Fly Fishing as a Substitute for Reality: An Afternoon on the (Sunny) Upper Sacramento

Regular readers know I badly needed some river time, and when the gray, drippy olive weather looks to be setting in like a sack of wet cement, you don’t want to miss your shot at what could be acres of rising trout.

What I’m going to say next won’t surprise any of my fishing buddies: only minutes after jamming my gear in the truck and leaving my house, the skies cleared and the sun appeared – an occurrence common enough that the local Undergrounders have developed an acronym for it: it’s a “NOWE” (Non-Olive Weather Event).

My less-generous friends would say I “Tom’d” the hatch (and no, it isn’t a compliment).

Later – near Dunsmuir – the sunny weather made for nice light.

Fair enough. After all, we’re fly fishermen, which means we start whining when the rain stops and the warm, happy sun emerges.

In short, we aren’t exactly the poster children for mental health (at least not in the outdoor sense). Glancing apprehensively at a clearing sky might seem normal to us, but it’s the kind of behavior that’s likely a source of concern for our families.

Still, when you need the river time, you don’t let something like a little sunny weather stand between you and a trout, so Steve Bertrand and I found ourselves way downriver (somehow reasoning the BWO hatches down there are more reliable in sunny weather, though how we arrived at that I can’t honestly say).

We hiked past a lot of attractive-but-riseform-free water, eventually finding ourselves on a very flat, very shallow, very technical stretch of water I hadn’t fished in a year (and for good reason).

We interrupt this fishing report for an artsy-fartsy picture.

It’s the kind of place where simply easing yourself into casting distance means the fish can and will stop rising. Of course, we knew that, so we tried the old ploy of picking a spot and standing still for 20 minutes.

One minute, the trout seemingly believe you’re an oddly shaped predator, and the next, you’ve become new piece of cover, and voila – they’re rising cautiously again.

Well, on a cloudy, rainy day they’d start rising cautiously again.

On a sunny day – with only a few #20 BWOs floating by – the best they do is rise sporadically, and with long dead periods in between. Catching a single trout tends to put the rest of them down, and given the thinness of the hatch, that could mean they were down for good.

A Roy Palm Emerger worked where the parachute didn’t – especially once coated with a little Frog’s Fanny.

I caught the only trout I had a real shot at, and in an odd moment of synchronicity, Bertrand bagged his just upriver, and at times our drags were whirring in unison.

My trout was a 14″ specimen with a messed-up lip but an expansive mid-section, and Bertrand’s went a couple inches longer (though I still contend mine was “smarter,” and therefore counts for more).

Odd lip, but he’s got the Upper Sacramento color.

Steve had a shot at another fish and got him to eat, but didn’t get the hook in him. The hatch – never good to begin with – faded rapidly into memory, along with the rising fish.

In the fly fishing sense, that’s the end of the story.

And I was fine with that. Better than fine, actually.

A nice trout is a nice trout, and time spent on the river isn’t time spent at a computer monitor.

At some point in the recent past, I’d started waking up to the idea that the world’s being overrun by yahoos and buttheads, most of whom seem happy to follow the loudest, most-vicious voices in the crowd instead of thinking for themselves.

That trout rise for a while and then stop – simply because it suits them – feels refreshingly, well… real. It’s possible fly fishing remains interesting to me after 30+ years because I play the game in somebody else’s ballpark, and do so by their rules, which are never entirely clear at the time.

It’s intriguing stuff, and you can’t embrace it when it works for you and then whine endlessly about it when it doesn’t.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

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