President's Journal November 2006
Monday, 13 November 2006, 11:43 a.m. CST
How To Get Skunked
A recent short trip to Fort Robinson had me thinking a lot about How To Get Skunked. You can guess at the fishing conditions that led to this line of thought. I ended up catching a few tiny fish, but you could still smell skunk up and down the creek, so to speak.
Of course there are lots of ways to get skunked.
You can fish in water that contains no fish (it happens!) On ponds, you may be fishing at the wrong depth, either below, or (more likely) above where the fish are hanging out. On streams you can fish the skinny water, looking for rises to your dry, while the fish are taking tiny nymphs 4 feet below the surface, in the holes.
You can fish at the wrong time - of day, or of the year. Fish are more active early in the morning or into the twilight hours. Unfortunately, that's when we humans like to eat breakfast and dinner, or maybe relax with a drink in hand... This October I thought I had a line on some semi-secret ponds outside of Fort Rob, and had visions of trout as long as your leg dancing on the end of my line. Imagine my disappointment when, after hiking a mile, I found that the ponds were completely covered with algae. The water under the floating green mat was cool and clear, and those hoggish fish may well have been there, but you sure couldn't tell. The algae shouldn't be there early in the Spring, and the fishing might be glorious, but I wouldn't know because I was there in October.
You can use the wrong fly. My personal failure in this area is to prefer dry fly fishing. Yes, they probably are taking nymphs, but doggone it, I like catching them on dries. They SHOULD be taking hoppers, why aren't they?! Take that hopper, you stupid fish!
You can fail to experiment. One of the biggest skunk-calls is the habit of continuing to do the same thing. There's an old saying: One definition of insanity is to do something, not get the desired results, then continue to do the same thing again and again. I think at some time we've all gone "temporarily insane" in this way:
- miss a strike and immediately cast to the same spot 30 more times with no subsequent sign of life (rather than sitting down, resting the pool, considering the best approach, then making one best cast)
- walk up and down the length of the stream with the same fly tied on ("See, it's my go-to fly...."),
- cast upstream 300 times instead of turning and swinging a wet fly or woolly bugger downstream...
But for me, the A-Number-One, sure-fire, can't miss, guaranteed way to get skunked is... to believe that you're too good to get skunked. I know that some people believe that confidence is everything, sort of the Dale Carnegie school of fly fishing, but I guess I'm not one of them. Since I believe in the Gods of Perversity, and that they are in fact some of the most powerful personalities in the Pantheon, I believe that when you get too full of yourself, life will step up and eventually put you in your place. For me, it's essential to remember to try to be humble - every fish is a gift from nature, and nature can decide to deny you, via the gods of Perversity, any success, just as it can make things laughably easy for you.
The worst days of fishing I've ever had have come immediately after times when everything went my way. (Same for pheasant-hunting, by the way - one day it's 3 birds, quick snap-shots, right- or left-going-away shots, long second shots, won't matter, it'll all work. Then the next, see twice as many birds, none in the bag, miss the full-frame point-blank shots, the straight-away shots, get out-smarted and watch the birds squirt out the end of a side-ravine you walked past...) Was it because conditions changed? Did I get locked into a previously-successful pattern of casting/fly/location? Doesn't matter; I've been once again put in my place, the Gods are laughing, and maybe next time I'll remember to be flexible in my approach, reasonable in my expectations, and thankful for whatever success that is accorded me.