Trout Eyes

by William G. Tapply

  “Hey, thanks, man.” He gave me a big grin. “Appreciate it.”

  A few minutes later his rod arced, and when he laughed into the gathering darkness, I found myself smiling.

  23

  Moon Down

  For most of my adult life I was a nine-to-fiver with family and other obligations, and the best time to go fishing was whenever I could—weekends and vacations, mostly. I didn’t have the luxury of timing a trip to hit a hatch or waiting for promising weather conditions.

  Lately, I’ve arrived at a time in my life when I can, at least theoretically, go whenever the spirit moves me. It’s been interesting to observe that sometimes I am moved, and sometimes I’m not. I’ve tried to keep track of the comings and goings of my fishing urges, and this is what I’ve found out about myself:

  The urge strikes quite regularly at dawn and dusk, particularly in the summertime.

  It’s especially strong on what my dad used to call “soft days”—cloudy, windless, warm, and misty.

  On the margins of the season—winter, early spring, autumn—I want to go fishing around noon on warm sunny days when the air and water are most comfortable for man and fish.

  When the mayflies are hatching, all bets are off. I want to go regardless of any other factors.

  My angling urges seem, more or less, to coincide with the times when fish are most active and my chances of catching them are best. After a lifetime of going whenever I could get away, maybe my subconscious has internalized the variables associated with good and bad fishing. I’ve tried to pay attention to myself, and I’m convinced that my urges are instinctive, almost physical, not the product of rational analysis. I do not think: “I will catch a lot of fish if I go now.” I go when that certain feeling comes over me. More often than not I have decent fishing. Sometimes I get skunked. My urges are not infallible.

  On the other hand, I always have a good time.

  * * *

  I was reminded of this last June when I was in Arkansas and John Gulley offered to take a few of us night fishing on the Norfork tailwater.

  I hesitated, biting back the impulse to say: No, thanks. I don’t feel like it. I’d rather sleep.

  Gulley cocked his head at me. “The gates are all closed. Low water and heavy cloud cover. A dead-dark night. Perfect conditions. We got some giant fish in this river. They’ll come out to play tonight.”

  I couldn’t turn that down. It reminded me that an optimistic prediction from a local expert was another variable that sparked my fishing urges.

  * * *

  I waded behind John in water halfway to my knees. The Norfork currents gurgled quietly in the darkness. A pair of barred owls called back and forth. From downstream came the muffled voices of our companions, T. L. and Tom.

  After a while, John steered me out into the river until I was knee-deep in a soft current. “There’s a sweet run out there in front of you,” he said. “Plenty of room for a backcast. Throw it upstream at an angle, swing it down on a tight line, twitch it in. The bite will be soft. Just tighten on him. I’ll be upstream, if you need me. Keep your headlamp off the water. When you catch one, face the shore if you need to turn it on to unhook him. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I said. I liked the fact that he said “when” instead of “if.”

  Then John was gone, and I was alone in the darkness. It took me a while to learn to cast without eyes, to feel the length of line in the air, to know when it had straightened behind me, and to sense when to pick up the retrieve for a new cast.

  I kept peering around, trying to see. But I could see nothing. When I gave up trying, I found the rhythm of it, and everything worked better.

  Casting blindly into the dark was pleasant and mindcleansing, but pretty soon I began doubt that I’d ever get a strike. I would cast all night into water that I couldn’t see, the same water for hours and hours, and eventually the sun would rise and we’d go home and go to bed.

  In the dark, without a watch, with no stars or moon, it’s impossible to gauge the passage of time. It felt as if I’d been there for hours, standing in the same place, casting repeatedly. But I’d probably been fishing for about half an hour when I felt a nip and a tug and then a strong pull, and then somewhere in front of me a fish sloshed.

  I steered it in, turned to face the shore, and flicked on my headlamp. It was a nice brown trout, 18 or 19 inches long. Not one of Gulley’s hogs. But a very satisfactory fish, and a different kind of fun in the dark.

