I’ve escaped and gone fishing numerous times these past few months. I vowed that I would go after being bound to completing graduate level classes for the last couple of summers and then coming off from the hecticness of E-learning this spring. I wouldn’t say that I felt like I had earned the opportunity to be somewhere on a lake or creek. Far from it in fact. However, I would say that I was looking forward to calling my own shots, being surprised by something unforeseen lurking under the surface, and immersing myself into nature’s frontier.
Water draws me like a magnetic field. When you are born and raised in a state once known as a territory, and has a motto that claims, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you”, then the spirit of adventure and water itself are distinctly and firmly established into the lifeblood of your soul.
I’ve been fortunate to fish in several different venues, but I’ll save some of those outings for a later blog entry and instead narrow the focus to the three recent times I’ve hit creeks for trout. Compared to past experiences, and with a keen eye for when the fishing is on, I can honestly say that my three outings were marginal at best. Still, an outing is an outing and being a relative optimist, each opportunity to escape held surprises that solidified the excursion as worthy of being documented and therefore remembered.
My second escape was during the third week of June and in a favorite little creek in South-central Wisconsin. I left home in the late afternoon when storms were predicted. I drove undaunted and was in the water by 6:00 p.m. The mosquitoes and deer flies drove me crazy from the beginning. Soon after pushing through high grasses and red osier dogwood to get to the creek, I cast my lure ahead along the bank of a relatively long run. As I began to reel, I felt that sudden, easy retrieve when a fish takes a swipe and pushes water around your lure, yet never touches a barb. When the spinner reached my side I glanced down and saw a hog of a brown trout turn right next to my leg. Things like that tend to stick in your head and push you onward just in case another would try the same thing. Around the following bend, the heavens unleashed and I was instantly soaked through down into my waders. Typically fish can start hitting in such weather, but from the look of things as I had hiked in, the area had already received some rain before I had arrived. In spite of this, I managed to catch 14 or 15 trout; half were brookies and half were browns, and most were really small. They were hitting softly so it was hard to react. As the rain passed through, the temperature went down ten degrees and by the end, as darkness fell, I shook from being cold and wet. It was time to quit and escape back to somewhere dry and warm.
Trekking like I did in the dim light, and in another squall of rain, it reminded me of silent trudges I’ve had while fishing with my cousins; when you just keep your head down and walk. The fishing was poor to medium but somehow “fun-ish” once I was back to my Silver Jeep; my fingers wrinkled like prunes. Sharing an experience like that sometimes makes for a better story than living it.
My last escape was the first week of July. It was on the front side of what promised to be a long period of unusually hot, humid, and rainless weather. I woke too early, but after watching a little TV, falling asleep for another hour, and then bouncing up, I left at 5:00 and was in the creek by 6:30. As I drove. I stopped three different times. Between the full moon setting and the sun rising, it was an absolutely beautiful scene. I couldn’t pass up capturing some of it in pictures. Temperatures started in the high 60’s that morning, but by the time I left to return home hours later, it was nudging 90 degrees. The slight breeze was out of the East by SE, which does not bode well for fishing, but I had decided to try anyway on a hope and a prayer. Overall I caught six small brook trout and one 13 inch brown, all in the first hour or two, but still I pressed on. I fished that section until I had a relatively easy place to get out and start the hike back to my Jeep; baking under the sun in my waders. Once there, and apparently as a glutton for punishment, I decided to try a lower section of the same creek. It was a new area I hadn’t fished before, and I wanted to explore, try something new, and see if any of the “big boys” would surprise me and come out to play like they are wont to do. Generally big browns will feed in the darkness of night, but on occasion I have seen them charge out from a bank in broad daylight as well. The problem is that by then you’re hot, you can’t remember the last time you had actually brought a fish to your hand despite some magnificent casts, and then they strike when you least expect it. That happened twice in that section of the creek. The first flew out from a shallow overhang, grabbed my spinner, and then rubbed it off on some underwater grasses just as I tried setting the hook. It was huge! The second rose off the bottom of a pool, took two swipes, missed, and was never seen again.
It was at that time that I broke down my pole and started my hike back, munching on several handfuls of blackberries as I went. It was brutally hot by then, and I downed an entire thermos of ice water once I reached my Jeep. All in all the experiences were a chance to get out and both wet my line as well as enjoy time on my own without any deadlines or people needing my attention. For that matter, although the fishing wasn’t spectacular, the opportunities to escape were priceless.
See you along The Way...
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Good read, thank you Mike!
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