Sixteen Years Ago
Article by Ray Helaers

The Maple trees across the street from my house are leafing out. They've still got a ways to go before they completely block my view of the Sound and the Olympics beyond, but tufts of delicate, bright green leaves are exploding on the ends of every branch. It's got me thinking about trout.
         More than any other type of angling, I love trout fishing. It wasn't always so. I grew up in Southern California, where let's face it, the rainbow trout doesn't put its best foot forward.
         Dad taught me to fish, but he never put me anywhere near a trout. We fished in the saltwater. But then Dad's boat, along with my fledgling sporting life, disappeared into the ugly mayhem of divorce. Mom, my brother, sister and I moved to San Diego. I learned to surf, or more accurately, became a surfer. Surfing, if you take it seriously, can ruin you for any kind of meaningful work, but it's not a bad apprenticeship for trout-bumdom.
         I'm getting ahead of myself. After high school I started fishing again, this time looking inland. The ocean's not that much fun without a boat. I fished for trout, or what somebody called trout. The only trout in San Diego County are hatchery fish, planted in tepid reservoirs. They are not the best salesmen for the species. I quickly switched to bass, and became rather devoted to them. I was full of disdain and prejudice against trout, based on those impostors I'd been duping with floating cheese.
         I was in college in San Francisco, having trouble with some girl, and I talked Paul into taking a weekend to go fishing. He talked me into making it a trip to the Sacramento near Dunsmuir to flyfish for trout. We had flyfished a little for farm pond panfish and bass, so I barely knew how to cast, but I knew nothing about river fishing. He had been doing some trout fishing already, and he knew the Sac a little. He'd been trying to get me up there for awhile. I still had my prejudices, but I needed to get away.
         If trout have no business in the reservoirs of San Diego County, the Sacramento River is literally their mother stream. If there is any place where they make the case for themselves, this tortured but still great drainage is it. They certainly sold me.
         I immediately felt the technical appeal of the fishing, the rushing water, the little fly, the ancient cadence of the cast. Bass fishing certainly had its protocols, and I'd come to think of myself as something of an Angler, but this was something else. Underneath the appeal though was the definite feeling of being out of my depth. I had resisted trout fishing because I thought I didn't like trout, but I also didn't want to have to learn it. Bass I knew; plastic worms I knew. I didn't like feeling like a duffer, and it seemed certain I was in for a skunking.
         But I'm a sucker for equipage. The neat little fly box, with its myriad clips and sprung doors, the little wheels of leader material, the chest waders, the long rod and the bright line, the absurdly simple reel, they made me feel archetypal.
         We were at the bottom of a steep canyon, its flanks forested with pine and mazanita, at the top, granite crags. I fished the head of a large deep pool, hemmed by bedrock and large white boulders. The far bank was vertical bedrock, with a tongue of current running along the base. I convinced myself all the fish must be very tight to that far bank. I stood on a boulder and managed the cast, but the drift was something else. I knew the fly had to drift without dragging, but figured that meant it wasn't supposed to go under. I had tied on a #12 red humpy, a good choice for a beginner because it's easy to see and will float forever, even through this sort of torture.
         On the umpteenth cast, as the humpy bobbed along the face of the granite bank, a fish slashed at the fly.
         He missed, and nothing else happened, but I snapped to attention under the thought, I just rose a trout. Given my expectations, I was ready to call the trip a roaring success. I rose a trout; I am a flyfisher. A couple casts later, he came up again. This time I felt weight, but failed to hook him. It didn't matter. He'd risen twice; it couldn't be just blind luck. I could flyfish. My excitement was tempered a little when I examined the fly and found I'd broken the point off on the boulders behind me.
         A little bit later, Paul and I were fishing together farther down the same pool. It was a ridiculous place to be flyfishing, at least with a dry fly and no rising fish. The current was slow and even, the surface smooth. The boulders on our side of the river plunged straight down into green water. The pool could have been thirty feet deep. I liked it though. The smooth even current made it easy to drift the fly, though I was still having a little trouble with some of the finer points. I'd tied on a new humpy, and I couldn't seem to pick up the bushy little fly without making a loud pop on the still pool. This is a good tactic for bluegill, but in trout fishing it's a no-no. After four or five pops had echoed off the boulders, Paul turned to me scowling. Just as he was opening his mouth to yell at me, a trout rocketed up from the green depths of the pool and took the humpy in its mouth.
         He was an honest 17 inches long, a bright, wild rainbow trout from the rainbow's most native watershed. In the open arena of the broad deep pool, he was able to mix up his plays to spectacular effect. He jumped several times. He sped away in sustained runs and sharp jabs. He bored into the depths, and he ran along the surface. Loops of line jumped from around my feet, through my hand, into the bucking rod. All the trout I'd ever hooked before had come to hand rather obediently. I was thrown by both his muscular defiance and the technical aspects of the tackle. I had no idea how much pressure the light tippet could stand, for instance. I played him with fearful care. Of course I wanted him very badly, and when I finally slipped the net under him, what I felt most immediately was relief.
         But even under the so obviously unlikely circumstances of his capture, I knew this trout had changed my angling life. Bass fishing had long since turned me into a dedicated catch and release angler, but after some internal debate, I decided to kill him, as an offering. We fried him with bacon and mounted his head like a trophy onto the grill of my truck.
         That first trip just kept getting better. In the evening we fished a pocket water pool in a thick hatch of mayflies and caddis and I caught several more fish. The next morning, in a beautiful bend pool under towering cottonwoods, I threw an irrationally perfect upstream cast to a rising fish and hooked it on the first try. My profound beginner's luck probably oversold me a little, but I was hooked deep, and I never looked back. I drove around for months with a desiccated and decaying trout head on the front of my truck.
         That was sixteen years ago.

 

Article	051
Created	6-4-2004
Author	Ray Helaers
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