As every fly fisher knows, the angling life has its share of disappointments. Some positive thinkers urge us to embrace our setbacks, but I doubt they’ve spent hours casting to rising trout without catching any. Advice of that sort is cheap and no help at all when you’re tossing and turning in bed trying to figure out what went wrong. We head to a stream in a hopeful mood, only to discover that our luck has deserted us. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Though we hate to admit it, it hurts to be skunked.
According to my dictionary, the term “skunked” dates from the mid 17th century. It’s derived from the Abenaki Indian word segankwu. When you’re skunked, you’ve been “defeated overwhelmingly in a game or contest,” which describes how I feel — overwhelmed — when I can’t even hook an undersize planter. The Abenaki, who occupy northern New England, turn out to be devoted fishermen. Some years ago, they won a court case allowing them to exercise their aboriginal right to harvest salmon, trout, and other species from nearby waters.
“We don’t need a government we don’t recognize to tell us we exist,” sagely noted Homer St. Francis, a renowned Abenaki chief. In fact, the Abenaki tailwater of the Kennebac River is prime fly fishing territory, especially for landlocked salmon. I f irst heard the word “skunked” from my Uncle Ned, a mailman in St. Paul, who was a famous softball player on the sandlot diamonds of the city. The Dodgers almost signed him to their AA minor league club, the St. Paul Saints, but Ned tore a tendon in his knee. That was that, but I still idolized him. Although he liked to fish for bass and pike, he never caught anything except crappies and sunnies. Truth to tell, he was a lousy angler. When he and my dad rented a boat to go trolling, I knew how Ned would reply when I asked how they’d done. “Skunked again,” he’d mutter.
So when I began to fly fish I had a pretty good idea what it meant to be overwhelmingly defeated, having witnessed the trials and tribulations of Uncle Ned. But being skunked on a stream isn’t the same as coming away empty-handed after trolling on a lake. A fly fisher has more control over his or her fate, although it may not feel that way. You and you alone are responsible for failing to outsmart the trout whether by reading a river incorrectly, choosing the wrong flies, clumsy technique, and so on through dozens of errors just waiting for you to embrace them.
The chances of being skunked increase, of course, when fishing slow-moving streams like tailwaters and spring creeks, where wary, wild trout have plenty of time to inspect a fly and its presentation. My most memorable skunking occurred on my first trip to Hat Creek. Although a rookie, I felt confident when I set out from San Francisco. I had a new rod and reel, hip boots, and a box of flies tied in Taiwan. I’d read up on spring creeks and understood the difficulties. Long leaders, delicate presentation, trout with PhDs — sure, I knew all about it. I had the basics covered.
Hat Creek soon set me straight. First off, it was far more impressive than the pictures in my books, absolutely mesmerizing as it glided through a meadow stretch in full sun. In the moment, my confidence slipped away. What had I been thinking? This bore no resemblance to hooking hatchery rainbows on Pautzke’s Balls O’ Fire. But I pulled myself together and followed the advice of my chosen guru, Ray Bergman, whose classic Trout I’d studied, and stood quietly on a bank before considering a single cast.
And what did I observe? A chorus line of anglers being overwhelmingly defeated. For the first ten minutes, nobody caught a f ish — and those folks were skillful vets, not rookies. Again my confidence took a hit. But the situation improved with a mayfly hatch. One by one, the anglers picked up trout. I saw that this was labor-intensive fishing, requiring both diligence and competence. I gave it a go, casting a Pale Morning Dun to a distant swirl. I wish I’d kept a count of my casts, surely more than 200 until dusk. Enough, anyway, to make my right shoulder ache, and I never got a touch.
Though it was painful, I learned from the trip. I did what every skunkee is obliged to do and looked at my mistakes. All my reading had been useful, but it wasn’t a substitute for hands-on experience. Doing things by the book isn’t the same as doing things right. Instead of flailing away, I should’ve asked someone how to correct the flaws. Fly fishing is an infinitely complex sport, and a few carefully worded suggestions might’ve saved the day. Perseverance is a virtue for an angler, but so are patience and humility. No classic text or YouTube video can teach you all you need to know.
I chalked up that skunking to being in over my head and unequal to the task, but the beating I once took on Caples Creek was entirely different. My brother used to have access to a cabin at Kirkwood, and that made a handy base for fishing the creek and also the East Fork Carson, where I always had good luck in the early season. Probably I wanted to show off my prowess when I invited my girlfriend to join me for a romantic weekend in the High Sierra. I thought she’d fall in love with the mountains and streams (and maybe me), but she proved to be no aficionado of the great outdoors.
For starters, she was scared of spiders, gnats, ants, and lizards. She didn’t like crows, either, or hiking or camping. She turned up her nose when I offered to teach her how to cast. Her ideas about our outing came from the Impressionists. She imagined a Degas-like picnic on a riverbank with shepherds piping in the hills and butterflies — she wasn’t afraid of them, thank goodness — winging by. She insisted on wearing an admittedly attractive dress and toting a wicker basket as she followed me along the creek. She didn’t pass a single riffle or pool without throwing a shadow across it, spooking every trout in the vicinity. I finally quit in frustration, skunked again like Uncle Ned. I see from the Internet I’m not the only person who has given some thought to being skunked. A guy in Michigan even goes by the handle of Skunked Angler on his Facebook page. Then there’s Jason Klass, a tenkara expert in Colorado who writes a blog and encourages us to look at the bright side of a skunking, which I’m frankly unable to do. But Jason says it reminds us that there’s skill involved in fly fishing — as if we need to be reminded — and that it makes our good days feel even better, a concept I can’t quite deconstruct. Yet Jason also points out that it forces us to reevaluate our technique much as I did after Hat Creek, and that’s a worthwhile approach to take.
Although I seem to have lost the exact citation, I did stumble on another blogger who put forth three helpful hints for coping with skunkings and learning from them. Are you switching flies too often? That’s a question worth asking. I’ve done it more than once and lost valuable time. Sometimes you’re better off sticking with only a few variables. Are you fishing the same water for too long? If you’re not having any luck, it’s best to move on. Are you doing a good job of planning your trips? This blogger urges us to prepare in advance, plotting a course of action before we arrive at a lake or a stream.With the season’s opener just ahead, I’m hoping for a skunk-free 2020, though I’m concerned about a research paper I read recently. Its authors believe that in our finest trout waters, where the pressure is heaviest, the trout are not only getting more suspicious and wary — they’re also acquiring a conceptual grasp “of what it means for something to be genuine (an insect) or fake (our flies).” If that’s so, we’ll all be dealing with more frequent skunkings. I intend to fall back on an excuse I once heard another skunkee employ. “I didn’t get skunked,” he claimed. “I just ran out of time.”
