A thought fires across the sky.
Matuka.
It makes little sense for a guy tracking the rainbows of western Alaska and not South Island browns, but then again I figure a thought has little business firing around in the first place.
That’s how it goes, though: big, bold ideas on the methods and means of taking trout from flowing water; little epiphanies that imply much in the way of subconscious musing and mulling; personal starbursts of information that come from nothing but seem to explain everything.
Of course I dig around my boxes until I find the right pattern and then tie-on the fly. It’s not that I hadn’t been finding success—to begin with, for a week of sunshine in late September, one hundred and fifty miles up the Nushagak River, with caribou crossing the distant tundra ridges and brown bears keeping us confined to the cabin at night, and crucially, with not another set of waders or tailing loop to be seen, we should probably amend our definition for the constitution of success. Regardless, I had been catching fish.
This, then, is something else; in fact, let’s call it advanced angling—meaning nothing about skill, I should state, but rather an irrepressible need to catch more trout, to catch more trout in a certain way, to catch more, bigger trout, to catch the biggest trout. In a certain way.
Earlier in the morning I had picked up a fish or three on a size 4 Egg-sucking Leech, which in a more aesthetic mood seems fairly gauche, but which remains plenty effective, and hence, ideally Alaskan. However, after a hot start and a few dozen drifts, things cooled considerably. This is not an uncommon circumstance with patterns that fish have seen a few thousand times. Still, knowing the Nushagak rainbows were packed thick to certain runs, trailing the coho migrations that had come upriver to spawn, I realized a change of fly was a better option than relocation. I went with an olive Zuddler, a conehead Dolly Llama and finally a natural-brown sculpin pattern delightfully christened the Sculpzilla. Each series followed the precedent above—a few fish, certainly nothing to get too excited about, and then a gradual pumping of the brakes until I was pretty much just casting.
That’s when I got my big idea. In some manner, each fly I’d fished after the leech could stand for a sculpin, which clearly interested the trout. But I hadn’t yet hooked anything worth the fifty-yard walk back upstream to find my camera. Going purely by time-of-year, the bead was an obvious choice, sure to up the action by several orders of magnitude. Too obvious, as it turns out. I set my mind onto the Matuka, a pattern that features a little less profile and a little more mottle to its body color than any of the sculpin-like imitators I’d used previously. Subtlety, I decided, was the order of the day, my ticket to a genuine two-footer.
I cast approximately ninety-seven times. I brought the fly back, clipped the tippet and dropped down to a size 6, slimming things as far as I dared while still hoping to maintain some presence in the flows of this great river. Having brought this thought to life, and having invested a considerable amount of effort in assuring myself of eventual triumph, I refused to contemplate alternatives, figuring them to be harbingers of the old age and reduced skill—and probably, walleye fishing—to come.
No, this was a good idea, born of a couple decades’ experience, of uncommon know-how learned and re-learned on gravel bars from Ennis to Quinhagak. I was going to catch a big fish; I was going to be right.
With a new, smaller Matuka, I cast around ninety-seven more times and thus confirmed my chronic relationship with being wrong about things I’m totally confident in.
That’s the funny thing about experience, I guess—it keeps teaching me how little I really know, and when it comes to Alaska’s trout, the humility that comes next is always a good thing. Which is probably why I eventually went to the bead, and proceeded to pound the fish.
Troy Letherman |
