When Things Go Bump in the Night

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! Thank you to my Patrons, Erin, David, john, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.

I spent more time on the river at night than I did during the day last week, and it was a great experience. I learned quite a bit, I saw some really cool things, and I caught a few decent fish.

Tooth marks are the sign of a workhorse mouse fly.

I found that I had to vary my tactics more dependently on the kind of water I was fishing than anything else: mice worked well in slow, flat water. Pushers worked well in big deep eddies and pockets. Woolly buggers and large soft hackles worked best in riffles, tailouts, and runs. A large black Heifer Groomer worked well anywhere but would only pick up a fish or two out of any given spot.

Out of probably 4 dozen trout I caught during the week, I photographed only a few. I took what I'd basically call the still photo versions of b-roll, for future blog posts. But I had no real intention of writing any blog posts about these nights...

...until Friday night, when I saw one of the strangest things I've ever seen.

The night before was plenty typical. I moused riffles before it got dark and pulled some fish. Funny how that seems to work: The water that mouses well during the day doesn't at night and vice versa. Then, after dark, I moved down river and had a slow, steady pick. And, most excitingly, I caught a big crayfish with purple eyeballs.

Friday night was warmer, cloudier, and rainy, which wasn't a bad thing. The bite was much better, I was on fish right away. And I could get some time on this water with nobody else in sight before opening week commenced, which was great. Even in the TMA opening day is hell. 

At about 9:10 I released a small brown trout and looked up to see a little white light erratically meandering out towards the middle of the river on the third pool down from the one I was fishing. "Oh great, just what I need, some idiot that doesn't know how to night fish out here skunking up the water I want to fish," I said aloud. I often talk quietly to myself about what's going on when I'm night fishing. I talk to the fish too, and other animals I encounter out there. It keeps me from spooking myself out. As it turned out, there was little reason for me to do it to myself. This little light was going to do it for me. 

I watched the light down there for about four minutes after it reached about a third of the way across the pool and stopped there. Like a headlamp when the user turns their head, it dimmed and brightened periodically. Nothing out of the ordinary. But then I looked away briefly and looked back and it had brightened considerably, so much so that I thought for a moment it must have gotten close. It then made a fast and abrupt swoop down and to the left, then swung back to where it had been as it dimmed again. I said "what the hell?" under my breath, and simultaneously missed a solid take. I kept watching though, and again the light did nothing particularly odd for a little while. It then brightened again and made the same swoop to the right. Okay, so maybe my eyes weren't tricking me the first time. But then it turned red and once again did nothing interesting, this time for much longer. It lulled me into a false sense of security. My eyes must have been messing with me. There was no way what I saw had actually happened. I continued missing takes. Then it turned white again and slowly meandered back toward the river right bank, the place it had come from, and again I was sure it was just a fisherman. "Good." I thought, "Go home and don't come back until you learn how to night fish without a light".

But when the light reached the bank, it paused, brightened excessively, then shot to the other bank in less then a second. There, it paused again for a second, then shot up to the tree canopy, where it faded away and disappeared entirely. Yeah... that was no night fisherman's headlamp. What the hell had I just seen?

I sent messages to some friends, lest this be the night I vanish without a trace. I even talked on the phone with my friend Ian Devlin about it, after which I headed down there to check things out. There were no recent signs of human activity along the pool over which the lights had been. The closest house was a little ways away and hidden behind the hill and trees. They had a bonfire going, and were quite inebriated. Probably too much so to be performing crazy maneuvers with a drone just feet above a river on a dark rainy night. I kept fishing, though I was completely unable to get back into a groove again. 

What the hell was that?!

I'm not sure I believe in alien visitors. I certainly believe a lot of people have seen lights and objects in the sky they couldn't identify, but I also think most of that can chalked up to misidentifications and lack of observational experience. Some can by chalked up to lying, too. But I've also had a number of strange things happen throughout my life that I couldn't explain. I've spent a lot of time in the woods and on the water at night for various reasons. I think some things are true that would probably make most people scoff. And frankly, I don't care. I know what I've seen and heard. I also I know what the only intellectually honest answer I have is in almost every case:

I don't know what it was.

So. What is the strangest thing you have ever seen or heard while fishing? I'm sure a few of you have some good stories. Fill up the comment section with weird and spooky stuff.

