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.