President's Journal April 2006
Saturday, 01 April 2006, 11:07 p.m. CST
Fishing under a high pressure system
Last years Spring Fling speaker, Ed Engle, said two things that have stuck with me, and both recently came back to mind.
The first was an off-hand comment during his presentation where he mentioned that he likes, when possible, to go fishing when a low pressure system has stalled out over the Rockies... the bugs hatch in profusion, stay on the water longer, and the fish gorge on them.
A couple of weeks after that, Neil Boston and I did a Sunday one-day up & back trip to Verdigre creek, under a robin's egg-blue sky, a falling thermometer and a rising barometer. Driving up, I was telling Neil that Ed said he likes to fish under a low-pressure system, and Neil, who has a full schedule and like me has two teen-age daughters, said: "I like to fish when I can get away to do it."
I caught a couple of stockers on the ever-faithful gray scud; Neil got skunked. The fish pouted, hung out in the deepest holes, and dived for cover after one bad cast. We both separately walked hundreds of yards of stream, never seeing a fish except those few that we scared out of hiding as we shuffled upstream. The fish is the slow deep pools would spot our flies drifting towards them and fin left or right, out of the way, making sure that the fly wouldn't accidentally snag them, don't even mention considering eating the fly! But we lowered the pressure of that high-pressure system, that day, standing around stamping our feet, sipping piping hot tea out of Neil's Kelly Kettle, airing observations and concerns until they evaporated with the kettle's steam.
The second memorable saying from Ed was his answer to my question "What's been the biggest change you've seen in flyfishing in the past 20 years?" His answer: "Guides. Twenty years ago we just "went fishing." Now, nobody has that kind of time. You've got to get a guide and make the most of every minute on the water." And guides are expected to get you into fish, by the way. Some guides stand by your elbow, tie on your fly, tell you where and when to cast, when to strike, how to play the fish, and how to release it. Others point you towards the water, and stand off on the bank smoking and sipping a coke/tea. They seem to cost the same, whichever approach they take (and to expect the same size tip.) One day with a guide will cost you the equivalent of a new Sage, 2 days would get you a new bamboo rod; a guided week at a lodge is worth 1/4 of the average new car...
As I've mention before, learning on your own about a body of water can be a slow, irritating, frustrating thing, but it's worse when you're paying a guide 3 times your hourly wage, and you're still not catching fish. You're either thinking about all the positive things you could have used that money for, or you're getting mad at the guide for not getting you into fish (or both), and the guide is either cursing his luck for having drawn a hapless "sport" or thinking, "Well, there goes the tip!" (Which by the way, constitutes a high percentage of his final take-home cash for the day.) Regardless, it's bad.
And yet, according to Ed, "guiding" has been the biggest change in the last 20 years of fly-fishing.
We work more than 40 hours a week, we drive Lexuses and Suburbans and Landcruisers, take 3-day weekends instead of 2-week vacations, buy top-of-the-line equipment (because if you don't have much time to fish, you want to have the best on your side.) We fly into the mountains instead of drive, because it maximizes the "quality hours" of that 3-day weekend.
And so, no matter what the weather is doing, rising or falling barometer, we go when we can get away. We fish under a high-pressure system.
Here's hoping that this year we all can spend a little more time fishing under a low-pressure system.
Lee