Readers Cast

THE UGLY DAMSEL

Jim Riemersma aka rainbowchaser - January 18, 2010

This was a long time ago, when I’d only been fly fishing for about a year, so it probably wasn’t the way I remember it. I had a week day off and decided to fish the Pere Marquette River. I thought I would miss the weekend overcrowding and the aluminum super hatch that way. There were a few less fishermen but it seemed that an entire camp of boy scouts was canoeing down the river sideways with a mix of families and drunks sandwiched between them. After driving an hour and half to get here it made no difference; I was going to fish. I got into the water at the Green Cottage access which back then was just where the gravel road dead ended at the river and started upstream.

When I had last fished here I used green hoppers tied as best I could to match the ones at Ed’s Sporting Goods in Baldwin. I had noticed though that there were a lot more slender green bodied bugs with dark wings on the bushes and hovering over the water than there were hoppers anywhere that I could see . They didn‘t resemble anything in my fly box and I didn‘t think my usual .tactic of trying a fourteen Adams would work either. The next day I set out to tie a damselfly. I don’t recall if I knew the name or not but I did know what I wanted. I took a number six dry fly hook and tied in a bunch of moose mane as long as hook shank for a tail. I didn’t remember a tail on the damselflies but I didn’t know how to make a fly float without one. For a body I wrapped a piece of grayish olive sparkle yarn forward. The four ply yarn made a body much too thick for the delicate damselfly. For wings I tied on a pair of black hackle tips and set them at about a forty-five degree angle to the hook shank back toward the tail. By propping them against the fat body I got them to stay in place. I used a grizzly hackle since that was what I had. I probably needed at least three of them for that big a fly but I used one. With my glasses off this looked vaguely like a damselfly from twenty feet away. With my glasses on it looked like an ugly cigar butt smoldering in the vice.

I had no faith in this monstrosity so when I entered the river I tied on another green hopper. I slammed it down as close to the bushes and the bank as I could. Shortly I had lost both of my grasshoppers while pushing off a couple of canoes and rescuing the paddles of hapless pair of scouts who flipped over trying to avoid me. I pulled the cigar out of my box and tied it to my 4X tippet. Now I was trying to cast a fly I couldn’t turn over and trying to place it in the gaps in the canoes without hooking anyone. Each time I pulled the line in to let a group of canoes go by it took several false casts to get  some control of the fly again so when another group of canoes came around the bend toward me this time I just cast up into some slack water on the right. After they went by I could hopefully just pick up and cast again. The instant the cigar hit the water a brown exploded from the eddy like a bass and grabbed it. I got lucky and this particular bunch of canoeists knew what they were doing. They held up in the edge of the slack water while I landed the twelve inch brown.

Today I hope I would change tippets if I put on a fly that big though sometimes I don’t if I’m feeling lazy. I try not to ignore any water. Sometimes I get into bad habits there too. It’s been a while since I tied an ugly cigar but if I do I hope I’ll fish it.

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