Written By: Matt Canter | Issue: 2021/09 – September
September brings us a meditation on the allure of Wild Trout and the guides who lead us into their hidden domain.
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Burned out; ground up; rode hard and put up wet.
The dog days of summer take a toll on a fly-fishing guide here in the Southeast.
It’s hot, the fishing can be sub-par, and you have to work way harder for less. The rain is good…it cools down the creeks and adds oxygen into the water. It’s all about timing though, sometimes only an hour of time separates an unfishable muddy mess of a stream to clearing water and hungry Trout.
There’re fewer options in the summertime. The more sizable rivers, you know, the ones that are easiest to fish…they get too warm to fish in the summer. There’s fish there all right, but they have gone almost completely nocturnal, feeding only when the water temps are coolest, and finding cover and shade when it gets hot.
It’s tough. You have to be able to cover water, which means you have to be able to walk up the creek. Flogging the same hole over and over again with your fly is simply wasting time.
New techniques are taught in order to keep the client’s fly in the water more than in the trees. Here in the creeks the fish are wild, and they aren’t going to be fooled by a sloppy cast that immediately drags across the hole…no sir, that fly needs to float the current the same exact way that fish saw its last meal, and the one before that, and so on.
Then, finally, the client connects to a rising Trout. After a short tussle, the trout is scooped up by the guide, and all the guide can think about in this moment is “please don’t say it…please don’t tell me that this Trout is as big as the bait you use down in Florida.”
Every guide has heard it over and over again, and even though that statement is nothing short of the truth, it disgraces something that we put very high on a pedestal…the Wild Trout.
A Wild Trout is the real thing, it was born in the stream instead of a concrete raceway, survived predation of many types, and in spite of feeding vigorously on every bug it could find over the last six years it has grown to a whopping nine inches long. These mountains are some of the oldest in the world, and over time have lost a lot of the minerals that make the streams fertile.
One thing is for sure though, that nine-inch Wild Rainbow is more beautiful, and required way more skill to catch than any 20-inch stocked trout in the main river. The average client doesn’t get this, though.
Oddly enough though, what’s most satisfying to a seasoned guide, is when one of his return customers books a trip during the time period of “many options,” runs through all the options on the phone, and their wishes are to go crawl around on rocks and hills in pursuit of those tiny wild fish.
That’s when the guide knows he/she has done their job well!
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