Trout Eyes

by William G. Tapply

  Henry’s Fork super-guide Bob Lamm showed me a better way to rig a two-fly system that casts without tangling, drops the weight of the nymph under the hackled part of the indicator fly, and has no weak links. First he ties a dry fly to the end of the tippet as if it were the fly he intended to catch fish on. Then he knots a 12–24-inch length of tippet of one size smaller diameter directly to the eye of the indicator fly and ties the trailing fly to the other end. I have found that with this set-up I can false-cast the water out of my floating flies and throw tight loops and all the necessary types of cast as effectively as I can with a single fly.

  Now, whenever I expect to find fish at or near the surface, I usually rig up with two flies from the beginning. I make my best guess when I tie on the dobber, and I change the trailer as many times as I need to. The dobber-with-trailer setup gives me many advantages—and presents no handicaps that I’ve yet discovered.

  25

  Animal Wrongs

  Until eight years ago, I didn’t pay much attention to the animal-rights movement. I had a general understanding of what they believed (they thought the Bill of Rights applied to spiders and catfish and porcupines the same as to people), and I’d read about some of the stunts they’d pulled to promote their beliefs (mostly silly). I knew there were a few certifiably dangerous fanatics among them—people who burned down medical laboratories and threatened to murder researchers who used animals for testing and experimentation—but for the most part, they seemed to be harmless get-a-lifers.

  In December of 1996, though, the animal-rights folks struck close to my home, and I decided I better take them seriously. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), the largest, best-funded, and most media-savvy of the myriad animal organizations, sent a letter to Peg Campbell, the head ranger at the Walden Pond State Reservation in Massachusetts, with copies to all the Boston and local newspapers, who dutifully reprinted it under headlines such as “Animal Activists Angle for Fishing Ban at Walden Pond” (the Boston Herald).

  The letter was signed by Davey Shepherd, PETA Save Our Schools [get it? schools?] Campaign Coordinator. It said:

  Dear Ms. Campbell:

  On behalf of PETA’s more than 15,000 members in Massachusetts, we would like to request that you ban fishing at Walden Pond.

  As you know, fish have a neurochemical system like ours, the brain capacity to experience fear and pain, and sensitive nerve endings in their lips and mouths, and they begin to slowly die of suffocation the moment they are pulled out of water.

  Fish have individual personalities, too. They talk to each other, form bonds, and sometimes grieve when their companions die. They communicate with one another through a range of low-frequency sounds (audible to humans only with special instruments), expressing courtship, alarm, or submission. Fish also enjoy companionship and develop special relationships with each other. And since they enjoy tactile stimulation, they often gently rub against each other.

  We feel sure Henry David Thoreau would have wanted Walden Pond to be designated a sanctuary for all wildlife. He wrote more than 100 years ago, “. . . I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect.” Ending fishing at Walden Pond would be a wonderful tribute to the great humanitarian and his love for animals.

  PETA has produced and would be happy to provide you with “No Fishing” signs free of charge to help institute the ban. Please feel free to call me at 757-622-7382, extension 612, if you have any questions, and please let us know what you plan to do. Thank you for your time and consideration.

  I’d fished for trout and smallmouth bass at Walden Pond since I was a kid. I’d lived in Concord, Thoreau’s hometown. I’d studied his books about Walden, the Concord and Merrimack rivers, the Maine woods, and Cape Cod, and I knew that Davey Shepherd had taken Thoreau’s fishing quotation way of out context.

  Shepherd’s anthropomorphic images of fish grieving and courting and enjoying “special relationships with each other” should have made me laugh.

  But this was my Walden Pond he was targeting. It wasn’t funny.

  I called Davey’s extension at PETA. He seemed to be a humorless, mild-mannered, intelligent man. He had an unmistakably British accent. It was unclear whether he’d read Thoreau. He asked me if I wanted some free No Fishing signs.

