It will be a soft late-summer night, breezy but warm. Swallows will swoop through a blood-orange sunset. Then, when there’s only lavender left in the sky, bats will pirouette above us, inky silhouettes limned against a void not quite so black. While we’ll have only two, two and half hours before dark, it would be fine to fish into the gloaming.
Texting is a communication clearly designed with Steve in mind.
“Fish tonight?” I send him.
“Tonight works,” he replies a minute later.
Now that he’s committed, I confess the caveats. “Going to be a full moon, and hatches are doubtful.”
“Don’t care. See you in 30.”
Half an hour later, Steve pulls his truck into the driveway, steps out of the cab, grunts at me, and sinks to his knees on the lawn. Rascal, a golden retriever with the finest soul I’ve met in anything, is already waiting for him. Soon they roll around in the grass, moaning and whining only partly because both now have stiff hips.
It’s a ritual. So is the process of launching Steve’s truck-topper five minutes later, which is, to be honest, traditionally awkward. Steve prefers to load and unload alone because he built the truck rack, knows the boat’s balance points, just where a gunwale might slip off the crossbar. And he’s done this solo for decades.
Steve’s big, the size of professional defensive linemen, used to handling objects and operations in ways few other people can manage. His reach is roughly seven inches longer than mine.
He spent two years logging forest preserves with a team of Percheron horses, felling trees and skidding logs in remote areas, one of the most dangerous jobs not assigned to prisoners. This has left him committed to considering each action carefully, because every day is filled with hundreds of steps that, performed badly, will cripple man and beast.
So why is it awkward? Because I feel obliged to help and get in the way. Steve is used to this and, recognizing my reluctance to stand idly by, losing face, doesn’t complain. This works for us.
In a trice, we’ve hauled the boat down a short, grassy slope onto a tiny beach, there to load it up. The beach is the narrow tip of a narrow fjord, bordered on both sides by fingers of land that separate it from broader bays. We settle ourselves and begin motoring out the longer, steeper finger, where the slope’s 60 or 70 degrees, a fractured granite wall from which second-growth evergreens — many over 100 feet tall — somehow find purchase on shelves and in cracks, towering over ashes and maples with splayed trunks and branches flush with leaves beginning to change color.
This outing was spontaneous. My only plan was to leave this to Steve. We favor different parts of the lake. He likes the area he can see from the deck of his house, so that’s where he’s steering us.
“ Well then,” I say from the bow, looking up after clipping the tag off new tippet.
His eyes are hooked. “No talk yet,” he answers in a voice that’s both murmur and growl.
I laugh instantly, delighted. This admonishment is also common, even welcome, or — let me just say it — endearing in the most manly way.
Steve comes to these evening jaunts from his job as general manager of a homeowners association, a couple of hundred houses spread out over several square miles, from tiny, 90-year-old cabins to new custom homes, almost mansions. In these live as wide a variety of residents: older folks with deep roots; middle-aged, back-to-nature sorts; and lots of young families, willing to trade long commutes for space and trees, a pretty private lake, roads safe for their children to walk. To these add a few folks a little too extreme to play well with others: a hoarder or two and several armed against intruders who any day will arrive in black helicopters.
The job’s a combination of herding many cats and keeping a few apart. Luckily, what the majority agree upon is keeping Steve. Less happily, the association has a board, which gives the most earnest and invested residents — also the most adamant and egoistical — a platform from which to preach.
“No talk now” means one or more of them got to him today.
Mine’s been different. Writing and more writing. A call from an editor, couple chats with friends and family — maybe a total of half an hour of phone conversation, because I’m not keen on talking that way anymore. And that’s a problem. I’ve always been obsessive about news. These days, the Internet offers me too much, most of it awful, and human contact, even over the phone, helps dispel the darkness. So does fishing, which I know will soon lighten both of our moods.
Maybe. When I see Steve preparing to let out a line behind him, I hesitate, then do the same. Mine’s a sink-tip that came to me used circa 2000 and is still a favorite. I’d intended to use it tonight to fish over rocky areas where smallmouth bass lie in ambush, but figure it will drag behind a boat all right, even with its hinge. And of course, when we find fish, we’ll cast.
