Do you fish with the fly?

Publish date: 2024-08-07

Why is it that the things we love to do most in the world for some reason get shuffled to the bottom of the list of things that need to get done? And just when you think you can see the thing you love tantalizingly close on the calendar, more life gets in the way, and you have to watch it recede to the following weekend or the weekend after.

After a week at work best described as “a bit rubbish” — and with clearance from my good wife — I stepped sideways out of my deep funk and got my fishing gear out. I had in all honesty been surreptitiously collecting it as we unpacked and gently tucking it nearby just in case. I had even downloaded myself a Maryland fishing license back in January, also, just in case.

“Do you fish with the fly?” Is one of those macho sussing out “what caliber of a man are you?” questions that Scottish men in tweed ask others. The answer “aye,” is best delivered with a firm handshake and a cold blue-eyed stare, before entering a serious session of tall fish tale swapping — and beer.

“Aye,” my one true love is fishing with the fly. I was introduced to fly fishing by my grandfather. He also taught me how to float downstream with your legs above your head after falling in, and how to throw a squashed tomato out of a closed window while warming up in the car afterwards. But those are other stories.

Mostly what I remember of my apprenticeship is an 8-year-old’s unbridled joy at spending a dozen hours standing in the middle of a rushing river in the pouring rain — something my mother would never let me do. The skill and understanding of the fishing and the surprise of catching fish were something that came later.

Saturday morning with my sandwiches and sketchpad in bag and rod and tackle in hand, I crunched up the hard-packed gravel north from Annapolis Rock Road in Maryland along the Scott Branch of the Patuxent River. I even carried my landing net, because hope springs eternal. Fist-sized eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies spooled around me when I stopped to peek over the road bridge into the shadowed pool underneath. Broad bellied trout silhouettes, slightly spooked, moved back and forth down there. It was just before 7 a.m., the day spread out before me. Today was going to be a good day.

I had been told by a local that this was a nymph river, but in my soul I am a dry fly fisherman, so I disregarded that advice and with my feet in the rushing water, line in hand, I moved slowly upstream. In the tributary vessels of the Patuxent, the water moves fast but the river still meanders because of the rolling terrain. And with each forced curve of the river, large deep pools are carved out. It is almost completely covered in a canopy of trees.

I waded close to the first pool, got down on my knees and attempted to drop that perfect dry fly cast — just where the rush of water from above poured in. First cast was a thing of beauty. In the slanted morning light on the dusting of pollen on the water’s surface, the fly touched down just like in the fishing magazine photographs. Spot on. The fish, however, were not impressed.

Even using all my pool-sneaking guile and some of my prettiest casting, I couldn’t muster even a bite in the first couple of hours. I eventually took a break in front of what should have been a sure-thing pool. It was deep and dark, and a fish had repeatedly broken the surface as I crept to within casting distance, but all for naught. I eventually spooked the fish enough that he went silent. So I took a break and did a little sketching instead.

Another big factor in the river’s shape up here is the beavers. They fell trees in order to create nice safe pools for themselves, but occasional flash floods smash their work — along with the other deadfall — and send it all downstream where it comes up against the trees along the rivers edge creating massive logjams. Some are four yards above today’s waterline.

Good luck sorting this sketch out. It is a mixture of tree root and deadfall in a big tangled knot. The pool below the roots is about four-feet-deep. Being so early in the day the light was constantly shifting which made the drawing even more confusing, as it seemed to change every time I looked up. But really, much like the fishing, I am happy just to have a reason to be out here doing nothing. As I sketched, a good-size fish teasingly made a repeated “glooping” rise to pluck something from the surface. Cheeky bugger.