  Davey referred me to Tracy Reiman, PETA’s “national antifishing coordinator.” She used phrases like “aquatic agony” and told me how a famous London designer was creating a costume for their anti-fishing mascot, “Gill the Fish,” who they planned to send out to disrupt bass tournaments. Ms. Reiman explained that PETA also intended to exploit the power of the Internet to promote their agenda. “Ultimately,” she told me, “what we want is for people not to fish.”

  Peg Campbell, the recipient of the PETA letter, just shrugged and smiled. She couldn’t ban fishing at Walden if she wanted to—which she didn’t—because to do so would violate the terms of the Reservation’s deeds. PETA, she said, knew that. They really didn’t expect anything to happen. It was all about publicity. She advised me not to worry about it.

  But I was worried. Walden Pond really wasn’t the point. There were millions of people who didn’t know any better, well-meaning, non-fishing, soft-hearted, animal-loving folks whose common sense I didn’t trust. They might fall for this nonsense. PETA, I knew, was deadly serious. They wouldn’t give up.

  They had my attention.

  Shortly after the Walden letter, PETA took aim at catch-and-release angling, which they equated to “torture disguised as sport.” Their arguments rested on the assumption that fish experienced pain and fear the way humans do. This seemed silly and far-fetched and self-serving, which probably accounted for the fact that their crusade against fishing wasn’t gathering any momentum . . . until some Scottish scientists conducted experiments that, they claimed, proved that fish did, indeed, feel pain.

  The researchers discovered that fish had nerve endings called “polymordal nociceptors” in their heads and mouths, just like people. Moreover, injecting bee venom into the nociceptors of rainbow trout produced “anomalous behaviours” that the researchers described as “strikingly similar to the kind . . . seen in stressed higher vertebrates.”

  In other words, fish felt pain . . . just like us.

  The animal-rights propaganda machine proceeded to blitz the media with stories. Headlines such as “Fish DO Feel Pain, Scientists Say” appeared in newspapers and magazines, on television and the Internet. PETA chortled: We were right all along!

  But wait . . .

  Most of the stories didn’t mention the fact that the scientists, following standard experimental procedure, had also injected a control group of trout with a mild saline solution. These control trout did not behave “anomalously,” meaning that it was the bee venom—not the prick of the needle—that caused their “pain.”

  You don’t have to be a scientist to realize that hooking a trout on a Size 6 woolly bugger is quite similar to pricking its lips with a hypodermic needle. If anything caused pain and fear in trout, the Scottish researchers proved that it was not jabbing something sharp into their mouths. Unless you soak your flies in bee venom, in other words, you won’t cause anomalous behaviours.

  As these things typically go, it’s taken longer to debunk the fish-feel-pain hoax than it took PETA to promulgate it.

  * * *

  I’m keeping my eye on PETA and their anti-fishing crusade. Here’s what they’ve been up to recently:

  • They’re trying to persuade the Boy Scouts to “demerit” its fishing merit badge.

  • They’ve been publicizing the mercury and PCB contamination of fish—not to promote clean water for healthy fish, as you might expect, but rather as an anti-fishing argument.

  • When the animated film “Finding Nemo” was nominated for an Oscar, PETA declared the movie a compelling manifesto against the barbaric practice of imprisoning fish in aquariums, the finny equivalent of “Bambi.”

  Oh, well.

  I intend to keep
my eye on the anti-fishing movement. Still, I think Peg Campbell was right. The PETA folks are a minuscule minority of true believers, earnest and committed, but not worth worrying about.

  Peg’s reply to Davey Shepherd’s Walden letter put the whole issue into proper perspective:

  Dear Davey:

  Many thanks for casting us your letter regarding our chums, the fish. Many special interest groupers have tried to land us with the same line. At Walden Reservation we try to avoid being gaffed by such carping correspondence, so my response will be brief.

  Our piranha budget is shrimpy and we cannot afford to spend any extra clams on such a project. Further, our mantapower situation is such that the park already shells out more than it makos.

  You may think, this being Walden, that we are perched above the rest of the parks and that we don’t get the blues or pout over the fate of our scaley friends. Believe me when I tell you that Walden is not a Gilled Lily. With less money, we are reely in a pickerel. Our roe boats are leaking; our head of grounds, Ray, is out with a shiner. The fact is, we are really skating on thin ice.