Trout Opener 2019

Every year for a while now my dad and have fished some small wild trout stream on CT's opening day, somewhere nobody else is fishing, somewhere the stocking trucks probably haven't been. It's a nice little tradition. One year we got on a ridiculous sucker bite. Another year Dad got the biggest brookie I'd ever seen out of the particular stream we were fishing. Last year I got a bunch of small brookies out of an exceptionally small stream. This year it was the conditions that would stand out.

It had rained almost all night and well into the morning. The creeks were up and off-color. We had breakfast and made our way to the stream and found it carrying more than a little bit of leaf litter. Well, we were there to fish, so we did.

After poking some pockets in the main stem of the creek I decided that we ought to make our way up to a tributary that would likely be more fishable. We did. And it was, though just barely. I switched from a San Juan worm to a little purple streamer, and in the third pool I fished I had a fish on that came unbuttoned. Okay, this might work. a few runs up I had another take and this time sealed the deal.

Unfortunately the next four takers were not so easily landed, and that was kind of the trend for me: lots of takes a brief hookups, lots of fish dropped. But eventually I brought another to hand, which I chose not to photograph. My trend was preferable to my fathers though. For him, it was lots of things hooked and lots of flies lost. We all have those days....

My third and finale fish of the day was a gorgeous male.I had hooked him on the way up, but sure enough he was in the same spot and willing to come back. For this minute little tributary of an already small stream, this fish was a stud.

We briefly visited another stream, and it's tributary as well. But nothing was doing there except frogs, which was fine by me. 

The king looks over his domain

All told, that was a nice little Saturday morning. The opening day tradition continues.

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! Thank you to my Patrons, Erin, David, john, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.

Burbs Trout Quickie.

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! Thank you to my Patrons, Erin, David, john, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.

Last Sunday Mike Andrews and I drove more than 150 miles go get to and from streams that hold trout. Going that far to get to trout when there are plenty of them closer isn't something Mike or I are strangers to. But usually the idea is to get to less populated places. On this day, we basically went as far into suburbia as possible to look for our fish. One river Mike had fished one time but I hadn't ever, another I had fished one time but Mike hadn't. We're both pretty good though, so even with a very short morning trip time span we knew we'd be on fish. And we were in no time at all.

Mike and I leap-frogged downstream. He fished nymphs, I fished streamers. We both did pretty well and were out of that river with plenty of time to hit water with more wild fish.

With the trout slam done and more than enough freshly stocked fish out of the way, we headed back the way we came and in 20 minutes were on smaller water. We both rigged dry droppers, and it was on. BWO's, caddis, midges, and stoneflies were hatching. It was a pretty solid morning bite. Through one riffly stretch I was getting takes virtually every cast, though they were almost all little year old fish. It was pretty clear that that was nursery water.

All in all that was a nice little Sunday morning. And if this post seems hurried and short of words, good. It well matches the kind of outing we had. Short, but sweet.

When The Stars are Aligned

Every angler has his day. Some of us fish so much we have a lot more than one. I put in 270 or more days on the water most years, so I generally expect to have about a dozen or so days that are just stupid good, unforgettable, spectacular events. They are usually a combination of good luck, lots of time on the water, and lots of time observing and recording patterns. Last night between sunset and 8:45 was a bite window so bat s*** crazy that I will never forget it. It was just ridiculous. In that short window, in which I had predicted there would be a good bite at a specific spot, I caught more crappie by weight then I've probably ever caught in a single outing with a relatively small total number of fish, a couple jumbo yellow perch, and three walleyes, two of which I'd consider big. It was insane, and a perfect show of what happens when you actually put in the work to narrow down a pattern and have the bite window so dialed in that you can be sure you don't miss even a second of it.

Once again, just like last time (Finally, Something to Chew On), I saw the conditions lining up well in advance. I kind of wanted to fish during the day, but I had work to do that took longer than I expected. I finished up, went and did the first real river herring check of the year, then got geared up in time to get to the spot before the bite would start. Walleye were what I was there for, but I expected big crappie too given the previous trip. But I couldn't possibly have predicted what was about to happen.

I sat on the spot for a little while, enjoying the view and watching big carp jumping. It was a beautiful foggy evening.

