Some You Earn. Some Are Gifts: The Underground Guide to Lucky Fly Fishing

It’s an unfortunate reality: everyday life tends to cut into your fly fishing time. Some days the adult voice whispering in your ear keeps you home, all dry and responsible, but on others, you say the hell with it and fish.

Lately, I’ve had the urge to take bamboo rod pics. I don’t know why.

That’s how I found myself hiking along the river, an 8′ 5wt Phillipson Peerless clutched in my hand.

Chris Raine said he’d been fishing the Pink Albert hatch — a #14/#16 mayfly with a bright pink body.

It’s been a staple hatch on the river, though the bug doesn’t enjoy much notoriety.

It’s probably just old age creeping up on me, but the hatch seems to come a little earlier each year, and while I’ve never seen a blizzard hatch, the trout tend to get on the dry in a pretty serious way.

A simple, quill body Catskill dry with mangled tails. It’s all you need.

Several years ago I fished the same Dave Roberts-tied Pink Cahill (melon quill bodied Catskill style) for a week straight (yes, I was single and less busy), and never once felt the need to go to an emerger, cripple or floating nymph.

I still have that fly somewhere, and figure I landed better than 600 inches of trout on the thing (score one for quality construction).

I didn’t get anywhere that number tonight, but I did congratulate myself for running out on my adult responsibilities.

My first pair of fish were typical Upper Sacramento trout — 10″-12″ fish with exceptional color. The second fish was wildly colored enough that I took his picture despite the unremarkable size.

Check out the color. He wasn’t big, but he was the Liberace of trout.

Another small fish ate the dry, and I figured I could walk back to the truck right then and there and call the evening a success.

I didn’t of course; fly fishers mix hope and greed and equal quantities, and besides, there were still plenty of Pink Alberts in the air.

I wandered up to a good-but-tough spot; a fish was rising steadily under a roof of overhanging branches, and an extra current tongue reduced the drift to an exercise in trigonometry.

And yes, it’s fashionable to play up the difficulty, but to do so in a humble, “I do this all the time” way, but in truth, it took a good cast and a little luck.

The fish ate the bug, I lifted sideways (to keep the line from fouling in the branches), and I was attached to what would later tape out as a 16″ rainbow. Hot damn.

An Upper Sacramento 16″ football. This one I worked for.

Another small fish ate my Pink Albert dry (a new one — I lost my first one in a tree), and as it got darker, I walked back to the truck, then past it.

I tried a nice dry fly run 200 feet from the parking lot. There I caught another 10″ fish, and then got truly lucky.

If my first big fish was the product of a lot of work and a little luck, the last was purely a gift.

Two small fish were working right in a current tongue. I cast and the fly disappeared — presumably into the mouth of a small trout.

Wrong.

I lifted the rod, and the fish started running like he’d stolen something. My old Orvis CFO did its dentist drill imitation, and suddenly — surprisingly — I was into the backing.

I’d love to indulge in a little “outdoor journalism” — you know, describe the fight in heroic terms, my pecs rippling, hair flying in the wind, hand-to-fin combat, the monster trout saying “well done, you bested me” from the confines of my net.

But I was fishing 4x, Bill Phillipson’s 8′ taper was plenty strong, it was a big, slow-moving pool, and the only real danger was that the rippling pecs holding the rod would do something stupid.

They didn’t, I landed the fish, got a bad picture in the net, then measured him against the rod as I let him go.

Bad picture, but cool trout. Lucky trout, but only a fool ignores luck.

Nineteen inches; not the biggest fish I’ve caught on this river, but certainly one of the hottest.

Teach me to not stay home and work.

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