  I won’t string you along by casting about for other excuses. But many fishermen at Walden Pond are as attunaed to nature as you are. Oh sure, a few are basstards, but almost all of them have haddocked up to their littlenecks with half-baked ideas like yours. And while you flounder about trying to f-eel good about yourselves, most of these folks live in the reel world.

  Frankly, Davey, I think your effort to try to a-bait sport fishing at Walden Pond is eel-advised. I see trout fishermen’s hackles stiffening; indeed, it could easily spawn a whale of an uproar. I think their anger will truly shark you when you encounter it. This is something they love to do, and I assure you they won’t give it up just for the halibut.

  I hope my response wasn’t too lure-id. My crabby disposition lately comes from dealing with so many suckers. Do drop me a line if you are planning to come to Walden. And take the Pike. It’s faster unless you encounter a snag or a jam.

  Sea you soon.

  26

  Mouse Ears and Hendricksons

  When I was a kid, our fishing season officially opened when Charley Watkins called from Maine to announce that the ice had gone out at Sebago Lake. Charley ran the ramshackle cabin-and-boat-rental up there, and he knew that we Massachusetts boys were itching to go fishing after a long New England winter.

  “You fellas better git up here yestiddy,” Charley would yell into the phone. Charley yelled because he was stone deaf. “I got Cabin Four waitin’ for you.”

  “WE’LL BE THERE FRIDAY NIGHT,” my father would scream.

  “You gotta speak up, Mr. Tapply,” Charley would yell. “Must be a bad connection. How’s Friday night for you?”

  Shortly after iceout on Sebago, the smelt began swarming in the mouth of the Songo River. Landlocked salmon came from all over the lake to feed on their favorite forage, and they would strike Grey Ghosts and Warden’s Worrys trolled on fly rods off the stern of one of Charley’s clunky old rowboats.

  Charley Watkins’ annual call came anywhere from the third week in April to early May. Eventually we noticed that no matter when he called, it was always just a day or two after the apple tree in our front yard—100 miles southeast of Sebago—burst into bloom. “Charley’s gonna call tonight,” my father would say. “He’s got his eye on our apple tree.”

  We laughed about it. It was our superstition, one more case of connecting two unrelated events such as walking under a ladder and losing money on the stock market in a cause-effect way. It was, we thought, one of those random, inexplicable things, a coincidence, what logicians call a “post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy,” as if the blooming of an apple tree in suburban Boston actually caused the ice to go out of a lake in southern Maine.

  But, of course, the connection between our apple tree and iceout on Sebago was not a coincidence. In nature, explanations are sometimes hard to find. But nothing is random.

  * * *

  As winter slides into springtime here in New England, we natives watch the trees that grow along the banks of our favorite trout streams. According to folklore—and by actual observation—when the year’s new maple leaves reach the size of mouse ears, it’s time to go fishing. That’s when the Hendricksons—large, smoke-winged mayflies that trout find irresistible—will begin to hatch.

  Observant fishermen in other regions have their own, equally dependable, Hendrickson predictors. On certain Catskill streams, for example, the first Hendrickson hatches coincide with the blooming of the dogwoods. On other rivers, anglers look for blossoms on the swamp violets or bloodroot plants.

  Everywhere, in fact, the life cycles of riverside flora and aquatic insects and other creatures are intimately intertwined. On some Rocky Mountain streams, chokeberry blossoms signal the beginning of the salmonfly hatch. Golden stoneflies appear when the wild roses burst into bloom along the banks, and green drakes hatch when the marsh marigolds begin to flower. On other rivers, these links do not hold true. But the observant trout fisherman can discover different, equally reliable, signals.

  In nature, all life cycles rotate according to the same, mysterious timetable. Migrating birds appear—and depart—in the identical sequence every year. Insects hatch, wildflowers bloom, ice forms and melts, animals emerge from hibernation and bring forth their young, trees turn color and drop their leaves, fish spawn. It’s all ordered, predictable, and interconnected, and observing how it works is one of the pleasures of spending time out of doors, even if you’re not a fisherman.