Until then we’re trolling.
TROLLING, mea culpa maxima.
| F |
ly fishers who appreciate art and history admire iconic streamers such as Carrie Stevens’s Gray Ghost and Bill Edsen’s Edsen Tiger. And it might surprise others as much as it did me: Theodore Gordon, America’s “father” of dryfly fishing, tied a Bumblepuppy streamer for Catskill waters.
Sometimes these flies were cast. But often, and maybe more often than not, the long-shanked Rangeley style were trolled, a technique that began — for trout, anyway — in Great Britain during the mid-nineteenth century, as noted by
Bob Petti, in How to Dress Salmon Flies. And soon trolling, mainly in still waters, was standard operating procedure in the Northeastern U.S., around the Great Lakes, and beyond.
It’s still popular, I suspect, but it’s also suspect, more generally. The static act of holding a rod while a moving craft gives a fly or flies motion gets little respect from today’s tribe. I can’t even remember the last time I saw the practice described in a fly-fishing-only magazine or a dedicated book on the subject since the 2011 reissue of Dick Stewart and Bob Leeman’s Trolling Flies for Trout and Salmon, first published in 1982. If the subject is not officially out of bounds, editors seem to rank it somewhere below illustrated articles addressing prostrate problems.
That’s true, even if most anglers understand that trolling is often the most effective way to cover water and to find concentrations of fish, sometimes the best way to angle with kids and tyros, also that there’s more skill involved than is obvious to a gimlet eye. But none of that changes the hard fact is that trolling typically requires minimal casting, a part of the sport most American fly fishers consider essential. To take casting out of the picture is like hitting a baseball off a tee.
This doesn’t stop people — possibly you — from dangling a line while moving from one place to another in a float tube or boat, occasionally pulling the line-up and throwing it out to the side and “kicking creatively.” But for many, a fish hooked this way doesn’t “count” as much as one that strikes a strip manipulated by you.
I’ve no intention of challenging the generalizations above. Other than dragging a fly while repositioning in float tubes — using, of course, creative kicks to mimic life — I’ve not done much trolling for a quarter of a century. But back in the early 1980s, a pal and I resurrected a maimed Sunfish sailboat. Falling so far from grace by late summer, we used the small gang-trolling rigs included in a overflowing shopping cart of tackle I bought at a store in Winters that was abandoning the fishing market for good. These consisted of a light wire strung with six or eight blades not much bigger than a size 3 Mepps, each separated from one another by lines of colored beads.
When a big enough fish took this rig and jumped, it looked to be trailing Queen Nefertiti’s necklace. And a lot of fish did take it. Largemouths from San Pablo Reservoir, along with stocked rainbows near double digits. Also, from ponds behind a sake brewery — fishing at night, well armed — stripers from 10 pounds to twice that. To these, add smallmouths and more trout from Berryessa and four or five species of big panfish and perch from all over. These fish made us happy.
But not happy enough. Even a small flasher rig requires a heavy rod to pull it, best saddled with a conventional casting reel to prevent line spin. And while thick-shouldered stripers, for which we used nine-inch Rebels, fished solo and stripped of five hooks, would certainly give us a run for our money, such gear overpowered anything much smaller.
That wasn’t the case a dozen years later, fishing for silver salmon off Tofino, the northernmost point on Vancouver Island. Here’s how the locals catch them on 7-weight and 8-weight rods.
Trolling: no casting at all. Knot on a 10-to-12-foot leader with a 0X tippet or stronger. Thread onto the tag end a tiny clevis attached to a spinner blade about the size of a nickel. Below that, slip on a metal bead to act as a ball bearing. Then tie on a four-to-six-inch bucktail, blue/ white, green/white or some combination, usually rigged with tandem hooks.
