First Dry Fly

My first dry fly of the season drifted a couple feet and suddenly vanished. I gasped, seized with delight, and immediately set the hook. Feeling a fight coming on, I steeled myself for it, and saw the flash of a belly – I swear it was orange – just when the hook came free and the fly catapulted into the air. Rats.

This scene repeated twice more, in the soft, blurry seam of a broad inside bend, all within 10 minutes. Then it was radio silence everywhere on the river for seven hours. Again, rats.

Odd day! Slow day. Ironic day. Because every time I looked up, the air was dense with Hendricksons, and every time I looked down, the river was free of rises. So it was a buggy day, just not a fishy one.

In fact, at one point I observed an actual fly drifting in the current, untouched by any fish, meaning my chances of moving a trout with an imitation would be slim indeed.

That’s okay, though, because the river, one of my favorites in Michigan, was just plain gorgeous! The leaves were starting to bud, swaddling the stream and trails in mild, nascent green hues.

It was only the second weekend of trout season, so I thought the river was going to be a circus of anglers sniping at each other for parking spots, but I was wrong. I found large tracts of unpeopled wilderness and the peace that comes with roaming it. When I arrived, the morning thunderstorm had ended and I had the whole place to myself.

But that morning storm, which thankfully kept other anglers on the sidelines, also elevated the flows. The river was still fishable but the force of the current surprised me. I actually had trouble moving through the water.

I was fishing downstream when I encountered a couple sweepers, one projecting from each bank, forming a chute of water down the middle. Only a fool would look at that and say, “I got this.” So I said, “I got this,” and boldly stepped right into the fast current. I realized I made an abysmal choice and panicked. Straining to keep myself upright, I ended up literally floating downstream. Okay, never want to do that again! Unable to wade back upstream to the car, I bushwhacked through a cedar swamp. Once more, never want to do that again!

Later at the second access, I ran into a trio of youngish dudes from Metro Detroit who said that their fishing was awesome the day before, but this day not so much. But recently they did find a couple rare rises in an upstream stretch, a cobble-strewn S-bend that I had come to know quite well last year after discovering that it tended to produce almost too many fish (blasphemy!) on a few September evenings. No, not telling you where.

So I hiked the bank in that direction. No rises. I hiked and blind-fished with an attractor fly. No rises. A mile, maybe more, and still no rises. But I did find my first tick, a gnarly, chunky American dog tick. I cringed and flicked it off.

The next hour would soon draw nightfall across the sky, so I figured I’d better head home. The day had given me three dry strikes and the chance to drive on two-track roads through lovely tunnels of trees for miles and miles. In the words of a 100 year-old hymn: “blessings all mine, and ten thousand beside.”