Then, as the sun set, I started to get takes. First came a small yellow perch. Then a few misses. I quickly downsized from a chartreuse zonker to a white woolly bugger, because I was seeing the fish flash but not coming tight. This and every other fly change I did was made faster and easier by the Tactical Anglers micro power clips Alberto had given me at the Hartford expo. I was always kind of skeptical about clips, but they have really grown on me. I don't promote products often. Hardly ever, actually. But these work and work well. Especially for a warm water nighttime fly angler, TA clips are a good investment.

The next fish to come up absolutely blew blew me away. It was a crappie, and a big one. Even for this lake. And I'm used to catching 14 inchers here. What I've told people before has always been "I don't catch many crappies there, they're hardly even targetable, but when I do catch one it's almost always a giant". Well, this one was a giant, the biggest crappie I have ever seen in person. Just a monstrosity in all dimensions. The photos just did't do the fish justice, at all. It was huge. A measured 16 1/2 inch black crappie. It didn't look real.

I got another big yellow perch, then it was just slab crappie city for another 20 minutes. Most of them were over a pound. It was just silly. I'd never caught more than 3 crappies in a trip to this lake and now I was in the middle of the most wide open big crappie bite I'd ever seen.

This was the dink of the night.

Then, when it had finally gotten fully dark, I felt the tell tail faint bump that told me a walleye had just inhaled my little fly. Sure enough, after a good brawl, I was soon holding a pretty good walleye, the first of a string of three with two more crappies between the first and second.

The second and third walleyes came when I switched casting positions. Like I said in the previous post about this location and bite window, sometimes just changing which direction you're pulling your fly over structure can be the deciding factor. The walleyes were on a really shallow sand bar adjacent to the hole the crappie were in, and while fighting them I could see their buddies spook off. There were probably a dozen or more there, cruising in from the deep water, feeding, then going back out.

After the third 'eye, I got a few more mega crappies, including one that had a pretty big meal in its stomach. Then I felt the bite window slam shut. I had gotten everything out of it that I could have, though. I was laughing loudly and cursing quietly through the whole event. This was really, really special. But also probably repeatable. The longer I've fished the more I've come to appreciate when a good bite window and trophy fish are reached not through luck or being given a hot tip, but through hard work and dedication. Thank you to everyone who has ever helped me along the way. I am utterly grateful to call some really exceptional anglers and upstanding people my friends. My successes are as much yours as they are mine.

When the stars align catching trophy fish looks easy. But when you begin to align the stars yourself, you actually start to understand what makes catching big fish special. You begin to respect them even more.

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! Thank you to my Patrons, Erin, David, john, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.

Shifting Perspectives After Dark

I started night fishing for trout in 2015 and started doing it consistently in 2016. I have learned an awful lot from just following my own path, instead of doing what everyone else before me has done, and especially what is most popular. The biggest thing I've learned, to modify a quote from the late great Lefty Kreh, is that there is more bs in night fishing for trout than there is in a Kansas feed lot. Talking to fly fisherman you'd think everyone and their mother is out there on the river at night. Then you get out there, and even on the most popular rivers on the calmest, clearest, warmest of nights, and there's a few other fisherman out at most. In a few places it's enough to make an appreciable difference, but overall, the vast majority of fly fisherman that claim to night fish regularly talk the talk but just don't walk the walk. How many of you are really out there fishing a trout stream for 6 or more hours in a night even just once a month? I know of a handful of consistent night fisherman in CT, one or two in Mass, a handful in NY, a few in PA, and a bunch in Michigan. Even just reading pieces in various publications, I get the feeling the writers are more or less just just regurgitating the same stuff, maybe with a little bit of a twist. It is only infrequently that I see something really worth digging into . Domenick Swentosky (troutbitten) has written some really good stuff, and Field and Stream's Joe Cermele has done quite a bit to separate the bull from the fact on fishing mouse flies at night (Hook Shots Podcast: Mousing Straight Dope Live From Camp Carnivore).

There are other good examples too, but they are all the exceptions to the rule. If you really want good information, don't look to today's anglers, look at George Harvey and Joe Humphreys. They were the OG's. Joe could still put almost anyone that claims to be a good night fisherman to shame at 90 years old.

One of my own variations on George Harvey's pusher wetfly, used and abused.