By midday I was methodically fishing my way up a broad fast-moving channel. It was that perfect two-foot-deep riffled run that every fly fisher recognizes. In almost complete tree shadow there are few clues as to where the fish are, so all I can do is work my way upstream, taking my time and fishing left and right under each bank, covering every lovely yard. A jogger suddenly appeared along one bank and asked if I had had anything? “Not a thing,” I replied happily. He tells me he has fished the river a dozen times and never caught a thing. I could still hear him panting in the distance when I got my first fish of the day.

It was not very big; I used the landing net anyway. The fish neatly dropped through the wide netting back into the river. Both of us were somewhat embarrassed by this, so we shuffled to the waters edge to sort ourselves out. It was a lovely little five-inch rainbow trout that after a brush with the paparazzi got right back into the stream.

I am a fishing god; fear me.

The next few hours follow the same repeating pattern of hope and loss as each pool came in sight, but the deeper feeling of euphoric contentedness never left me. I stopped for lunch on a collapsed sycamore, which has fallen perfectly perpendicular to the river creating a natural, if awkward to get on, bridge. I am just about at the halfway point in my run upriver, so decided to fit in another sketch.

The river flora, both dead and alive is so tangled and thick that I have to use every casting technique in the book, including some that I have to make up special. At times, conditions could be so tight that it was more like fly dangling. The number of snags and snares both above and below the surface add an air of “Sly Stalone – First Blood” action-adventure to this middle-aged outing. Something that many other fishermen would rather avoid. The benefit of fishing this instead of more easily accessible waters is that I don’t see “many other fishermen,” or any really.

This sketch is a good glimpse of what it is like to fish in here. There is the fish rise, so tauntingly close — just below the deadfall bridge and just above the underwater tangles, and in between the banks of impenetrable flotsam. Now go and sneak up on it and catch it if you can. Ha!

After losing a couple of flies doing that, I galumphed further upstream. As the trees thinned and the river got narrower, faster and rockier I finally succumbed and switched to a nymph instead of a fly. I lost a couple of those as well before adjusting to the weight change on the end of the line.

As the day went by and my shadow grew longer behind me, I finally got some gratification from all my wafting about. I suddenly started to hit good-size strikes in each pool, although I failed to land anything. And my final, and — count it – second fish of the day was a strike at the tail end of a cast that no self respecting fish had any right to be fooled by (I sometimes wonder if I have fluked every fish I have ever caught?). Another young rainbow, this one about eight inches long.

Having released that beauty into the wild. I sat down for one last sketch before I hoofed it back downstream. One of the joys of sitting and drawing out in nature like this is that the fauna forget you are even here after a while. In the past I have had all kinds of animals and birds move quite close without realizing I was there. This time it was a big beaver that walked to within eight paces of me before catching a waft of my scent and disappearing after an ungainly fat-boy run back into the river again.

This sketch shows the rocky nature of the terrain and the slightly thinning trees further up this branch of the Patuxent, along with another one of those “sure-thing” looking runs that really aught to have produced a few fish. But maybe it is the quality of the angler rather than the quality of the river that was the deciding factor on this day.

I think it is in the nature of fly-fishing that expectations of catching fish are low. The fish we are after are highly evolved downright finicky hunters with a hair-trigger flight mechanism. Add in the complications of terrain, the fly delivery method, the weather, the temperature, the particular insect larval hatch and the fact that regardless of all these, sometimes they just aren’t biting, and I mean really, everything is against you catching a fish. Still, even saying all that I should probably have done a little better; it was lucky indeed that I was not fishing to feed my family. Maybe I can sell the sketches and feed them that way instead?

More than half a day after I began, I was back at the car in the almost full dark. I was home in time to tell my fish stories to the kids before bed. If I had worries from the previous week, I could not remember what they were.

So that is it for this week. Get your paper and pencils and get out there and immerse yourself. Then sketch it and send me what you create. I’ll feature it here on The Washington Post, unless it’s nudes of your mother or something.

Got a question? Ask me at richardjosephjohnson@yahoo.com

Want to see more of my work? www.newsillustrator.com.

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Do you fish with the fly?