, absolutely still, rare for Montana, the kind of morning that just feels fishy no matter what part of the world you’re in. The water was scummy with bugs, and we saw dimples and noses and swirls all along the banks as Bill steered us downriver.
I pointed. “What about them?”
He smiled. “We got plenty of fish.”
After ten or fifteen minutes, he rowed across the river, nosed the boat against a steep bank, and threw the anchor up into the bushes. “Behold,” he said, gesturing upstream from where we sat.
It took me a minute to realize what I was seeing. At first it looked like a ten-foot swath of riffled water flowing against the bank and extending upriver into the mist.
Then I realized that the riffle effect was caused by feeding trout, hundreds of trout churning the water, poking up their noses, humping their dorsal fins, wagging their tails, turning and swirling and boiling. Big trout, judging by the size of their noses. Bill called them “toads.” The snout of a big brown trout does look something like a toad when he pokes it up to eat a bug.
For the rest of the day, Andy and I took turns casting to those toads. It was just what we needed. While one of us fished to that pod of trout, the other one sat on the bank with Bill, smoking, sipping coffee, munching apples, telling stories, kibitzing, getting to know each other. Rarely did either of us need more than ten minutes to hook a trout. The trick, Bill said, was not to flock shoot. Pick a nose, learn his rhythm, then lay the tippet between his eyes.
I found that flock shooting actually worked pretty well, but I didn’t tell Bill that.
The trout ran from about fifteen to nineteen fat healthy inches long. When they felt the hook, they exploded in the shallow water and surged for the heavy currents in the middle of the river. They were powerful, unstoppable fish on fourweight rods, and by the time we released them, the others were up and feeding again.
After a while, we got so we could pick out the 19-inch toads by the size of their snouts, and those were the ones we tried to catch.
It was dry-fly nirvana, and yet all the other boats we saw on the river that day were drifting down the middle dragging pink strike indicators.
“Oh, no doubt, it’s a great nymph river,” Bill told us. “You can catch a boatful on scud and sowbug imitations if that’s what you want, and most of the guides, well, they can put their clients into plenty of fish that way without hardly breaking a sweat. Rig ’em up, throw it over the side, and go floating down the river. But lookit that.” He waved at the lineup of big trout noses. “Who’d want to drag lead when you got that?”
The next day we fished with Dave Schuller, Bill’s partner. Dave was small and quick and athletic and bubbling with energy and enthusiasm, the Southern California yin to Bill’s laid-back Northern California yang. He must have beached his boat at twenty places. Move it, let’s go, climb out, cast quick, come on, catch a few, that’s it, back in the boat, next spot. There were rising fish everywhere Dave stopped, pods of big brown trout eating pale morning duns. He wanted to catch them all. Just about the time the PMD hatch petered out, black caddis began swarming, and the water became crusty with them. The trout switched over, and so did we. We fished into darkness. Dave didn’t want to quit. There were still fish to catch.
* * *
When I got home and had time to sort it out, I realized that by all the standards I could think of, the Bighorn had to be the best dryfly river—maybe the best trout river—in the world. Where else could you absolutely depend on finding fish up to and over twenty inches—hundreds of trout, if you knew where to look—sipping mayflies and caddis off the surface all day, every day? Certainly none of the other legendary western rivers I’d fished even came close.
I looked it up. There were 8500 trout per mile in the Bighorn’s upper thirteen miles that summer, of which half were over thirteen inches, making it probably the most densely populated trout river in the history of trout rivers. With the even tailwater flows, the fertile weedy water, and the abundant forage, the fish grew at the astonishing rate of six inches a year.
I wrote an article called “Bighorn of Plenty” for Field & Stream. Bill and Dave got prominent mention and presumably more business, so they insisted that thereafter we fish with them as partners, not clients.
Andy and I spent ten days to two weeks in Montana every summer after that first one. We always arranged our Fish-Til-You-Puke-Trout-Bombing-Mission so that the best—a few days on the Bighorn with Bill and Dave—came last. We learned the river’s hotspots—the Owl Tree, Spring Creek, Glory Hole, the Bluffs, Pipeline. We knew the best runs for throwing early morning streamers, the best riffles for mid-morning nymphing, the best scumlines for mid-day PMDs, the best banks for afternoon sippers, and the best flats for evening caddis.
Andy usually paired up with Dave. They liked to fish hard and compete with each other. I generally fished with Bill. Sometimes we just sat under a cottonwood sipping coffee and watching the water and telling stories. He told me that everybody called him Bubba, and I should, too, and there was no sense in making a joke out of it, because he’d heard them all and was immune to being offended.
He called me Grandfather, because I was almost ten years older than him, and I wasn’t offended.