  Early settlers gave the shadbush, a New England woodland shrub, its name. They noticed that along the coast the shadbush’s white blossoms always opened just at the time when the American shad, an anadromous fish, first entered tidal rivers to spawn. Today’s savvy shad anglers keep an eye on the shadbush. It occurs on different dates from year to year, but it always tells them when to go fishing.

  Inland and at higher elevations, the blossoming of the shadbush coincides with the hatching of the white-winged caddisfly called, naturally, the “shad fly.”

  Of course, it’s not coincidence, it’s not folklore, and it’s not mysterious. It’s a science called phenology, from the Greek word phaino, meaning “to appear.” Phenology is the study of how periodic events such as flowering, breeding and migration make their regular, interconnected, and sequential appearances, especially as they relate to climate and weather.

  The more time I spend outdoors, the more phenological links I’ve noticed. When I spot the spring’s first migrating redwing blackbird in the marsh across the street, for example, I know that the trout will be feeding on midges in my local trout ponds—and those two happy events always seem to coincide with my first woodchuck sighting in the pasture behind the barn.

  When the iris blossoms open up in my backyard rock garden, I can count on finding smallmouth bass on their spawning beds in the big lake. The autumn’s first blue-winged olive mayflies appear when the sumac turns scarlet along the riverbanks.

  For the past several Octobers, I’ve noticed, the flight woodcock have flocked into the poplars on John’s Knoll the very night that the last leaf drops off the old lightning-struck sugarbush beside the abandoned farmhouse at the crossroads.

  Other irises, sumac patches, woodchucks, and maple trees don’t have the same predictive qualities as these particular ones. These are my personal phenological connections, and they probably won’t work for you. But discovering your own unique local patterns is the reward and pleasure of becoming an amateur phenologist anyway.

  The unfolding sequences of natural events are more or less dependent on local weather patterns, climate, latitude, altitude, and even longitude. Spring moves north at about 100 miles a week—a nugget of ancient farmer’s wisdom that the science of phenology bears out—and it comes earlier along the coast and at low elevations than it does inland and in the hills. Shad bushes blossom—and shad flies hatch—later in the Green Mountains of Vermont than they do along the Connecticut
coast. It happens later some years than others, but barring catastrophic events such as flood and drought, the connections among these events are unchanging. They are linked in complex but logical ways to such measurable variables as the temperature of the earth and the sea, the phase of the moon, and the angle of the sun.

  Old Charlie Watkins has been gone for many years. Now we have the Internet and the Weather Channel and hot-line phone recordings to tell us what’s going on where, if you want to trust them, and we can still get local updates from friends with telephones. As for me, I’d rather watch the maple trees and shad bushes and redwing blackbirds and let my seasons unfold in their ancient, predictable, and comforting ways.

  27

  Bass Bugging Myths and Misconceptions

  When I started going bass-bug fishing with my father, oh, close to fifty years ago, I was entranced by the utter simplicity of it. Anytime we could sneak away for a few hours, we brought a five- or six-weight trout rod and a small box of generic deerhair bugs, launched our canoe, and took turns paddling and casting along a shaded shoreline. We always caught some fish. Sometimes we caught many fish, and more than our share of big ones.

  During the ensuing half century, a lot of so-called lore has been added to what Dad and I knew. Experts have written many books (I myself am guilty of a couple of them) and countless magazine articles. Scores of fancy new bass bugs have been designed. Specialized equipment has been invented.

  If you didn’t know better, you’d think bug fishing for bass was as complicated as dry-fly fishing for trout.

  It’s not. That’s the Number One myth about bass-bug fishing.

  There are others:

  Myth #2: You need heavy equipment to cast bass bugs.

  Aside from raising and catching big bass on the surface, the most addictive aspect of bass-bug fishing is casting to all the interesting targets a shoreline offers. Bass lurk around structure and cover and won’t move far to eat, so the angler needs to drop his bug into some tight spots. Bug fishing requires accurate casting, and a lot of it. Throwing an eight- and nine-weight line will quickly take the fun out of it.