The Value of Winter

winter winter
Although many trout waters are now open year round, winter remains a time to fuss with gear and think and dream and plan.

In the old-timey days, memories of which make up a part of my mind in which I seem to spend an excessive amount of time, there was a thing called the off-season when it came to fishing for trout in the Sierra. The regulations closed fishing in mid-November, keeping me off the water until the last Saturday in April. Over the years, this closure came under attack by those who wanted to fish all year and now is pretty much a thing of the past. A younger version of me would celebrate this development while wondering if maybe the fish deserve a bit of a break from time to time. Nevertheless, I now will be out there whenever the weather allows.

What I will miss, though, is the offseason as a time to slow down and think about fishing, remembering past outings, dreaming about those I hope are in the future, and planning new angling adventures. The off-season also was a time in which to take stock of the state of my interest in fishing and the condition of my gear, tie up a bunch of flies, and get lost in reveries about the sport and about the various things that I want to try to accomplish when the weather warms up. I will still do all of this, but it will seem less ceremonial.

The Gear of Seasons Past

Periodically, I need to get a handle on all the stuff I have accumulated over time. What is it, where is it, and why is there so much? The process starts with gathering up every vest, sling bag, chest pack, and travel bag that I have. It is likely that some of these did not even get used in the past summer, and there might be something in one of them that I believed to be lost. I pull everything out and pile it together on the table. Before I start sorting things, I give the vests and bags and packs a check-over, looking for holes, tears, loose connectors, or compromised clasps. Almost immediately, I notice that I have too many. Here is a theme that will repeat itself as I work through the pile on the table. Most likely, I will resolve to get rid of some of these items. Most likely, that will not happen.

There are fly boxes all over the place. I like to open them and contemplate their contents, even daydream. I have been told I do this to excess. In theory, after initially organizing the flies, everything should be where it belongs. My subsequent objectives are to return each fly back to the box where it belongs after I’ve fished it, and to replace the flies that are lost after the end of every trip. Ha. I inevitably fall behind. By November, the whole arrangement is looking pretty sorry, and it is time to start over.

Most of these boxes just hold extra flies that I label as backups, flies whose purpose is to replace ones that get lost or compromised on the stream. There are also patterns I do not even fish anymore, one-hit wonders that were successful for a limited period of time or in a specific place, but now seem to have lost their appeal to trout, but still have a hold on me, and I keep them in case the need arises. For some of these, the need has not arisen in more than a dozen years. Still, I remember the day that this pink-headed nymph was irresistible to a dozen or more fish. The fact that I was three days out on the trail and those trout would possibly have struck a bare hook doesn’t diminish their value in my memory. The rest are boxes that actually go out with me, several with general-purpose dry flies in various sizes that I am confident using in just about any setting, some with flies for specific locations, such as Hot Creek, and a series of Altoids tins for hiking trips into the backcountry (it’s easy to fit one into a pocket). As I work through the pile, I keep a running list of patterns that need to be tied for the coming year, imagining, as I tie them, how successfully I’ll fish them. Hope is a wonderful thing.

Once the flies are laid to rest, I look at the lines and leaders and check tippet spools to get an idea of how much is left. I ponder mysteries such as why there are five spools of 6X, each of which apparently was used at some point in the last six months. Then there is the annual attempt to figure out a more effective system for carrying these spools without them streaming tippet by the foot all over the place. I always default to the previous arrangement. I check over all the lines and loops and leaders and clean the lines. Do I need anything? I put it on a list.

On the rods, is anything is coming loose? Are they in their correct cases, and are the cases sound? Just handling your favorite rods when you can’t fish is almost as good as fishing. The same goes for reels. Reels are just cool, elegant combinations of form and function. I clean the reels and give them a lube, then admire them, holding them lovingly.

What remains is a pile of miscellaneous equipment. After going through all my gear, I have found a lost pair of polarized flip glasses in a bag with wading shoes, giving thanks that I never got around to buying a replacement. There are nippers and forceps and pliers. Do I want to have a set of these tools in each vest or bag, or just keep them in a central location and add them in when I gear up for every trip? Will I remember to do that? Have I forgotten to before?

