Tag: Arkansas River Colorado

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Lucky We Brought Beer

Warning: Not many fish were caught during the making of this video.

At an average of 3000 – 4000 fish per mile, you’d think they’d be more plentiful than the rocks on the river bed, but sometimes they can be as hard to find as a politician with his hand in his own pocket at election time. Or so it proved to Caveman and I the other day.

Naturally, with a pastime not short on intangibles and variables, there is no corresponding shortage of excuses either. ‘When in doubt, blame the weather’ is a particular favorite, and the last refuge of many a fishing guide. It can always be too hot, or too cold, or too windy, or too something. In reality it often boils down to the fact that on some days, the fish are reading a different book than you, and there is not a lot you can do about it.

All things considered, the river has held up really well this year from a recreational point of view. The last time the fishery experienced similar low flows throughout the summer was in 2002. This was also the summer a seven fold increase in the number of fish over 14 inches was recorded. Less current means fish can spread out over more of the riverbed, resulting in decreased competition for the prime real estate along the edges. More calories go into growing than battling the current and other fish. Generally mid to late August are the Dog Days, with fish hunkering down during the day, awaiting nightfall to get active, and the warmer water temperatures this year have exacerbated this.

Slow days are the ones you hope you brought enough beer. Fortunately, I’ve always believed that when it comes to stocking the cooler, plan for the worst. Its better to have a couple left at the take-out than being two guys eyeing up the last one with three miles still to float. Slow days are when the memories are generated watching time pass anchored in a back eddy or parked beneath the shade of a bridge or cottonwood, BS-ing.

Slow days also make you really fish. Working extra hard to find a feeder, you’ll try different flies and techniques, fishing fast water and slow, shallow and deep, dead drifts and twitches. It also demands extra concentration when you are the recipient of only one or two strikes in an hour. Morale can plummet and self -doubt seep in when you miss those rare opportunities. There are days when the river, and the fish, flatter us, so it is only fitting that there should be an equal number where they humble us as well. If at the end of the day, you’ve more flies lost than fish landed, its fair to say you’ve probably been served a dose of humility, along with a desire to come back and try to even up the ledger.

But the true point of the day is not how many fish or flies were caught or lost, but recognizing the privilege of living in a place that supports such luxuries as fishing for fun ,and the little cubes of ice you buy in a bag that help keep the beer cold. That, and a special word of recognition to shuttle drivers, without whom we’d all be stuck in an eddy somewhere, eyeing the last can.

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The Bother Of Fish

Sooner of later, it comes down to this: How much do you want to be bothered by fish? For that matter, how much bothering do you wish to inflict on them? There’s all sorts of flies and combinations you can tie on that will, in all likelihood, lead to a greater number of fish in the net – bead heads and double bead heads, multi-fly rigs, split shot and indicators, all of which are designed to help the fisherman get down and dirty in the fish’s world.

Yet there is little more guaranteed to interrupt the flow of thoughts, conversation and PBR on the river than the constant tugging of fish on the end of your line. This is where dry flies come in. You select just one, preferably the gaudier and more outrageous the better, something that, were you to encounter a live specimen resembling the one tied to the end of your line, you’d cross the street to avoid it. Neon colored body, legs like tentacles, sized to the dimensions of a rodent or small child.

You cast it to the furthest reaches of the river, those thin margins where the liquid world laps gently at the solid. Throw such a fly out there, you know its going to take a special fish to mess with it. One that’s hungry, possibly a little ticked off at the intrusion, ambitious, on the larger side of normal and actively feeding, rather than minding its own business on the bottom of the river before being rudely hauled to the surface. With this warmer weather and low flows, fish needing a break from the stresses of fish life will tend to head to the bottom of the river during the day, leaving those still full of beans to hang out on the edges and in the shallows, predators awaiting prey.

It is quite possible this is all merely a convoluted justification for not catching as many fish as the guy with the nymphs on the end of his line. It is a sound argument for those who seek the hollow sanctuary of numbers, but personally I’d trade ten fish caught down deep for the sight and sound of one rising to a small, rubber-legged child lazily drifting a bubble line.