  It went like that for a while—now and then one of us would hook a trout. It wasn’t fast, but it kept me tense and alert for the soft tug and gentle bump in the night out there at the invisible end of my line.

  Then Tom and T. L. hooked up at the same time and, before they landed their fish, John had one on, and then my rod tip twitched and dipped, and four hooked fish were sloshing in the darkness.

  And then we kept hooking fish. Somebody always had one on. Our voices, trying to sound cool but betraying excitement and awe, and the splashing and surging of fighting fish, echoed in the moist night air.

  It’s hard to say how long it lasted. At least an hour. Maybe two hours. I know that I landed nine trout, more or less one right after the other, interspersed with some unproductive casts and several missed strikes and a few brief hookups. The same thing was happening to the other three guys.

  And then it petered out and stopped, and we went back to a lot of casting and an occasional hookup until the sky brightened and it ended entirely.

  John built a fire and produced a coffee pot.

  “Is it always like this?” I said.

  “When we got competent anglers,” he said, “we catch fish. Oftentimes an 8- or 10-pounder or two. As long as the water’s down and there’s no moon.”

  “I meant,” I said, “that flurry we had, when everyone kept hooking up. It was like the river suddenly exploded.”

  “Often happens that way.”

  “That,” Tom said, “was our Solunar period.”

  “You’re joking, right?” I said. “That Solunar stuff. Mysticism. Astrology for anglers.”

  He shrugged. “There are those who swear by it.”

  “Period or no period,” said Gulley, “we wouldn’t’ve had any fishing whatsoever without that cloud cover. Moonlight on the water is the kiss of death. A bright night, it’s not worth fishing. Doesn’t matter how the sun and moon are lined up.”

  “I bet that flurry was a Solunar period,” said Tom.

  “Anybody happen to notice what time it happened?” I said.

  They all shook their heads.

  “I guess we’ll never know, then,” said Tom.

  “You boys want to go again tonight?” said John.

  We definitely did.

  * * *

  Back in the 1930s, John Alden Knight observed that fish didn’t feed consistently all the time, that they seemed to become active at certain times of day and night. He theorized that high activity periods such as we had that night on the Norfork could be predicted.

  Knight noted the central importance of tides to saltwater fishing and wondered if there was a similar variable to account for activity peaks in freshwater fishing.

  If so, you’d know when to go fishing and when not to bother.

  Knight studied 33 variables and concluded that the key was the position of the moon. When the moon was directly overhead or directly “underfoot,” exerting maximum gravitational force, fish became active. These times, which might last as long as 3½ hours, Knight called “major periods.” Halfway between the major periods were “minor periods” of ¾ to 1½ hours. Two major and two minor periods every day, for a total of ten prime hours of fishing.

  His 1936 book, Moon Up Moon Down, explained the theory. Field & Stream has been publishing the monthly Solunar tables ever since.

  Knight cautioned that weather and season and other conditional variables—an approaching cold front, for example, or moonlight shining on the water—affected fish behavior. But everything being
relative, the Solunar tables, he claimed, predicted the best times to go fishing.

  * * *

  When I got back to my room that morning, I looked up the current month’s Solunar tables. That night, we’d have a minor period at 10:30, followed by a major period at 3:50 AM. I’d wear my watch and give the Solunar theory a scientific test.

  I had my gear ready to go at sundown. I felt the urge coming upon me.

  And then it occurred to me that, if the pull of the moon influenced fish, maybe it also affected people. Maybe the Solunar tables had been predicting the comings and goings of my own fishing urges all this time.

  That night, there were no clouds. The full moon shone on the water like daylight, and John called it off.

  So much for science.

  24

  Dobbers and Trailers

  Over half a century ago in his classic Trout, Ray Bergman wrote of fishing nymphs upstream on a dead drift: “In my estimation, this is the most effective way to use nymphs, but unfortunately it is also the most difficult method to learn.”

  Nymph fishing was less popular in the 1930’s than it is today, but Bergman made no claim to having invented or refined the upstream natural drift technique. Nor did he claim credit for suggesting what, at least in hindsight, seems like the obvious, common-sense remedy for the difficulty of this method, which is determining when a trout has eaten the nymph.

