November

I’d been invited a month or more before to go fishing on the North Fork of the White River with a bunch of folks from the fly shop. I’d been a regular there in middle and high school, taking fly tying classes there on Wednesday nights. I’d gone fishing with them last April on the same stretch of water; it was a lot of fun, and I managed catching some gorgeous wild rainbows and a few small browns, too.

The program was pretty simple, namely fishing heavily-weighted stonefly nymphs and a couple split shot under an indicator through deep runs and riffles, probing for fish. I was in Creepy’s float boat, one of those personal pontoon boats with the two oars that seems like a mobile fish vacuum. “It’s easy,” he had told me, “it floats like a cork.”

It was true, the thing did float like a cork, and I assume they’re not as difficult to maneuver as it seems. But it doesn’t take much energy to set the thing in motion, and it doesn’t take much effort on the oars to get the thing spinning in circles. I spent a fair amount of the day doing that, though within the last two miles, when I finally gave myself over to utter and total failure, things became quite a bit easier.

I did manage to catch a few fish though, all browns and all at the smaller end of the scale. The biggest around fourteen inches, the smallest around ten, and all on rubber legged stonefly nymphs. I missed two or three, though still not big ones, and had one that may have been pretty sizeable break off my 4x tippet.