Bubba taught me how to row a driftboat, how to spot the tiny blippy riseforms of bank-sipping browns, how to cast long trout tippets straight into the wind, how to land and unhook big trout without a net. The PMDs began popping every morning a
t eleven, and after the hatch petered out we could always find fish eating leftovers along the weed patties and in the scumlines and backwaters, and pretty soon the black caddis would start popping and continue into the darkness. More often than not we ended up fishing by moonlight and then racing to get to Polly’s for our ribeye steaks before she closed.
After a while, I think Andy and I could have done a decent job of guiding dry-fly anglers on the Bighorn.
One July evening as the four of us were speeding back to Fort Smith in Bubba’s ancient Power Wagon, late for dinner as usual, I said, “Let’s make a pact. We four will fish the Bighorn together every summer till one of us dies.”
“That’s a long time, Grandfather,” said Bubba.
“I hope it is,” I said.
“Things change,” Dave said. “Nobody understands the life cycle of tailwaters. This river’s just a baby. Who knows how long it’ll last?”
“Don’t talk that way,” I said.
“Carpe diem,” said Andy.
“We got great carp fishing in the reservoir,” said Bubba.
For several years, the Bighorn did not change. Oh, the boat traffic became ridiculous as the word got around (I suppose my article didn’t help). But the hatches came like clockwork, and big brown trout ate bugs off the surface all day, every day. You could plan your trip a year ahead and know exactly what to expect.
And that’s what Andy and I and thousands of other trout fishermen did, and none of us was ever disappointed. By the early nineties, a hundred boats were launched on the Bighorn every summer’s day. A village of fly shops had sprung up in Fort Smith. Dozens of trout guides worked the river. Most of them rigged their clients with nymphs and strike indicators and split shot and left the dry-fly fishing to Bubba and Dave. Everybody caught tons of trout.
If you launched early enough, you could get there first and stake out a prime piece of water, and you’d find the fishing almost as good as it had been back in ‘86. Those who counted them reported that the trout density was declining—5000 fish per mile in 1991 was a big falloff in just five years—but it was still an awful lot of trout.
Dave was right. Things did change. There were high-water years and low-water years and some years when you got both. The fluctuating water levels affected the insects and the fish. One year the PMDs, which used to begin hatching in late July, started in mid-June and petered out after a few weeks. One September, just a dribble of tricos hatched right at sunup. The hatch merged with the spinnerfall and lasted barely an hour, and for the rest of the day, we searched the Bighorn for rising trout and didn’t spot a single bank sipper.
The Bighorn was stone dead. It was a spooky sight.
* * *
Andy and I returned to Fort Smith for the last time in the summer of ’97, our twelfth year at the Bighorn. Dave, discouraged by the river’s decline, had left by then. We stayed in Bubba’s house. He had clients, but his friend and fellow guide Don Cooper took us down the river. The water was high. There were no PMDs to speak of, even though it was late July, formerly prime time. The tricos had started already, more than a month early. Coop said that was a bad sign. But we had fun and caught a few trout, and we became friends, the way you do when you spend time on a river together and the fishing isn’t very good.
* * *
That fall Bubba called to tell me that one of his clients had offered him a real job, and he was going to take it, sell his boat, and move to Atlanta. Health insurance, pension, stock options, sick days, salary? Hey, you can’t be a fishing guide all your life.
It was unclear who he was trying to convince.
* * *
The drought has been severe in the west the past several years. All the rivers are suffering. Several of my friends go to Fort Smith every year, and they tell me the Bighorn’s still a fabulous trout river. They rig up with strike indicators and split shot and dredge the channels, and they catch ’em on scuds and sowbugs. The trout are running bigger than ever. Rainbows, mostly. There aren’t that many browns anymore. Twenty-two, twenty-four-inchers are not uncommon.
What about the dry-fly fishing?
Oh, you hardly ever see rising fish anymore, my sources tell me. The tricos and PMDs and black caddis come off unpredictably and sparsely, if at all, and the trout pretty much ignore them.
I don’t like to dwell on the past. Dave was right, of course. Nothing stays the same. I know that. But some things just change too much, and too fast.
* * *
Dave and Coop are dead now. They were both young men, and they went suddenly and unexpectedly.
Bubba’s working in the Bahamas. He goes bonefishing on his days off.
He called just last week. He’d had some awesome permit fishing in the Turks and Caicos, he said, and he’d found some secret bonefish flats near Grand Bahama.
“But I miss the trout, Grandfather,” he said.
“I really don’t want to go back to the Bighorn,” I said.
“It’s all scuds and sowbugs,” said Bubba. “Big rainbows, right on the bottom. I talked to Mike the other day. He told me they’ve got to pinch on so much lead that they’re blowing up party balloons and using ’em for strike indicators.”