  “In the beginning,” he wrote, “it may be advisable to use a dry fly on the leader as an indicator. In attaching this dobber or float, tie it on as short a tippet as you can manage and attach it to the leader from four to six feet above the nymph. A fly with good floating qualities is necessary, say a heavily tied palmer hackle of a color most visible to you. The purpose of this dry fly is to give you something to watch for indications of a strike. Sometimes it will disappear quickly, at other times it will simply stop floating with the current, and often it will simply twitch slightly without going under the surface. All these signs signify a strike, and you must react quickly by striking back or you will miss the fish.”

  Oddly, Bergman did not mention the possibility that a trout might decide to eat the “dobber” instead of the nymph, but, of course, that would happen occasionally no matter how outlandish the indicator fly was.

  In deep water, where the trout are hugging the bottom, Ray Bergman’s rig does the job in a low-tech, all-natural way. Modern strike indicators made of cork, foam, impregnated yarn, or other unsinkable and highly visible materials, however, work much better. “Heavily-tied palmer hackle” dobbers lack the buoyancy to drift weighted nymphs without sinking, nor do they remain afloat for long in heavy, broken currents.

  Another problem with Bergman’s rig is that the dropper arrangement, the length of tippet between the indicator and the nymph, and the air resistance of the indicator fly all conspire to plague the fisherman with leader tangles. You have to cast it with a lazy, open loop—a method that does not allow you to falsecast the water out of your indicator fly.

  If they don’t offend your aesthetic sensibilities, synthetic strike indicators are the practical answer for upstream deep nymphing in heavy currents. But, with some refinements, Bergman’s dobber-and-nymph rig will outfish foam or yarn better than two-to-one (a figure I just made up, which sounds about right) in slow-moving, shallow, clear water—especially when the trout are feeding at or near the surface.

  It’s no secret that even when mayfly duns and adult caddisflies and midges are drifting on top, trout still target emerging nymphs and pupae. Often when they’re maddeningly selective to dry-fly pattern they will eat almost any reasonable facsimile of the subsurface insect. I have found this to be especially true during blue-wing olive and sulphur hatches. The swirls and dimples of feeding trout pockmark the water, but no matter how precise my imitation, long and fine my tippet, accurate my cast, and natural my drift, my dry fly gets few takers. On the other hand, the fish happily gobble a pheasant-tail nymph. I have run into similar selectivity when caddisflies and midges are on the water. Soft-hackle wet flies and midge pupa imitations, drifted a few inches beneath the surface, consistently take trout that spurn the most true-to-life floating imitations.

  The attentive and experienced angler can dead-drift subsurface flies upstream to visibly-feeding fish and do a fair job of guessing when his imitation has been taken, although there is always a lot of hit and miss. If a trout swirls or boils somewhere near where you think your nymph is, lift your rod. Sometimes you’ll find a fish on the end of your line.

  In this situation, a strike indicator improves your odds to nearly 100% (another fabricated statistic), which ain’t bad. Any twitch or hesitation in the indicator means a trout has eaten your fly, and because you know your nymph is suspended beneath the indicator, you can usually tell which boil or swirl means business even before the indicator moves. The problem with the neoncolored synthetic indicator, even aside from the fact that it looks like a glob of trash floating on a pretty stream, is that in clear, slow-moving water it scares trout. Many times I’ve seen a trout approach my drifting nymph, spot the pink or chartreuse strike indicator, and dart away.

  The trick is to choose for your “dobber” a close imitation of the floating fly that’s actually on the water and that the trout might be eating. It should be visible, but not garish. On slow, smooth water all you need is something that you can see. Even a tiny, drab floater offers a visible silhouette, and a spot of color improves it. During those frustrating sulphur and blue-wing olive hatches, for example, I use a low-riding parachute imitation of the natural dun. Once in a while a trout actually eats it, but mainly it allows me to locate my nymph and detect strikes without frightening them. A parachute with a white post makes a pretty good imitation of an emerger or cripple. But I catch about 75% (beware of all angling numbers) of my fish on the unweighted pheasant-tail nymph (which closely imitates both the sulphur and the various blue-wing olive nymphs) that I trail behind it.

