Fencerows: Preseason

By John Luthens

It was somewhere around midnight when I decided to go trout fishing.  It was either the first or second day of spring.  When I ripped my eyes from the television screen, it depended on which way I tilted my head to look at the clock.  It was also either the first or second day of the March college basketball extravaganza upon which I had a highly vested interest.

It’s not that I had a lot of money riding on a bracket.  Losing money is something I’ve grown accustomed to.  It’s a family competition with pride on the line, and pride is about all I have left to hang my hat on.

It was a spur of the moment thing, based on tired and tearful emotion and not reason.  The game had just gone into overtime.  Depending on the outcome, I was not only in danger of falling behind my kids, but I was in danger of falling behind my wife who picks her teams by throwing random darts at a bracket print-out.

Switching the game off, I stumbled to bed, swearing off basketball and focusing my energy on something I have better percentage shot at.

I spend more than an average amount of time on the trout waters of Wisconsin.  I fancy that I’m like one of the highly-tuned athletes I’d been watching dribble the ball for the better part of a day: fly fishing, spin casting, drifting a worm or two along the way.  Over the course of a season I end up slam-dunking along every corner bend hole of the state.

I put a lot of miles on my gear, wearing out maps, cutting line and leaders, tearing line and punching holes in my waders.  By the time the first day of spring rolls around, one would think I should be in game shape.  I had a whole winter to reassemble my trout arsenal, repair the things that needed repairing and organize myself for a fresh assault.

Morning found this athlete slugging down coffee and remembering where it was exactly along the time-line of my life that the ability to stay up late deserted me.  I remembered where my waders were piled, but couldn’t remember if they’d leaked or not on their last outing.  I found the bottom halves of a couple of fly rods but had to hunt hard for the matching tops.

Fly boxes were neatly piled on my desk, but searching random flies to put in the empty boxes was another matter.  I found some snagged in the basement carpet, and a few others in a corner pocket of my fishing vest, which was hiding exactly where I’d stowed it last year, fish-stained and unwashed in the laundry room.

Trout fishing is an early-risers game.  By the ripe hour of a quarter to noon, I was more-or-less set.  I snuck out of the house just before the next basketball game started, thus avoiding the temptation of my couch, which had been calling invitingly ever since this finely-tuned trout athlete had crawled out of bed.

I found my way to a small stream in Sheboygan County.  It was a place I’d heard about but never fished.  There were rumors of a naturally reproducing trout population, and it should be stated here and now that going after trout on nothing more than rumors is akin to a 16 seed beating a number one.  Chasing rumors is the main reason my fishing gear gets such a workout.  It has nothing to do with actually catching trout.

For all the morning’s drama, it turned out to be a pretty little stream.  There was snow packed tight along the banks and the occasional iceberg broke loose and drifted down stream; catch and release trout fishing at its finest.  It’s like pulling your bicycle from beneath the snow bank that covered it where you dropped it last fall, knocking the rust loose, checking the tires, and then remembering if you still know how to ride.

Flies missed their mark early in the game, rejected in the paint by brushy overhangs, while some of my back casts actually hooked five feet above in the trout-free regions of tree branches. But the further I waded, the better they fell.  Soon I was hitting near-perfect drifts along submerged logs and dropping menacing casts beneath the protecting tangles of deep holes.

I didn’t exactly knock the fins off the trout.  In fact, I didn’t catch a one.  I missed two strikes that might have been sizeable fish, or might have been the combined product of ticking the deep rocks with a nymph, coupled with an overactive imagination.  It was preseason fishing, but when the sun poked out and shined down the riffles, it didn’t matter.  The age-old game of man versus trout was afoot.

The highlight of the day came when I discovered a moss-grown and splintered foot bridge far back on the stream and drifted a streamer beneath it.  A splash of yellow caught my eye and I picked the tail feather from a Northern flicker woodpecker out of the snow.  That’s sometimes as close as you can get to a winning basket on a first-round trout expedition. 

I’ll doubtless move on into the summer trout tournament, but as I headed home from the first round, I swear that I heard cheers and smelled sweet victory wafting across the creek.

Early season trout fishing on a small stream in Sheboygan County.

A feathered find along the stream banks.