“Balloons on the Bighorn,” I said. “Jesus.”
“Yeah,” said Bubba, “but Mike said they were getting better flows last summer. He told me he actually found a few fish eating black caddis one night. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“If the dry-fly fishing comes back?” I said. “PMDs and tricos and black caddis? You kidding?”
“It might,” he said. “Like Dave used to say. Things change.”
“If it does,” I said, “Andy and I will meet you in Fort Smith. Carpe diem, man.”
“I got no interest in carp, Grandfather.”
19
The Norfork Tailwater
You’ll find Norfork, Arkansas, population 494, nestled deep in the Ozarks at the confluence of the White and North Fork rivers halfway between Flippin and Calico Rock, about twenty miles from the Missouri border. As you cross the town line, you are greeted by a billboard-sized sign that reads: Welcome to Norfork, Arkansas, Home of the World Record Brown Trout, 38 Pounds 9 Ounces.
That behemoth measured 41 inches long and had a girth of 27¾ inches. The great fish was caught from the Norfork Tailwater in August 1988 on a small treble hook impaled with kernels of canned corn and drifted on the bottom. It remains the town of Norfork’s main claim to fame.
When the lucky fisherman reeled it in and saw what he had, he called local trout guru John Gulley for help. Gulley put a tape to that record brown and couldn’t help chuckling.
A few days earlier he’d taken Arthur Hempsted out for some night fishing. Hempsted was a specialist at catching big trout on light fly tackle at night. The Norfork Tailwater was his favorite destination, and John Gulley was his favorite guide.
“Arthur was using a size 12 wet fly and 4X tippet and a 5- weight rod,” remembers Gulley. “When he hooked that fish, he just gentled him over to a sand bar so I could corral him. I don’t think the fish ever realized he’d been hooked. Arthur was awfully good at catching big fish. In the light of my flashlight, this one looked huge. I told Arthur it was way over 30 pounds. He said, ‘I always thought if I caught one over 25 pounds I’d kill it and have it mounted.’ I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ and he said, ‘Let him go.’ So I measured him and released him. Next thing I knew, there he was again. Same fish. Identical measurements. A world record brown, as it turned out. Arthur never seemed to regret putting him back, though.”
The record stood until 1992, when a 40-pound 4-ounce brown was taken from the nearby Little Red River. The Norfork fish remains the second-largest ever caught anywhere.
* * *
That record trout was not a fluke (pun noted, but incidental). Six days after the record brown was caught, a local fisherman took one from the Norfork that weighed 34 pounds 4 ounces. The Norfork Tailwater is probably the best place in North America to catch
a truly humungous brown or rainbow trout on a fly. The brookies and cutthroats grow big, too.
I do not exaggerate. The Norfork joins the mighty White River at the town of Norfork, infusing it with cold water and luring big White River trout into its channels. In summer and fall, White River browns and brookies and resident Norfork fish follow their spawning urges up the river toward the hatchery on Dry Run Creek, a Norfork tributary, where they were born. In winter and spring, rainbows and cutts do the same thing. When I fished the Norfork Tailwater in late June, some of the browns we caught were already showing their spawning colors.
Young trout grow at the astonishing rate of one inch per month in the Norfork. There are many reasons for this. It’s a tailwater, with cool well-oxygenated water from the bottom of the reservoir and constant ideal water temperatures year round. The river cuts through limestone hills and valleys, making it exceptionally fertile. Sowbugs and scuds, trout staples, blanket every rock and weed stem and leaf in the river. There are loads of crawfish, creek chubs and sculpins. Mayflies, caddisflies, midges and craneflies hatch in abundance. Plus, every winter Norfork Lake, the reservoir that feeds the Norfork Tailwater, undergoes a mysterious phenomenon that locals call “the shad kill.” Tons of threadfin shad, the predominant baitfish in the lake, get sucked into the hydroelectric turbines where they’re diced and sliced and spewed into the North Fork. Trout chow. Local fish fatten up.
The Norfork is the only river I know where you can legitimately anticipate a 10-pound trout on any cast. Your best chances are on low water at night, when the Army Corps of Engineers, which controls the dam and its releases, generally holds back water. Big trout of all four species prowl the shallows, especially on cloudy, moonless nights. If you’re in the right place, swinging a woolly bugger or a muddler through the currents at the right time . . .
Usually it doesn’t happen, of course. I fished the Norfork Tailwater two June nights in a row, midnight to sunup. I caught about a dozen fish each night, none over 20 inches. Nice fish, but not the certifiable Big One I was hoping for, although I did hook a couple that sounded truly big.
Trout Eyes Page 11
