Fly fishing for trout in mountain streams is fun. Except when it isn’t.
I like to discover new water. I am constantly looking at maps for thin blue lines I hadn’t noticed before, and constantly keeping my ears open for any whispered hint of a mention of some secret trout creek in some secret drainage in some hidden nook in the mountains. These remote explorations used to get me into trouble back in the day when gold miners working remote Sierra claims didn’t take kindly to their turf being infiltrated by enthusiastic young fly anglers.
(This reminds me of an instance a few years ago when the wife and I were fishing through a very well posted claim on the North Fork of the Yuba. I looked up from my myopic focus on my Parachute Adams to see her in the unattended miner’s camp with her rod leaning against a tree, his gold pan in her hands, happily panning away in the sandy bank next to his camp. “What in the hell are you doing?” I sputtered, shaking my head in disbelief.
“It was just sitting there; I just wanted to try it. If I found any gold I’d put it right back,” she replied, genuinely believing herself.
“You do realize that he is likely as not watching you right now…through the scope on his rifle!,” I replied, still shaking my head and looking over my shoulder, remembering the heavily armed and grizzled miners who glared at me, holding their pistols, with the least friendly eyes one can imagine. She put the pan back where she found it and resumed casting.)
But I ramble.
So, there was this place that I’d had my angling eye on. It was once private, but now had been opened to the public. (The opposite of the usual way of things these days.) It looked on the map like it would be a beautiful meandering mountain stream with undercut grass banks and old logs lying in the water. Just the kind of habitat that big brown trout like to live in, my hopeful angler’s psyche thought.
I had a weekday with nothing much to do except maybe to fix the broken garden fountain, replace the living room trim and paint the walls, clean all the windows in the house and vacuum, fix the clogged drain in the back bathroom, clean the garage, and repair the leaking hose bib back by the tool shed that needs to have the invasive ivy pulled away from the door so that the tools inside can actually be accessed, so I thought that it would be a good time to go check that creek out. It was late enough in the summer that I figured the snowmelt had subsided enough that the creek would likely be fishable. I grabbed a versatile 3-weight graphite rod (keeping a cane rod, my usual meandering-creek rod of choice, in reserve for the next time back to this creek after I discovered that it was full of eager dry-fly-eating trout), and my vest and some wading sandals.
My first mistake was the last words of the last paragraph. I’m just gonna say it: the only environment in which wading sandals excel is in the try-on area of the fly shop where you are purchasing them, thinking, “these are so light and easy and I’m sure going to enjoy not wearing actual wading boots.” Everywhere else that I’ve tried them they suck ass. But for some reason I thought that this mostly sandy bottomed low-gradient creek might just be their milieu. It wasn’t. These sandals are considerately designed with a toe-protecting rubber cap that is perfect for trapping the most uncomfortable gravels under your foot, and the most uncomfortable of these gravels is decomposed granite, the substrate of this particular creek. No amount of awkward in-the-creek leg shaking will allow that gravel to escape once it enters. So, after a while you just bear the discomfort, like a GI in a foxhole with trench foot. Besides the discomfort part, there is the danger part of the sandal, and this consists of the inadequate strip of supposedly traction-supplying carpet that is glued in the middle of the sole. I suppose that if one was capable of only trodding on this strip you might stay feet down on the slick wet rocks. I couldn’t. I had only been in the creek for a few minutes, enduring the uncomfortable gravel trapped under my feet, when I had to cross a short stretch of submerged granite boulders.
Yup… sandals up in the air; head down in the water. To make things worse, every time I tried to stand back up the sandals thwarted my efforts and, after spasmodic contortions of trying to stay upright, back under I went. It’s very embarrassing to nearly drown in a stream that’s only a few feet deep, but at least there was no one to see me except for the three attractive young women mountain bikers watching from the high bank behind me. At least they didn’t say, “Are you OK, gramps?” Instead, they just laughed and rode on.
Every pocket of my vest was now bulging with water, which meant that every dry fly that I had in boxes in those pockets was now waterlogged and as likely to float as I just didn’t. And I was only going to fish dry flies on a creek as deceptively pretty as this one.
As I took off my vest and emptied the water out, I noticed that where I had swatted the several mosquitos on the back of my hands there were now several little strips of blood mixed with creek water, and the back of my hands were also now reoccupied by a fresh battalion of the little fuckers. It occurred to me, after I swatted the back of my neck and came up with a palm of mashed bloody mosquitos, that everywhere on me not covered in fabric was covered in bloodsuckers.
You’d think that as a veteran of both guiding in Alaska as a young man and having been on many Alaskan fishing trips since then, that I would have either become immune to the depredations of this pestilence or would have remembered to bring mosquito repellent. Neither was the case on this day. I should have realized, with all of the water the Sierra received this year, that it was likely to be a good year for mosquitos, if you consider lots of mosquitos to be good.
Maybe it was just the mood I was falling into (those damn sandals couldn’t even keep me from falling into that!), but I couldn’t take any more. Maybe I’ve become a wuss. Or maybe I’ve become wiser than I once was. I packed it in for the day. I quit. Like I said, “Fly fishing for trout in mountain streams is fun. Except when it isn’t.” On this day it wasn’t.
That little stream, though, looked so fine. I will go back. Next time I’m wearing actual wading boots. And bringing mosquito repellent.