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Plenty Of Time To Think

It is not exactly my favorite piece of water to fish, the one from Big Bend downstream to the diversion dam. Once below the dam, the action always seem to pick up for me, but above it, I struggle to catch fish with regularity. Strange, as the structure of the river is excellent, and the biggest fish I have personally caught on the Ark was on this piece. I know many anglers for whom this is their section of choice. I guess I just haven’t figured it out yet.

In other ways, it is my favorite stretch of river. Turning away from the busyness of the highway as it does, the river here flows gentle and pastoral, ambling through meadows and cottonwood stands that quietly speak of times I imagine more simple and idyllic. Every now and then its possible to park the boat river-side and, looking upstream, see not a single sign of human intervention. Its that place on the river where I find I have to work the least to picture how this part of the world must have appeared to those first human eyes.

This particular day, it would have been easy to take in the sight of these same cottonwoods bending and groaning to the wind and decide to delay the float for another time. But then, how often do you get the chance to float the river running clear at 400 cfs at the end of May? And if your M.O. is to only fish when conditions are ideal then it is difficult to make any improvement. Anyone can cast like a pro on a calm day, but wind shows little mercy when highlighting deficiencies in technique and timing.

The smart thing to have done, from a catching point of view, would have been to have fished a nymph rig. Whatever bugs unfortunate enough to have been out and about that day would surely be huddling in the lee of the bushes and undergrowth, blown from the water in an instant. It is worth remembering however that below the surface there is no such thing as wind. Windy days means shorter drifts, which in turn suggests lead to help sink the flies quickly. I thought of golf ball sized wads of nylon and split shot wrapped around the tip of my rod. Prudence and a swirling southerly suggested keeping things simple, so we tied on a single dry and headed downstream.

One of the benefits of not being interrupted by catching anything is the places your mind takes you during the lulls between fish, what Tom McGuane refers to as “the longest silence.” These silences have a tendency to put things in perspective. Its difficult to complain about any aspect of a day on the river. Except if it is freezing cold and I have to guide – then I’ll bitch with the rest of them. We thought and spoke of many things. Surely there are better things to worry about than who marries who, or what. We recalled some departed from this world, and other things that remain on the river, thoughts that dart and flit through your mind like the swallows working the riffles, flashing briefly then lost to the ether.

One particular silence was broken in rather abrupt fashion, in a manner familiar to all who angle. After drifting my dry for ten or fifteen minutes without sign of a fish, I vaguely became aware of the need for a scratch at the back of one ear. Releasing the line from my stripping hand, while one part of my mind was directing a finger to the itch, another was softly ringing an alarm bell. “This is exactly the time a fish will choose to take,” said the voice. It was right. I almost saw it before it happened, left hand scrambling to retrieve the line as the fish rose and took the fly, my ineffectual set not bothering it one bit. The air turned blue. Caveman sniggered. I felt like a guy who keeps sticking his knife in the toaster to see if anything different will result.

By the end of the float, we’d caught a few fish. The wind didn’t work us too hard. I felt reconnected to that piece of the river. Perhaps its a place destined to reinforce to me the value of quality over quantity, and that too is fine by me.

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No Place to Hide

My wife thinks its kind of disturbing I get so excited about dry flies. Truth is, I agree with her on two counts. I do get excited, and it is mildly disturbing. If anglers in general are defined by their underlying optimism, then the dry fly angler is the one who clings doggedly to the belief there is a fish at the end of each and every drift, despite evidence to the contrary. Once in a while, sufficient in regularity to maintain the optimism, he or she is proved correct. Fish are masters of disguise. To cast to where you know a fish resides, even though it cannot be seen, and to have your certainty confirmed as it materializes from its world into yours is about as good as it gets.

