Day 2: Expectation
After talking to James the night before, we all decided to hike 45 minutes (30 if you are
@Billy) into a lake with big fish potential. I prepared for this, I was ready, I purposefully increased the number and distance of my daily walks so I wouldn’t drag the rest of the group down (not that they would have waited for me anyway
) and when all was said and done, I feel I handled the cardio/physical part of in and out quite well. What I was not prepared for were the “hatches”.
The hike in was filled with enough edible plants that I felt I could make it at least a week on the show Alone… ok at least 3 days, which is longer than some contestants, just saying. No pictures of the huckleberries and blue berries, or the remains of both after passing through the digestive tract of black bears, who clearly frequented the area to not just shit in the woods, but to shit on the trails and rub their musk on the flora, just to make it clear that they were around. In fact I think that some of them would watch us hike into a lake, wait for us to pass by, run out, squat and plop on the trail, rub up against a tree and then scram again before we hiked out. For the most part I agiled myself around the freshest offerings.
Cauliflower? Not sure of the other, maybe a boletus, but there were some chanterelles, turkey tails and some oysters.
Hatch number one turned out to be the sight of 1000s of water boatmen covering multiple areas of the lake. Now being on a lake when they are starting to drop, can be very productive with the right pattern, because the fish will aggressively attack them without much caution. Unfortunately, they will keep doing that until they are stuffed and even more unfortunately, like a late stage ant hatch, the fish will struggle to digest the bugs and they will get a bit of a tummy ache for a couple of days. Not that you can’t catch fish during these times, hell we all know that even though we are stuffed to the gills (pun intended), that we will still tickle our palate with a well placed snack, but the fish will definitely go off the bite. I avoided sharing this knowledge with the rest of the group, let’s keep up a nice bit of cheer after that treacherous last 100 yards down the slope to the lake, but I kept it in the back of my head none the less. Hell, fish buck the norm all the time, right? 4.5 hours later, one quick hit while my fly was dropping down in the water column, one missed take down for
@troutpocket and nothing for the other two and I guess I proved myself right.
All those white spots you see are boatmen being pushed by my floating line.
Unfortunately/fortunately for us, the first bowling ball hit the water slightly after we started. Those kinds of violent fish reveals keep a person trudging along with anticipation. But even anticipation gets old after awhile, so I decided to voice my desire to blow the popsicle stand for a couple hours of small fish fun at the home lake before dinner. I caught the whiff of some begrudging acceptance of skunkedness from the others and hope started to illuminate for me again. Then
@Billy had to go and evoke the will of the fish gods by openly complaining about the lack of action and then proclaiming/pleading with the universe to give him a strike….”Bamm!” I’m curious if any of you heard him down here in the states? The timing of the whole thing…
I turned in time to watch the fish jump and land (more cantaloupe versus bowling ball) and I worried about the size of his net, so I rowed o er to assist. Billy managed just fine.
Well that ended any talk of heading back early so we continued to grind it out. Billy worked that same area over pretty hard and I decided to buckle down and work hard the area where troutpocket and I had hooked up earlier. No love, but at one point as I was about to leave the area one of the 10 pound bowling balls decided to mess with me by breaching full flying fish into a perfectly place beam of sunshine. That was the kind of fish that made me stop every thing and reevaluate my gear. Drag? Check! Tippet? Check? Who was I kidding, hooking a fish like that… you can’t really prepare for it. Several attempted incantations uttered by myself and others later, mostly proved fruitless. Billy did manage to hook one more big fish, one that was likely bigger than his first and hat gave me just a sliver more pinch of momentum to keep grinding. So cast, count, strip, strippppp, stripstrip, strip strip strip… and hook up. Oh the expectations! Bowling balls throughout the day, Billy’s two hook ups the flying 10 pounder! Here we go!!!!!!! Straight at me, suspense for a few more seconds, a quick turn to the left, still not 100% sure, first flash of color, maybe? Final reveal…Guess which one is mine?
Just slightly smaller, but still washed me off of that stank!
The second hatch ended up gracing us on the way out. Turns out you absolutely need at least one free hand while hiking out of places like this. Not sure how I didn’t break a rod tip while frustratingly brushing mosquitos out of my face, off my neck, off my elbows…even from behind my glasses. But the next day I wasn’t sore, so there is that.