Since I started this path, I've progressive had throw away my own previously held notions, all of which had roots in what I heard and read regularly on the subject of night trout fishing. First it was the need to fish big mice and streamers aggressively. I quickly found that mice and large articulated streamers do work, and fairly frequently, but I had to fish them differently than the ways I was being told to. Then I found out that fishing smaller, more subtle presentations with wet flies and streamers got the job done way more frequently than big flies. My idea that night fishing was really just a way to get a giant brown trout was shattered too. Yes, big browns are often primarily nocturnal, but if you go out expecting to only get the hawgs, quit before you even start because this probably isn't for you. Night fishing is actually just another way to effectively target trout of all sizes. I've caught 4 inch brookies and 24 inch rainbows at night. Night fishing works on all sizes and species them when done in the right way for the situation.

My last big notion was that night fishing for trout was a warm weather deal. Summertime, low water, warm nights... that was the oft repeated mantra. In July I found a river that seemed completely dead after dark. In December I had more than one giant brown boil on baitfish at my feet on a night when the low was 26. I saw Swentosky write about night fishing in the winter. I started to question whether the summertime low water paradigm existed because that was actually a real rule, or because anglers that wouldn't have otherwise just resorted to night fishing during the summer because that's the only time the fish were really active. I'm now pretty sure that's the case. On some waters, night fishing is successful year round. On some others, it is best in the spring and in the fall. On yet others, it is best from mid summer through late fall. Time of year isn't actually the deciding factor on whether night fishing is going to be productive on a given day. Flow, available food, type of stream structure, and a few other things matter far more. The only real way to know is to go. You might be missing something amazing.

On Saturday night I fished my part time home water from sunset until about 11:30. The flow was moderately low, the water was 49 degrees, and the night was mild. I saw rises both in the little remaining light after sunset and in the reflections of artificial lights in houses and businesses. That was a good sign. Then, in the tailout of a big pool, I had a big fish slam my mouse just feet away from me.
Okay. This could work.
I met up with Michael Carl (he walks the walk, btw) a little while later. We chatted for a little, then I used my light to see if I could spot any baitfish swimming in the margins. I had already found a ton of tessellated darters in one spot downstream, but there weren't many things swimming around in that spot. I turned off the light and we continued to chat when, behind Mike and to his left, there was a massive explosion that startled us both, slashing through a fast, shallow riffle. It clearly wasn't a beaver or mink. It was a fish eating something. A huge fish eating something.
More confirmation that I was on the right track night fishing this river early.
Mike caught some stockers on streamers and I blew some more great chances with mice. But I finally felt like I was getting somewhere here. Since I caught the first wild brown on a mouse in this river a year ago I've made precious little progress. Now I feel like I've got the groundwork laid to make big things happen, both there and on other rivers. All it took was one night.

On the ride back from fishing two western CT rivers yesterday morning, Mike Andrews and I were talking about night fishing. Mike walks the walk too. He's put up some huge trout at night over the years. We talked about the TMA I live closest to. "You could fish the _____ tonight!" Mike said. I told him that I don't typically start night fishing there until May, when the water is lower and there are hatches after dark to bring the fish up. But I thought about that a little more when I got home and I realized that the only few times I had night fished it earlier in the year I didn't really know what I was doing yet. It was certainly low enough, and this would be another warm night.

I went for it. And hot damn am I glad I did.

I fished from 9:00 until 12:30 with a steady pick of fish. A couple pretty decent ones came to hand. And they fought stupid hard compared to what I typically experience there at night, often jumping 6 times or more. It was all in the approach. The water was higher than I typically night fish there, and colder, and there were fewer fish in the river (stocked river, very few holdovers). I had to fish a heavy tail fly, and a bigger wet than I'd oftentimes need (sz. 14's work well there at night in June), to get the rig down, provide a good moving silhouette, and be able to slow the swing down enough. I fished mice fore a short time without success, which didn't surprise me much.

Really, I know everything I need to know about night fishing for trout. And that's simply that I know hardly anything about night fishing for trout. Starting from there, I can actually make progress and maybe even change the game. Follow the crowd of people that just talk the talk though, and there's not much progress to be made.

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! Thank you to my Patrons, Erin, David, john, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.