Anticipation

"Well, the days are going to crawl by now." said The Fishin' Toe.

See, we just finished planning a fishing trip. The Toe and I try to take a couple of trips a year. We never go anywhere exotic, like Christmas Island or the Cayman Islands, because we're both broke as a joke. We head for the Driftless Area in Wisconsin. Truth be told, it's not even a trip for the Toe, because he lives down there. We used to camp out, until the Toe found a cabin that rents for about the same as a campsite. With the price if gas the way it is, hauling the camper down there would cost more than the cabin does, and the cabin has a refrigerator. Real rustic.

Like any other working stiffs, the Toe and I recognize the wisdom in getting your vacation request in early. It usually takes a couple of e-mails (on company time), a phone call or two and a couple of impassioned pleas to significant others to decide when we want to fish. Then we put our requests in for the time off. Once our vacations are approved, the real planning can begin.

I had to teach the Toe how to plan. He was the kind of guy that would plan to go fishing on Saturday at six in the morning. At five-thirty on Saturday morning, the Toe would be in the living room putting new line on his reel. All his gear would be spread out on the floor, looking like a garage sale at Babe Winkelman's house. The damnedest thing was this; he would be ready to fish at six. But rushing around like that is just asking for something to go wrong. So, gradually I showed him how a guy could do a lot of that stuff well in advance, sometimes as much as two months in advance, and avoid that slightly rushed feeling that comes from trying to tie six dozen Blue-Winged Olives the night before you leave to go fishing.

The Toe took to this new philosophy like a duck to water. Now, he's so good at planning ahead that we sometimes have ice fishing conversations in late August. This is the subject of much head-shaking and eye-rolling by the women in our lives, but by God, we are rarely unprepared and never under-equipped.

So, the vacations are approved and the planning begins. Numerous phone calls will be made, weather will be scrutinized, flies will be tied.

The menu will be a topic of conversation. The Toe and I fish hard. Go back and read that sentence again, because I'm serious. We fish really hard, and it takes a lot of food to keep us going. We aren't gourmets or anything, but we also aren't the type of guys that will suffer if we don't have to. We eat well. One night we'll grill some steaks, we'll deep fry a bunch of chicken wings another night and this year we're keeping some trout (gasp) for supper and possibly breakfast. Another fish camp favorite is what the Toe calls "Welfare Burgers". A big drippy hamburger with a slab of Velveeta melted on top. The cabin we stay in has a toaster, and last spring during the early season opener, the Toe produced a box of Eggos and a package of cinnamon-apple brats from some locker plant he frequents. Sheer genius. A couple of Eggos and a brat for breakfast will stick to your ribs when the fishing is slow and the weather is just short of brutally cold.

As the time to fish gets closer, the conversation will shift to the possible hatches we may encounter. Blue-Winged Olives are always a safe bet, as are caddis flies. Most of our fish are caught on nymphs, but we won't turn down some cosmic dry-fly fishing if the opportunity presents itself.

When the trip is within two weeks, the weather becomes the main topic of conversation. We'll fish rain or shine, but we prefer shine. Or more acccurately, a heavy overcast with no wind. To the Toe and I, wind is worse that rain. As a matter of fact, I'd rather fish on a calm rainy day than a clear windy one. Whatever the weather, we'll fish, but we like to know what to expect. The Toe and I were bass fishing one time and it was raining so hard we put our waders on even thought we didn't really plan on walking in the water. The wind was blowing like a bastard with no end in sight when the Toe looked at me and said, "At least we ain't at work!"

Indeed.

Reflections on Opening Day

I was about half-way to the bridge when The Fishin' Toe called.

"Dude, are you still going fishing?"

"I'm almost there." I replied.

The Toe was doing some tornado siren maintenance, but he said as soon as he was done, he'd be there.

I saw a lot of trucks along the stream, which didn't give me much hope. I don't like fishing with a hundred of my closest friends, especially on the regular season opener, when most of the fish end up in some bozo's creel instead of back in the stream.

When I got to the bridge, my hopes fell even more. The water was off-color and very high. The wind was blowing like hell, and it was colder than a well digger's ass. I got out of the Fishing Assault Vehicle and started putting on my waders. I had to dig through the back of the F.A.V for some extra clothes to layer on to fight the chilly wind. After gearing up, I walked over to the bridge hole and ran a nymph through the deep part of the pool. This pool is so close to the road that it gets fished pretty hard, so I wasn't expecting much. After a few half-hearted drifts I went upstream of the bridge and started fishing in earnest. The wind was blowing so hard, I had to aim my casts about fifteen feet to the right of where I actually wanted to present the fly. One wind-assisted roll cast landed right where I wanted it, tight up against the bank next to a clump of trees. I thought, "If that cast doesn't produce a fish, there is no God."

I should have specified what kind of fish I wanted, because just then my strike indicator darted upstream, I set the hook, and reeled in a fat, wriggling chub. On the next cast I caught his big brother, and decided to head upstream to find some trout.

