President's Journal May 2006
Monday, 01 May 2006, 11:09 p.m. CDT
Duffer's Delight
In May, in England, they call the great Mayfly hatch (actually a version of drakes) the "Duffer's Delight." For those of you not familiar with the term, a "duffer" is an unskilled player, unskillled either by inexperience or incompetence. I've been there, I've "duffed" with the best of them, and I can tell you that it IS a delight to watch big size 8 or 10 mayflies floating downstream like a regatta of Catalina 21's, only to get torpedoed by big German browns. If your imitation is vaguely OK, and your cast less than horrid, one of those "sailboats" will be attached to your tippet, and it will go down in that same spray and flash of color. In July and August, those big browns can be devilishly difficult to catch, earning the Chalk streams a reputation for "technical" fishing and few fish in the net, but in May, during the Duffers Delight, a mediocre fly fisher can sometimes do no wrong. It's as if your feet take you to the right spot, you always select the perfect fly, your rod automatically puts the fly where it must be, you play each fish wisely, and you are one smart son of a gun. Somewhere you picked up 20 points of IQ, lost 15 pounds, and re-grew that long wavy hair the girls liked so much. The lunch-time beer in the pub tastes better than usual, too. That's what the Duffer's Delight will do to you.
Back on more familiar waters, last May I fished Verdigre creek over Memorial Day weekend. The Grove Lake camprounds were packed with RVs, tents, campers, boats, trucks, cars, campfires, and people. To pitch a tent by the time I got there on Saturday, you would have had to bring your own piece of turf to pitch on. But in 2 days of fishing, I saw no one else fishing the creek.
The air was as full of bugs as the campgrounds were of beer cans. I saw tan caddis in a couple of sizes, light-colored midges, slate-dark blue-wing olives, some sort of huge lumbering mayfly (hexagenia?) and a long gangly-legged fly that the British imitate with something called a "spider-legs". Contrary to the "duffer's delight sailboats" of England, I didn't see one adult mayfly floating down the stream. Some caddis were dapping to lay eggs, but all the mayflies were in the air, not on the water.
In the evening, the fish were on emergers of some sort, swirling and slashing near the surface, but not breaking it, except as they porpoised back down or slashed a dorsal fin in the air as they twisted to get whatever they were after. They ignored every classic BWO dun imitation I had, but a green-body, hair-wing peacock-thorax thing I had, floating flush in the film, drew the same swirling strikes. As it got darker, and campers were lighting fires and burning weenies, the fish moved up out of the safe hatchery water, got more aggressive, and went after FOOD.
It's a rare and great thing to be casting a fly to fish who almost don't care about presentation, line-slap, sunlight flashes or long human shadows on the water. It is laughably easy, just as it can be frustratingly impossible other days. The biggest fish I caught was 15 inches measured against my rod, and the smallest was maybe 12. Every fish had great color, and lots of fight. Not one of them was the standard, calibrated, pale, stocker trout, and I was happy to put each of them back where they belong. I stopped at 9:30, when I broke a fly off in a fish and couldn't see to re-tie.
My wife recently put an aerated goldfish pond in our back yard, larger than the previous one, and I helped dig the hole. In exchange, I got rights to put one trout in it, and I was looking forward to going out every evening and seeing "my" trout swimming around in the back yard. I even thought about casting into the pond. Not that I'd want to continually pester the little guy, but from time to time, you know, just to keep from getting rusty -- maybe break off the bend of a few hooks, just for him... The only condition was that the trout couldn't be so large as to eat the baby goldfish. I figured maybe 5 or 6 inches would be just about right. More than once on Verdigre creek, those little inexperienced native browns were the ONLY fish I could fool with a fly in a long weekend of wading and casting, so once I saw the bugs in the air on this Memorial Day trip, I fgured my prospects for stocking the pond were good.
The May "Duffer's Delight" on Verdigre sent my plans awry, and while I had some of the nicest dry fly fishing I've had on the creek, I didn't get the backyard fishpond stocked. I can honestly say that it was the only fishing trip of my life where every fish I caught was bigger than I wanted.