Pull off 10 feet of leader, maybe three inches of fly line. Flip this out just behind the propeller wash — and I mean right there, at the far edge of the white boil. Raise your rod so that the tiny spinner blade flips on the surface, looking a great deal like an excited herring or anchovy. In theory, the wash creates a boil that fish mistake for a bait ball. Hold tight as the boat moves surprisingly fast. Peer into Tofino’s brilliantly clear water and —
“Silvers love to chase” is the axiom up there. And boy howdy, do they: with fair light and decent polarized glasses, you’ll see them tear in from the side or a brighter flash spear through the froth just below you. The stress a high-speed grab puts on a rod with that little line out is, by my estimate, roughly the same as it puts on your heart.
When you’ve found a coho school, cut the engine and cast weighted Clousers.
Then, of course, there’s fly-fishing for billfish, with a skipper who searches out prey and a mate hanging a teaser he’ll yank in when it’s time for an angler to make —
— one cast. . . .
Steve and I are unlikely to hook anything as momentous as a salmon or sailfish, though one can’t be sure. There’s a monster in the lake, I was assured by the first two fishers who filled me in on its denizens — an older couple who didn’t care if people believed them or not. And that became the first verse of an epic limerick a very young Sophie and I composed driving to school winter mornings:
There’s a monster in this big lake,
Or some folks say it’s so.
The day it eats a jet ski,
We’ll surely let you know.
Meanwhile . . . Steve and I cruise into a pleasant evening, hugging the longer, steep-sided bank. We cast occasionally and carefully when we encounter trees that failed to survive last winter, mild as it was. Eventually, these deadfalls will break loose, drift, and over years, sink slowly, denting a few props before joining a vast eerie forest on the lake bed — layers and layers of giant logs, some stacked up like pick-up sticks, cut to rebuild San Francisco after the quake and fire, bundled into rafts and barged 12 miles from a still-wild end of the lake to a sawmill at the other. How so many escaped nobody seems to know. Scuba divers insist that these include specimens a dozen feet thick, but none I’ve met have visited depths ranging to four hundred feet — or six hundred, according to old maps displayed at a local museum, along with photos showing stumps 24 feet in diameter. No harvest allowed.
Lines out, we watch for rises as the sun drops to the top of a mountain a dozen miles away. My ancient Minn Kota hums agreeably, set to the second of five settings because the first no longer works. Steve recently oiled a few fittings, but neither of us is talented or daring enough to open the housing, see if we can fiddle with or solder something to get the lowest speed back. It really doesn’t matter much. With the weight of the boat, battery, motor, gear, anchors, and us, we’ve 30 pounds of thrust pushing a full quarter ton.
Around the point we go, suddenly heading into a medium breeze streaming down the lake. I cast to a shelf running along the rocky shore edge and quickly pick up a smallish smallmouth. Then we head up the finger’s backside into the next, much broader bay, with sandy shallows and visibility of six or seven feet. We drift a few minutes, shooting casts toward another drop-off. No dice, so we move on. Apparently, the time is ripe. Steve lights a cigar and exhales a question into smoke. “So. What’s the news about Max and school?”
This has been a drama unfolding over many months. Some readers will be keenly aware that applying to colleges and financing a college education is like putting together a mortgage for a house you can’t afford while submitting enough essays to fill a small book and traveling to multiple campuses. Meanwhile, you must maintain your GPA, which in Max’s case means working hard in hard-science advanced placement classes.
Steve listens, nodding. Only last year, he paid off his part of his youngest daughter’s tuition and fees. (Retirement isn’t something we talk about much.) Two of his trio are married now, the last one at a small lodge in Belize.
Steve paid a half-day charter while they were there, hoping for billfish, trolling without a take, save for a couple of needlefish. “But I can always say I tried.” So far, we’re not doing much better.
And so far, we’ve not seen a bug, except for half a dozen midges so tiny they might have been motes in my eye. Two swallows, total, are scouting way up high.
