The poet T. S. Eliot thought April is the cruelest month, but I’d respectfully disagree when it comes to fly fishing in California. I think we can safely assume Eliot never wet a line on the River Itchen or anywhere else, although he did enjoy the outdoors and took walking holidays in the English countryside, fully attired in a three-piece tweed suit, as the photos attest. If he had shared our passion, he’d be excited about April and the trout opener. In the springtime, I wake from my winter torpor and start sorting through my gear and planning trips. It’s an optimistic time when I’ve forgotten all the skunked days from last season and can once again dream of being on an alpine stream watching a 14-inch brown inhale my perfectly placed Blue-Winged Olive.
February’s the month that gives me the blues. The weather’s still iffy, and the opener seems a distant dream. I feel the same way I felt when a thunderstorm washed out my Little League game — forlorn, that is, and slightly lost. I used to indulge in angling videos on YouTube to pass the time until April, but they only made matters worse. I fell victim to envy. Why couldn’t I be that guy hooking a bonefish in the Bahamas on a Mantis Shrimp Fly? Did I need to be reminded that life isn’t fair, or that the rewards are parceled out unequally at birth? I did not, nor did T. S. Eliot.
I handled February better when I lived in Sonoma County on the Russian River and could fish for steelhead in my backyard. All along the coast, in fact, there are wonderful streams such as the Eel and the Gualala that offer superior sport during the rainy months. Catching a steelhead still tops my list of angling thrills, but it’s a game rich in disappointments, many of them weather related. February can be particularly harsh. The big storms blow in off the Pacific and knock the river out of shape for days on end. It’s practically a tradition, and it happened again this past year.
On February 7, 2017, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “The Russian River in Guerneville swelled early Wednesday morning . . . and reached a peak of 34.4 feet at 6 a.m.” Only a local named Andrew Lasser failed to be impressed. He felt the storm didn’t live up to the hype. “It so totally under-delivered,” he told the San Jose Mercury News. Blasé doesn’t begin to describe Lasser’s laid-back attitude.
When I first moved into my trailer on the river ($200 a month in rent back then, the mice included for free), I had no idea how quickly the Russian rises during a storm. I learned the hard way, setting off to explore one afternoon without consulting the weather report. I fished every likely riffle and hole for a quarter mile or so downstream, relying on the flies (“surefire winners”) I bought from a fast talker in Healdsburg. I caught nothing, of course, except a few squawfish, but I was so involved in the casting I barely looked up when the rain started. A half-hour later, the river was a torrent, and I found myself stranded on the bank of a sheep ranch opposite the trailer, shouting for help. I suffered the shame of being rescued by a team of old farmers who tossed me a rope and hauled me across to safety, laughing all the while.
To be fair, February wasn’t always a nightmare. Every now and then it tossed me a bone. I remember a year when the month was very nearly dry. The days were cold and bright, with frequent frosts. The river looked like a mountain stream, much easier to read than when the water was high and discolored. The conditions made for excellent fly fishing, too, which isn’t always the case on the Russian. We enjoyed an early run of the smaller steelhead known as bluebacks, bright and silvery and fresh from the ocean. They spawned in Maacama Creek nearby, and though the creek was off-limits, I could legally fish just below its mouth, where it emptied into the river, and I often picked up two or three steelies in an evening. I’d never had such luck before and haven’t had it since.
When I left Sonoma County for San Francisco, I no longer had the Russian close by, so I tried to cure my February blues with a trip to Putah Creek, which is open all year. I made the tedious drive to Winters, the former home of R. Crumb, to fish below Monticello Dam off Route
128. As a tactic, this wasn’t entirely satisfactory. I can’t blame the creek, a first rate tailwater fishery. Again the weather was the culprit. It’s one thing to risk exposure in hopes of hooking a trophy steelie — that goes with the territory — but I objected to freezing my butt off while casting to (and not catching) Putah Creek’s incredibly picky wild trout. The potential rewards failed to justify the discomfort. Trout fishing’s supposed to be a warm-weather sport, but my fingers were so stiff from the cold I had trouble tying on the tiny midges, cream-colored and light green, that the trout were taking.
Given my reaction to Putah Creek, I find it difficult to explain why I once made a similar excursion to the East Walker River, also a year-round stream, in February. I’d fished there in high summer and always did well in the meadow section below Bridgeport Reservoir, where the dry-fly fishing can be terrific, and even though I’d read the fishing reports and knew the East Walker wasn’t considered fishable until March at the earliest, I convinced myself I’d beat the odds. But no, the odds beat me. My confidence flagged the minute I saw that wintry landscape and those snowy mountains. Frost covered the ground, and slivers of ice coated the stream. Here was a scene ideal for a Hallmark Christmas card. The temperature was in the low 30s, and I of course was the only angler in sight. I tried to make the best of it. That’s what we were taught to do as Boy Scouts. I put on my knit cap and knit gloves, the kind that leave your fingers free. My waders were neoprene, but I still felt the bitter cold. The river was so low and clear that any trout not lulled into hibernation by the Arctic chill would be easily spooked — and probably not eager to forage for food. Midges were again the order of the day. For everyone I tied on successfully, I dropped two into the water. The fish didn’t notice. They were supremely indifferent to my presence. I saw no rises or swirls to indicate feeding. I didn’t even see a bird or any other living creature. I could’ve been in one of those ecodisaster movies, the last survivor stranded in a godforsaken wasteland.
I lasted about an hour. It felt like twenty-four hours. When I finally gave up, I couldn’t move my fingers at all. If you grabbed one and twisted it, it might’ve broken off. Once I got out of my waders, I headed for Bridgeport and found the Sportsmen’s Bar on Main Street, a spacious joint with a pool table and dart board and the heat turned up. I was grateful for that and even more grateful for the large glass of bourbon the bartender poured. With great effort I managed to wrap my fingers around it, and after two swallows the healing had begun, as Van Morrison once put it. I had another for the road, checked into a motel, took a hot shower, and crawled under the covers to read the latest Harry Bosch mystery. It was two in the afternoon. February had won again.
It’s December as I write this, and I haven’t cast a fly since October. I figure I’ll get through the holidays without incident, my thoughts distracted from fishing, but I suspect by mid-January, I’ll feel a familiar twitch in my right arm, the first inkling of an itch to cast a line. February will no doubt be tough, as usual. I’ll be chomping at the bit by then, eager for the season to begin and subject to dangerous fantasies (see above, the East Walker River), but I’ll try to resist temptation this time around. Patience is its own reward, they say, and I need to develop some. Maybe I’ll give YouTube another go. I see they’ve added a library of videos about fly fishing for whopper trout in the Peruvian Andes. It’s a place to start.
