Seasonable Angler: Chasing Rumors

This article was originally published in the July 2008 issue of Fly Fisherman magazine.

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Nobody wanted the 5-pounder. Three anglers stopped, glanced at the fish, and continued intently down the dike. When three anglers—who appear to know exactly where they are going—strut past a 5-pound rainbow without batting an eye, you have to wonder what else is out there.

I can barely walk past a 5-pound rainbow swimming in a hatchery raceway without checking for security. Walking past a 5-pound rainbow feeding intently in public water is beyond my self-control.

I rigged my rod, twisted an olive scud to the tippet, and made a cast. An elderly gentleman fishing nearby called out: “If you hook that fish you’ve got one of the small ones. Last weekend I landed two fish—one was 8 pounds, and the other was 28 inches long with a 19-inch girth. It weighed 12 1/2 pounds.”

I drove that morning from my home in Ennis, Montana, to a series of integrated public ponds and lakes. I’d heard rumors of 18-pound browns and 10-pound rainbows from these lakes, but the reports were vague. When I tried to verify them, it always brought denials from people who knew something they didn’t care to share. “You must have the wrong guy,” one dude said after I phoned and asked, “Are you the guy who caught that 18-pound brown?”

“There are a couple big fish in the ponds, but most of them are, like, uh, 14 inches,” another guy told me.

And there was this: “Those ponds fish well the first week of the season and then it’s over,” he said. “The weeds grow to the surface and the fish suffocate. They don’t get a chance to grow. Even so, if you tell anyone about these lakes I’ll cut your throat.”

In the end, there was only one option. I loaded the float tube, filled the tank, and headed west.

Checking out rumors is part of the fun. Following vague leads and fishing obscure places offers a world of discovery I don’t find on the big-name streams. Those wild, personal diversions, where the risk is total failure and bitter frustration, give me the most satisfaction. This scavenger approach, however, isn’t for everyone.

I remember a men’s magazine piece regarding an elderly man who’d climbed the same mountain for something like 3,000 straight days. I see a lot of that same mentality in many anglers these days. It’s all about visiting the same stream, matching the same hatch, staying in the same hotel, eating at the same restaurant, and drinking at the same tavern. There’s no risk involved.

Certainly, it’s appealing to visit places that offer fond memories, but some of us can only take so much. The thought of doing anything other than brushing my teeth for five straight days gives me grief. In fact, the prospect of fishing mainstream, combat-style trout waters like the Madison or the Beaverhead every day of the season is about as appealing as being outfitted with a catheter.

In Ennis, it’s not surprising to see the same guides and outfitters nestled up to the same bar almost every night. They stare into their drinks and drop coins into the poker machines, begging for a reprieve. Fishing the same water day after day gets under their skin like a venomous bite. In the end, they resemble nine-to-fivers on Valium, wondering if the routine—the tradeoff for their time and what once resembled their passion—is worth it. They yearn for the end of the guiding season and the beginning of the fall hunting season . . . when they can track something down and kill it.

I get to fish a lot, but I don’t want to fall into a routine. When a rumor arrives, especially one involving an 18-pound brown in a public lake, I’m off to the party.

That’s how I ended up bobbing around in a float tube with Dennis, a retiree from Phoenix who was engaged in a 28-day fishing trip. And he was doing it right— he fished the Missouri, the Clark Fork, the Bighorn, the Taylor in Colorado, and now some obscure ponds in “Nowhere” Montana.

The old guy—Dennis—worked a willow-lined bank where he’d taken two fish the previous weekend. I worked a rocky bank, anticipating a vicious strike on the next cast.

A fish rolled to my right. Its tail—wagging lazily on the surface—looked like a shark’s dorsal fin.

Damselfly nymphs crawled up my legs and tube in squadrons. Callibaetis spinners lay spent on the water. At any moment I expected a legendary trip across the lake, rod bent double, a wake trailing my float tube, and a massive fin leading the procession. Instead, Dennis hitched that ride.

I pulled my camera from a bag and when I caught up, Dennis was sliding a monster trout over the bow of his tube. It was one of the largest fish I’ve seen in Montana during the course of 20 years.

“I think it would go 10 pounds, maybe more,” Dennis said, adding unnecessarily, “It’s a hawg.”

I tooled around for five hours without a strike, and my patience waned. Dennis told me that fishing the ponds wasn’t about numbers. The people he talked to—including one guy who fished the big lake five days a week, and carried the self-proclaimed title “The Mayor”—said three fish was a good day, five fish was a small miracle. These are not the kind of numbers you see in Montana’s glossy travel brochures.

My friend Dan Summerfield was with me that morning, and after those five fruitless hours, was also ready to throw in the towel. There was a bar, he suggested, just 15 minutes away, with air conditioning and PBR on tap for a buck. That combination sounded appealing, but I suggested we walk around the lake, seeking vantages where we might spot a cruiser or two. I couldn’t have dreamed the results.

After a short walk, I spotted a couple of shadows moving near the bottom. Then a fish swam by, just a couple of feet under the surface, with the dimensions of a modest king salmon. The first cast drew a strike but I missed the hook-set. On my next cast the indicator ripped under the surface and a huge fish rolled on top.

“It’s 10 pounds or more,” Summerfield said. “It’s absolutely huge.”

I soon had that fish—a 26 1/2-inch rainbow—cradled in my palms. We snapped a couple of photos and sent the fish on its way. I handed the rod to Dan and said, “You’re up.”

For three or four more hours we shared the rod, trading on each good fish—and they were all good fish. The final tally was 12 rainbows between 24 and 28 inches, plus two browns over 20 inches. One fish I broke off after a huge run may have weighed 15 pounds or more. I’ll take the image of it rolling on the surface to my grave.

With the light fading, we walked a mile along a berm to the parking lot. “Dan,” I said, “do you still think we should have fished Georgetown today?”

When he’d phoned a few days earlier, he had his sights set on Georgetown Lake and its phenomenal damselfly hatch. We knew that a trip to Georgetown meant plenty of 13- to 18-inchers and lots of company. Georgetown would have been strewn with water skis and jet skis, not to mention the normal fly-fishing crowd.

Georgetown could wait. To me, life is about challenge and discovery and sometimes reward. These days I’m more likely to fish some minuscule irrigation ditch in the middle of cattle country before the big-name stream outside my back door. During the successful days, I know I found something that other people missed.

They point at my photos and say, “Please, my man, you’ve got to tell me where you caught those fish!” At times like those, life, for a moment anyway, seems just about right and fair.

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Greg Thomas was Fly Fisherman’s western field editor and co-publisher of Tightlines.

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