We turn to follow another steep shoreline, broken in the middle by a short beach that looks to have been formed by a rockslide. A group of teenagers have set up a tent there. Several wave at us, because teenagers around here are generally friendlier than those I’ve met anywhere, usually the first people to stop and push a stalled car off the road. I’m not sure why this is so, but it’s interesting how many will stay here or leave for awhile and return to live out their lives.
I’m making occasional casts toward the bank, hoping to entice fish on the swing. I do: a decent trout. Steve raises his eyebrows and squints at me suspiciously. I hold up a beadheaded purple/blue Woolly Bugger I chose for no particular reason, although this lake’s myriad crayfish wear shells edged in this color. Steve replaces his light streamer with something darker. Two hundred yards beyond, we pass a posh church camp, with docks, ski boats and sailboats, and enormous inflatable water toys — slides, trampolines, circular rafts that might very well ferry 20 campers across the Pacific.
A chorus of three times that many kids is lined up four deep on a slope above, singing a song I can’t make out. They sound happy, but not like angels. That’s just as well, because their staff’s assumptions about these beings are terrifying. This is according to Max, who spent a session there at six years old. “Angels are really terrible! And thirteen feet tall! My counselor told us so!” Aside from that and three obligatory prayers a day, he enjoyed learning to sail, a craft project, and Capture the Flag.
We’re passing them by when Steve lashes his rod forward. A yellow perch skips along the surface, moving significantly faster than it ever has or will again. Skunk’s off the boat.
At the far border of the camp, a ridge runs into the water, resurfacing as a small island two hundred feet later, I ask Steve if he’s visited a neighborhood Facebook forum, where two weeks ago, somebody posted a photo of a doe swimming from the mainland to what she imagined was safety. “A day later I got a video forwarded by a friend from a water-skier filming right about there,” I tell him. “Twenty seconds of a mountain lion swimming, struggling along with its face barely above the water, headed for the island.”
“I’ve read they swim,” says Steve. “Not well,” I observe.
We fish the inside passage, then return the way we came to round the isle from the opposite side. It’s there I caught one of the biggest trout I’ve taken from this lake.
It’s also where I saw the monster Sophie and I mocked with a limerick many years ago.
An early spring day, late in a gray and chill afternoon, I cruised in a 19-foot ski boat. From a hundred yards away, I saw a dark shape, 20 or 25 feet long and 12 across at the belly, which seemed to be moving against the wind just beneath the nervous surface of water. It looked solid.
Naturally, I went to investigate what clearly could not be what it appeared. But the closer I got, the more obvious it became that whatever this thing was, it was alive, in transit, with tiny wavelets breaking white against its back. For a moment, I wondered how close I should get, but any reader who’s dreamed about spectacular animals will understand how much that mattered. Also, I reasoned, though something this large could eat a jet ski, presumably my boat should be too large.
You know how it felt when you first jumped (or fell) from a pretty high place — maybe a 10-meter board — the way you expected to feel impact and didn’t, so you look down and see you’re fallen only halfway? Well, that’s how this approach began to feel. Yard by yard, I waited for the unveiling of something obvious. A waterlogged tree or boat, a hunk of floating vegetation, some seedy contractor’s waste from a lot he’d cleared. None of these would explain its slow progress, of course, but perhaps that was an illusion? Twenty feet away, I set the engine to idle and drifted toward it.
If not for the deep overcast, fading light, and a little too much wind, my curiosity would have been satisfied sooner. As it was, I was less than 20 feet away when the solid-seeming mass resolved into thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of juvenile kokanee salmon, each four or five inches long, schooled together as closely as one those enormous bait balls herded and savaged by sailfish or tuna, dolphins, sharks, sometimes a whale.
Not long after, I visited the lake’s own Department of Game and Fish hatchery, where a proud staffer told me they had planted 2.3 million smolts that spring.
I don’t tell this to Steve as we’re trolling. He’s likely heard the story already. Also, I didn’t think of it. Unlike most of our trips, even when crowded into boats, we’re talking away, softly, but often interrupted by laughter. Steve explains his work angst.
“You know . . .” He sighs. “The things people complain about?
