Only nine more days until it’s time to ladder up the treestand. I’m all eager to once again mount the challenges and rigors of treestanding!
Meanwhile, there looks to be one more go-around at flinging flies for gorgeous rainbow and brown trout. If you can’t be in a treestand, fling flies!
In my mid twenties I accepted Uncle Ronnie’s invite for three nights fly-fishing Michigan’s famed Au Sable River. Salmo trutta (brown trout) the aim, Hexagenia limbata (really big mayflies that emerge in late June, size 6 hooks) the game.
What a prolific and amazing hatch. This giant Mayfly is technically Hexagenia Limbata, the Great Olive-Winged Drake commonly known as the Michigan Caddis and its emergence is simply called the “Hex Hatch.”
Hang onto your waders during THIS hatch!
As the Hex hatch begins its appearance at dusk, lurking and normally elusive brown trout lose their wary and instinctive inhibitions and enter a caution-less feeding frenzy, a fly fishermen’s heyday! It’s an excitement akin to hunting Whitetails in mid-November during their annual “rut” with caution to the wind, there will be no Springtime fawns without it. These are the easiest times to catch a big Brown, or arrow an unsuspecting big-antlered buck. I love being there. So the first night Uncle Ronnie hands me some big, bushy hex imitations. His self-tied bugs were a bit burly-looking and not the most professional-grade flies. I DID notice before we headed out, however, that his freezer was jammed with really nice brown trout. That IS the object of the game, I believe, and I wisely trusted him as my mentor and burly crude-bug fly-tyer. We boarded his rickety station wagon bound for the river (his rod was always rigged and ready)
He smoked a lot, to keep the mosquitoes away, he said.
Michigan has some HUGE, swarming, aggressive mosquitoes that can quickly ruin a good evening outdoors.
After spraying with Deep Woods Off, receiving a handful of his burly bugs, he located me at a likely spot to net some browns. I got skunked.
Fish were feeding, just not on my bug. He laughed at my pity party and said “when a trout rises near your floating bug, quickly raise your rod to set the hook.”
The next evening was a delightfully successful. Several careless trout rose to my bug and I dutifully “set the hook.”
On the last day he advised me to listen for a quiet “ga-LUNK”! “That’s a BIG trout!”
Now, well after sunset I hear ga-LUNK! Flung the fly over there (it’s pitch black dark). Again, ga-LUNK. Raised the tip, the hook set into the jaw of a 21-incher.
From downstream Uncle Ronnie came splashing upstream hollering, “That you?” I was hooked.
Later on the nearer Manistee River, nights saw hooks set and nets filled with large brown trout.
Uncle Ronnie died at age 41 in his town’s tug-of-war contest. I helped carry his casket. I cried. I love and miss him.
Too often a wayward hook buried itself in my clothes or flesh and had to be cut out. “Hooked” isn’t always good.
Jesus said “Follow me and I will make you to become fishers of men” (Mark 1:17).
I am eternally grateful for a “fisherman” who shared the gospel of the Lord Jesus with me. I believed and received Jesus personally as my Savior. I am hooked for eternity and now, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who will believe” (Romans 1:16).
Have you been hooked yet? I’m praying for you as I write this.
PRAYER NUGGET: FATHER, thank You for loving us so much that you sent Jesus to love us, die for us and to be resurrected for our sin!
Nebraska Panhandle and eastern Wyoming, I love you and am praying for you!
.All Bible references are from the NKJV
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