I should say right now that I'm not real familiar with this stream. Generally, the only time the Toe and I come here is during the Hex hatch in late June or early July. Because of this, I probably passed up a lot of good water as I traveled upstream to the bend pool. This pool has a fast current that flows in from the left and has scoured a deep stony trench out of the pool's bottom. I got one good strike in this trench, but a combination of fast current and my own minimal line-mending skill left me with too much line on the water to get a good hook set.

Just upstream of the bend pool is the Hex pool. This is more of a long slow run than a pool, but Hex pool is easier to say than Hex long slow run. The bottom of the pool is a mixture of silty muck and big ankle-turning rocks, punctuated with sticks and clumps of weeds. I was walking along the bank, drifting nymphs through the grooves between the weeds and rocks. No takers. The left bank of this pool has a long rocky slide carved out by the current. I was picking up for a backcast when suddenly my rod took a nosedive. About a foot or so under the surface I saw a long silvery shape. The trout had mistaken my rising nymph for an emerging insect, and grabbed it when he saw it heading for the surface. The rainbow's white mouth looked about as big around as a coffee cup. Just like that, he was gone. It all happened so quickly, I forgot to set the hook. Such is life.

I continued upstream, with no success whatsoever. Then my phone rang, the Toe was at the bridge. I told him to meet me at the Sulfur pool and we'd fish up from there. The Toe just got a new rod via St. Croix's replacement program and was going to fish with it, wind and high water be damned. When he got to the pool and got all strung up, we continued up stream.

No luck at all. The creek was right at the point of being unfishable, blown out from wind and rain. The Toe gets the idea of fishing the pond near the stream.

"The DNR stocks trout in there," he says, "I want to catch a fish on my new rod."

I told him where he could probably catch a nice chub, but he didn't really seem into that. We piled into the F.A.V. and headed to the pond.

The pond has a nice fishing pier, which surprisingly was unoccupied. We walked out to the end and started casting. About three or four casts later, my strike indicator went down like a crash-diving U-boat. I set the hook and pulled out a fat little stocker rainbow. The Toe and I went on to catch about eight or ten clones of the first fish. Ten-inch rainbows with pinkish-purple stripes and worn-down fins. We turned them all loose, stocker fish taste like fish-food flavored mush mixed with liver. Funny how a year in a trout stream eating bugs can make them taste so much better.

Then the Toe starts hollering that he's got a big one on. I've been fishing with the Toe for most of my life, and he's always got a big one on, so I usually reserve judgement until I see it.

This was a big one. A rainbow in the eighteen or nineteen-inch range, with a gnarly-looking hooked jaw. Beautiful and scary-looking all at once. I grabbed the net and waited for the Toe to subdue the creature. After a couple of good runs, the big stocker was whipped, so I netted the big boy while the Toe retrieved the camera. A couple of snapshots later and the fish was back in the drink.

I looked at the Toe and said, "We're probably the only two clowns out here that would turn that fish loose." No sooner had I said this, that a guy and his son show up and start casting spinners. The dad hooks up with a fish, and after a bunch of yelling he gets it out of the water. It's the twin brother of the Toe's fish. The dad immediately scurries for the truck to get his stringer. Next thing you know, the poor fish is flopping in the water with a big chunk of stringer chain through his gills. The Toe and I began wondering why this guy didn't just stop by the grocery store and pick up a pound of liver for supper; it would have tasted the same, and he wouldn't have had to murder a nice fish to get it.

Wisconsin's Regular Trout Season Opener

It's a gray and gloomy opening morning. It doesn't look like the mercury will rise much above 55 degrees today, and rain is likely. Perfect fishing weather. Wisconsin has an early catch and release season beginning in March, and The Fishin' Toe and I fish quite a bit then, but we like to go out on opening day and fish as well; not to keep fish, more like a rite of spring. It's a way to set our internal clocks. It confirms that we have finally broken Old Man Winter's icy grip, and soon the lilacs will bloom and the baby geese will make their appearance in the park, chasing bugs through the grass and looking like a bunch of tennis balls rolling across the lawn.

Today the Toe and I will be fishing a well-known stream just west of Madison, WI. It's probably going to be crowded, but hopefully the chill in the air and the threat of rain will keep the less-dedicated away. One thing about me and the Toe; we're dedicated. We fished the early season opener in fifteen-degree weather, picking ice from our guides and beards. We've been known to leave camp in the small hours before dawn and not return until the sun sinks behind the hills. One year we tent-camped in Avalanche for a week. It was so cold in the morning that we had to thaw the Toe's wading boots out under the heater in the truck so he could wriggle his feet into them. That evening we went to buy some firewood from Roger W., God rest his soul, and he asked if we were the fellows who were camped out by the creek. When we allowed that we were, he said, "Jesus Christ, boys! It was twenty-two degrees last night! Take all the wood you need." Roger was a good guy, and everyone who appreciates trout and the beautiful habitat they inhabit should remember him in their prayers.
More to come...