“So today I get a call from a board member. About . . . a duck. Actually, a duckling, which some second-grade teacher gave to a girl at the end of year. Now . . . this girl lives way out on the edge of association property, right? She’s like seven years old.”
“Right.”
“And this guy, this board member, he’s retired, late seventies . . . he tells me I’ve got to get rid of this duck. I ask him if it’s been bothering him, making noise, coming onto his property. No. No, but poultry aren’t allowed in the bylaws — what it really means is roosters — and ‘rules are rules.’ So . . . I’m supposed to go out there and tell her to get rid of it — he actually wants me to haul off this little girl’s pet. And I’m thinking . . . you’re bothering me about this? Seriously, does it get any smaller?”
“Not much,” I admit.
We stop at a large flat, cast here and there, then concentrate on a drop-off. We’re talking not at all until Steve points and asks “Is that a mayfly?”
It takes off. We move, change flies, flog dries and nymphs for 20 minutes. No strikes. No more emergers.
We’re back to trolling.
And talking. The conversation is relaxed, almost continuous. This generally happens when we drive to and from places, but not, again, while we fish, and I’m suddenly aware of that. Also that I’m no longer casting much and rather nicely relaxed.
Right about then, Steve frowns into the distance. “Do you know what I don’t understand?”
He pauses, but I don’t need to answer. “What I don’t understand is . . . why
can’t everybody be like me?”
I laugh, as quickly and happily as I did at “No talk now.”
“Seriously,” he continues in a serious voice. “I’m just a guy. Love my family, my dog, fishing, friends. I work hard, I’m honest, not greedy. I might not like too many people, but I don’t hate anyone — not going to take anything from them or force them to believe what I do. I sure as hell don’t want to kill anybody. I see the news and ” He shakes his head vigorously. “I just don’t get it. Everybody should be like me.”
I let silence ride. Sincerely, succinctly, the lament of Everyman, a plea for common decency that might have been muttered by some ordinary Neanderthal, harassed by the first Homo sapiens, forcing him out of territories in a pattern that will last as long as we do, because common decency has never been common enough, or dominant for long, during any of the eras our species has survived.
For a moment, I toy with the idea of saying something sly and funny, like “Maybe you lack ambition,” or “So what country are you moving to?”
Nah. I just nod and smile sympathetically.
We troll on. The battery hasn’t been recently charged, so to maintain speed, Steve is now on setting four. The sun’s down behind mountains now shadowed, but still bathes the bellies of clouds, gold turning orange streaked by umber. Higher up, a thin band of lavender border divides these colors from a deepening blue.
The wind’s reversed, so in the broad bay, we face it again heading home. In the distance, we can just make out the silhouettes of a few bats, but like the swallows, they stay up high. Also in the distance is a marina, docks, and a channel from which Max and Sophie caught their first fish, and a dog park where a young Rascal ran and swam.
It’s not been exciting fishing. In fact, call it pedestrian — “A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along a briny beach.” But that’s the thing with trolling, for me, often even when more or bigger fish cooperate. That said, I’ve been pleased by the company and a place I know well — where I have, I realize, history — and that, if far from wild, has swimming deer and pumas, as well as ospreys, otters, and eagles.
Waves thump below the boat. “Not a bad night,” says Steve. I notice that now there’s no growl in his murmur.
Later — much later — I ruminate about that evening’s pleasures, trying to subsume myself in memories of this evening during a day when I’ve consumed too much bad news. I fail: that we are not a viable species seems obvious. “In fact,” I think to myself at one point — Boko Haram, Syria, Big Pharm — “we’re just friggin’ monsters.”
Word association; proximate lines of thought intersect. I see again that enormous gray mass moving beneath a nervous surface, the convincing illusion of mass that fragments into many lives. At first, the metaphor seems trite and banal, then doubly so when I wonder if those smolts were filtering algae, sheltering in numbers while trolling in their own style. Then I think of those bait balls massacred by predators. Not a comforting thought, but at least the comparison better fits reality.
Still and all, so far as I know, those kokes seemed happy enough, as were we this evening.
