the one

Lots of each are nice but sometimes one is all you need.

The one need not be big or rare, just timely.

The clutch fish turns the day around. The clutch fish improves your subsequent casts, unfurls your leader, betters your drift, lets you carom flies off trees and leaves and onto the holding lie; it lets you laugh full-throated at missed strikes, makes you feel smarter than you actually are.

Today’s one was my first fish of 2012, and she came from way up a feeder creek that was running clear while the main branch was becoming higher, cloudier, and colder as the sun melted snow off the bluffs miles upriver. Crawling over old elms downed in last year’s flood, tiptoeing through ankle-deep water on flat cobbles that looked like they were hovering under rippling air, casting upstream to every broken top deeper than my boot.  In the trough of a long riffle the drift brought up the fish that would have busted the slump and I missed the take, but when I made the cast again she came back – a little nosy blip and a flash of wormy olive and the weight was there, fighting to gain what passed as deep safety in that austere March stream. When she was close enough to net I saw she was a spec, a brookie, a streamborn native and that my year on the water was starting auspiciously. The hook was fair in her left maxilla; her right pectoral fin was torn along one of the rays. She rested in my cupped cold fingers for a while and breathed water and then pushed back into the creek and turned invisible again. And as I sit at home with a glass of beer and a picture I hope this hard winter is coming to an end, and I hope she ate a big fucking dinner of stonefly tonight.

The Thing

There’s freedom in the obliteration of 21st century wifi ego by a system of water: the utter loss of self duing a blizzard hatch or while working down your favorite run as the film goes quicksilver at the magic hour. The endless thudding heartbeats it takes to bring a good fish to hand. The gravityless grace-state of drift. But eventually the bugs stop, the pod is put down or the pool goes flat, daylight fails. You spool up and go home, back to regular life, back to Babylon (with maybe a vanilla malt in the intermezzo if you earned it). It’s temporary at best, and it’s also the point of entry for all the painful “fly fishing is an addiction, man” rhetoric because we keep seeking those moments in the resonant void.

As both Siddartha Gautama and Kris Kristofferson teach us, true freedom is only arrived at through non-attachment. But where does that ultimately leave a down-and-across dude?

There is no non-attachment for these punters. There is slack and there is mending and there is sink, but always a physical connection to the unseen, a stick to poke into the guessed-at and unknowable. Galileo’s telescope or a turn of the webby ahead of some silk to find what we desire and confirm what we suspect. Ahab’s harpoon or the sleechy sculpin muppet meat pushing water at the end of some chop-shop CCT, from hell’s heart I cast at thee.

I suggest we deal with it, friends. We’re on the wheel, Nirvana is from Seattle, and maybe we will be reincarnated as an osprey or a Burkheimer.

2012 Opener: Milk Run with the Monster

I won’t sit here and feed you a line about why it’s not called “catching” or about the crushing continuation of a beatdown that started on a fishing pier above some wily sunfish almost a year ago now; but the best thing about fishing with a 3 year old is that they always think it’s just nice be out. And the Monster still has that skunk on her back.

Offseason Haiku #5

Opener rained out?
Stay home, tie lazy baker’s
dozen: eleven flies.

What’s up, slate winged hotties?

Oh, hey ladies! Don’t tell me I missed the mating flight … let me just get out of this shuck and then it is on. I’m going to rock your oviduct for the rest of your life, girl. Or 23 hours, whichever comes first. Shit! I’m stuck in this … hey! Don’t fly away! I’m just … twitching here … but I am totally gonna get all up on your cercii! Damn surface film. Well, I’m sure missing that subvaria orgy is the worst thing that will happen to me this afternoon …

Why does everything taste like IPA?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guest post: an opinion upon a wet tye

From time to time, Just Nice Be Out is pleased to be able to offer its readership extended commentary from notable writers in the fields of fly fishing and innuendo.

I was told I had to shorten the title from the original draft, which was “In Which I Endeavor to Offer an Humble Opinion Upon a Particular Wet Tye, for Purposes of Edification and Discussion of my Fellow Flye-Anglers.”

Bon soir, compatriots in the Angling Arts, it is I, Sir Nigel New-Page. I beg a moment to shew you the Frewts borne upon the Tree of my evening’s labor (the wood was quite bent under their weight!).

I apologise to you most profusely for the blurry qualities inescapable when working in Daguerrotype (as evidenced by the date of the Broadside upon which mine tyes are at rest).

Here we have a full one-quarter of the jury referenced by Izaak (spiritual Father of all trouters, carpers, and squeezers of Milch-maids) ready to trye and hang a brace of our riparian quarry.

If the Brown & Brown tied by the proprietor of this Web-Log is the Messerschmitt 262 of early season wet fly Mid-western spring creek trout-angling, then it surely follows that the Partridge & Green is the Focke-Wolfe 190.

About the contributor
Sir Nigel New-Page is a sporting country gentleman from English antiquity currently residing in Wisconsin. This is his first post for Just Nice Be Out.

P to the G

Earlier in the evening I was on an urgent errand, listening to music out of keeping for a man of my age out shopping for 4 month Manchego and gluten-free waffles and the biggest piece of chocolate cake. Then I came home and got out the vise for the first time in 2012.

Oh, hello ass-end of winter. I can’t help but notice you don’t have any snow cover around here and you’ve left our locals what I can only assume is gin clear and spooky. And what’s up, early inland trout season in Wisconsin. Do you know about green Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk and whatnot? Well then let’s get down and across like a boss. Wait, what’s that you say, McClelland’s Highland? Peat reek? Say hey.

OG soft hackle hustla. Rooster necks up, partridges down. Gimme my fuckin shit … right now.

Le Fevrier Fever au Cabine

Fresh back from the high country, where there was much work and no trouts and the local whiskey burns a hole through your guts like Big Sister Rabbit when the Szechuanese are mad at you. Babylon in the mountains is all. I did get a sweet t-shirt though.

Is it the early season yet?

MZA’s 116th Dream, plus Offseason Haiku #3

Last night I went to the Frying Pan river in my sleep, a mile high and unconscious, casting hand twitching, legs jerking as I stepped off the bank into something deeper than I thought.

The Frying Pan in my dream had tannic northwoods water and balsam firs and graffiti on a railroad bridge that cast aspersions on the entire town of Spooner, WI.

Slint was there, and Beastmaster, and in diffuse cloudy light a pod of western fish working the pool in the slow wake of the trestles of the old rusty Spooner Blows bridge. Slate winged Baetis rode the film and died in trout maws. Standing hip deep in their water I put a dun and a cripple dropper on a rod that hasn’t touched Rockies water since I became a father. They took the dun.

Every one was an aerial wild rainbow, except for the ones that were pink gilled cutthroats flashing weirdly gold in the Namekagon-colored river.

Offseason Haiku #3
I know why the dormant
trout sings: it’s Maya Angelou,
dumbasses. Amen.

2011