There’s a little too much guess work with nymphing below the surface for my liking, a little too much “fire a shotgun into the cloud and see if you hit a goose” about it for me. A devoted nymph fisherman will quote all sorts of facts and figures to you about how much of a fish’s diet consists of subsurface feeding, and how much wider a fish’s field of vision is underwater as opposed to above. They’ll tell you all about the importance of bouncing your flies along the bottom of the river where the big ones live. And maybe they’re right, but I bet they all turn the light out before sex also.

Having lured the fish to the surface, a dry fly angler’s triumphs or tragedies reside in the public domain. When a fish rises to your fly and just as it is about to take it down you jerk it away in a fit of schoolboy nerves, it is hard to blame your ineptness on a rock or stick or some other unseen underwater obstruction as a nymph fisherman can. Best you can do is to reclothe yourself in what shreds of dignity you can muster and press on to the next success or humiliation. I once missed nine fish in the space of thirteen casts. In front of a client. I handed her back her rod.

“See, I told you it was difficult,” was all I had left.

Despite glaring evidence to the contrary, in the form of rising fish tugging, chewing, inhaling and ingesting their flies, some fishermen still try to put the blame anywhere but themselves. The guide is an obvious target. I generally point out that short of leaving them in the parking lot and fishing in their stead, once the fly is in the fish’s mouth there’s not a lot more a mortal can do. Others get more creative. Among the excuses I’ve heard, “The fish on the Arkansas take a dry fly differently than most other rivers. They seem to gum the fly, rather than take it with their teeth,” and “They seem to be just slapping it with their heads rather that biting it, like they just want to stun it,” are personal favorites.

So yes, I do get excited when fishing dries. I get excited when I get it right. I get excited when I get it wrong. I get just as excited when others get it right or wrong. I’m not sure that this is healthy in a fifty-two year old. Still, it could be worse. I could be one of those types that dream of articulated streamers. Now that’s disturbing.

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The 95th Percentile

Spend a season on any given river, a hundred days or more, and you’ll find that there’s maybe five or six that stand out in your memory, days when a healthy river system is revealed for what it should be, a veritable incubator of life and fertility and energy. For the angler, such days are when the planets seem aligned to their own benefit, the momentary convergence of countless variables – barometric pressure, air and water temperature, water level, time of season, favorable work schedule – that coincide on life’s continuum to produce a day of fishing that will lead he or she to believe momentarily that they can do no wrong, at least with a fly rod in hand.

Such a day was last Wednesday on the Arkansas. From the outset, fish fed off the surface, gorging on the novelty of newly hatched caddis from the outset and did so to the end. A sunny morning gave way to a still, high overcast, the early winds of spring subsiding to a gentle downstream caress. Even the fact that I was guiding a couple of attorneys didn’t seem to trouble the Universe, such was the benevolence of the day – no broken rods, no man overboard, no glowering, rumbling displeasure from the heavens above.

Five or six days a season, you make every cast with the expectation of there being a fish at the end of each drift. On these occasions it is easy to believe the assertion of the local fisheries biologist that at any given time there are between four and seven thousand fish per mile of river of river. These are the easy days to be a guide – dip your oars in the water, crack a few jokes, let the fish do the educating. You even overlook the sacrilege of someone throwing a woolly bugger while the fish rise all around you. Even NASCAR tastes deserve to be indulged from time to time.

There’s even room in the day for the occasional existential crisis that comes with drifting a fly for five minutes or so without sign of a fish. Is my fly too big? Should I be further from the shore? Maybe the hatch is over? Invariably, such thoughts are barely expressed and the fly disappears in a toilet-flush boil and you raise the rod tip and feel OK about the world and your place in it once again.

The trick is to appreciate these days for what they are – reward for persistence, for showing up, for all the times you froze your ass off or spent your day deciphering golf ball sized tangles of flies and tippet and indicators twisted around rod tips. As Woody Allen once famously observed, ninety percent of life is merely showing up. Just step up to the plate and start swinging. Once in a while, you’re bound to connect with the sweet spot.

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