  I use the same rig when fish are feeding at or just beneath the surface and I can’t tell which, or what, it is they’re eating. Often the water is littered with a smorgasbord of cripples, duns, spinners, terrestrials, and half-emerged nymphs. A dobber with a trailer at least doubles my chances of figuring it out, and it’s easy enough to experiment with a variety of likely trailer flies until the fish submit their report.

  Here are some other situations where trailing a subsurface fly behind a dry-fly dobber solves tricky problems:

  —On my eastern ponds and, indeed, on waters both still and moving everywhere, trout often gluttonize on emerging midges. They tend to select the pupae that hang suspended in, or just beneath, the surface membrane. Your imitation is impossible to see. But you can locate it well enough to detect a strike if you trail it behind a Griffith’s Gnat or other midge adult imitation.

  —Although stillwater “gulpers” (for which Hebgen Lake is justifiably famous) usually eat high-riding Callibaetis duns, I have sometimes found them fussy. Dangling a Callibaetis nymph (a pheasant-tail is close enough) under my parachute Adams has convinced me that even these surface-feeders gulp nymphs whenever they encounter them.

  —At the early stages of any mayfly hatch, when duns are just beginning to pop onto the surface, it’s helpful to assume that the trout are still focusing on nymphs and emergers. You can locate these fish by their swirls and bulges, but they ignore your dun imitation. Trail a nymph or emerger behind it at least until the trout tell you that they’ve switched to the high floaters.

  —Trout can be especially selective when they’re sipping spinners, but spinner imitations ride so low on the water that the angler simply cannot see it—especially during the low-light conditions when spinners tend to fall. Often trout “pod up” to eat rafts of spinners, so that figuring out which rise came to your fly is mere guesswork. I routinely use a parachute version of the insect with a visible post for a dobber and trail a hackle-tip or clumped-hackle-wing spinner behind it. The parachute isn’t a bad spinner imitation—but the tro
ut generally favor the more realistic trailer.

  —Trout love ants and often select them over any of the other odds and ends they find drifting on the water. An ant makes a great “searching” pattern, too, but a realistic ant imitation, except in giant sizes, is typically impossible for the angler to see on the water. I trail ant flies, both floating and damp, behind a beetle or hopper or even a Royal Wulff (which trout eat more often than you’d expect) and miss few strikes.

  —During any blanket hatch, when insects cover the water and every fish in the river is up gorging on them, locating your good imitation among all the naturals can be next to impossible. Trail a precise imitation behind a dobber that’s a couple sizes bigger than the naturals, or that has a white wing or some other feature that allows you to distinguish it from the others so you can follow its drift. You won’t be able to identify your trailing fly, but at least you’ll know where it is, and when your dobber darts under the water, you’ll know a trout has taken it.

  —When trout appear to be eating adult caddisflies—but not your precise imitation—they might be feeding selectively on either emerging pupae or drowned adults. Dangling a pupa imitation or a soft-hackle wet fly under your floater is a good way to find out.

  —In the absence of specific surface activity, the “hopperdropper” has become the standard go-to searching rig among Western drift-boat guides (and it works equally well on eastern rivers). Drop a Copper John, hare’s ear, or PT nymph off a high-floating grasshopper imitation and throw it against the bank. A beetle or ant dropped off a hopper/dobber makes a lethal combination.

  * * *

  Until I learned how to rig it, I rarely used a dry fly for a strike indicator. I got too many tangles and broke off too many fish.

  Tying the dropper tippet to the bend of the indicator fly’s hook is how I see it most commonly done. This method is strong and secure and minimizes tangles. The problem with it is that even a minimally-weighted nymph tends to sink the rear half of the floater, which looks unnatural and minimizes its appeal to trout. Besides, anytime a fish takes the floater, the trailing system becomes tangled.