The inability to resolve this issue has led me to this point at which there is too much stuff. Why not do both? I remove anything that is broken or showing excessive wear, check waders and wading shoes, refill the emergency and first-aid kits, and make sure the bag of extra clothes is ready for when I fall in the creek or the temperature drops unexpectedly. Then I try to fit everything into the smallest amount of storage — it would help to be a wrestler or a PhD in topology here — and put it in a central spot that I can get to if we have to suddenly evacuate the house: a good job well done. I have seen the future, and it is bright.

The Fish of the Past and Future

As you will have inferred from the above, fussing with gear is a good time for thought. I have always done a lot of angling in my head. When I was young, my family was not into fishing, and so my opportunities to actually get out on the water were severely limited. To compensate, I spent hours fishing in my mind’s eye. I would relive the adventures in the outdoor magazines, fishing in Alaska and Canada and catching enormous fish.

Given this background, it’s no wonder that winter nights bring back visions of fifty years of trout and the places where I found them. Are there lessons to be learned from all this, things I could have done differently or better when, say, I was on Hot Creek this past summer? What do I need to learn in terms of technique or entomology? What habits have I fallen into that need correcting?

Winter also is the time that leads to broadening horizons. A good many years ago, I was watching a basketball game in January with my fishing partner, and we were talking about golden trout. Neither of us had ever caught one of these fish, and we both wanted to learn if they are as beautiful as we had heard. Our problem was that goldens are found in remote places that require some serious hiking. (I did not know at that time that this was not entirely true, that there are spots that are more easily accessible than we imagined.) Even though I backpacked frequently, he felt such a trip was beyond his abilities due to the effects of an injury. We cursed the fates for a while and then realized that he could ride a horse into the backcountry. He had worked on ranches early in his life and was comfortable around the animals. I was not, but I was willing to give it a shot if it meant realizing our dream fish. The upshot was that we found a packer who took us into the French Canyon area, and we spent four amazing days catching the most wonderful trout imaginable.

That trip changed my life. My friend and I went on many more horse trips into the Sierra wilderness. My future wife was into horses and agreed to come along, learned to fly fish, and has been the best fishing companion I could hope for. We began to spend so much time in the eastern Sierra that we moved there and have been blessed to be there to this day.

Not all trips planned on cold winter days turn out as well or to have such longterm effects, but the off-season is the perfect time to let one’s mind wonder and explore “what ifs.” It is easy to fall into a rut and repeat trips until they become unquestioned rituals. I have looked back on summers in which I fished fewer than ten separate locations. That is not necessarily a bad idea, but there were a lot of good fishing destinations that I missed. Having some time to think opens the door to musing about special experiences from the past and how they can be built upon. Back when I was working and had only a limited number of days for a vacation, my wife and I would spend time in the winter planning the coming year’s long pack trip. We would go through anglers’ guides and lay out maps with potential locations until we had found something that was exciting and logistically reasonable. The coming of the internet has made so much material available (some of dubious value), that today, it can be far easier to gather the information necessary to design your special experience (although books, maps, and magazines remain very useful). Think about ways your horizons could expand. It might be an altogether new destination, tacking a couple of unvisited spots onto the annual trip to Mammoth, looking for a new fish species, or trying a whole new approach, such as tenkara.

Each winter, I look over the pages of my journal to see where I have been and, more importantly, what I have neglected. I make up a wish list of places to fish in the coming months. I do the same thing in terms of the people with whom I fish. There will not always be time to spend a day on the stream with all the people I would like to fish with, and I need to remind myself of the promises I have made with others to get together and enjoy the chance to chase some trout. I also look at the things that gave me trouble during this last season. One year, I noticed I was beginning to have trouble getting around along the stream and in the water, so I enrolled in a balance class through our local hospital and learned a series of exercises that I continue to do and that have made me feel more confident. This past season, I had trouble with Trico hatches — I did not understand the hatch or how to imitate it successfully. For some reason, these insects seemed to be present more often than in the past, and I have vowed to find a way to take better advantage of the hatch in the future. It probably wouldn’t hurt to work on some bad habits I am acquiring in my casting, either.

The advent of the extended, year-round trout season has changed the months between November and May for me. I can scratch the itch to fish a lot more readily. It has meant learning to fish in conditions that are cold for both the trout and the angler, but I have already experienced treasured days on the water in winter that were not possible during the seasonal years, and for that I am grateful. But there will be days that just have too much winter and nights when the wind howls and makes you want to hunker down and play with toys. Off-season rituals will still have an important place, even without an off-season. Winter remains a time to fuss with gear and think and dream and plan.

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