The Appropriate Time
By Neil M. Travis, Montana/Arizona
One of the keys to success in most things is being in
the right place at the right time, and being prepared
to take advantage of the opportunity. The world is
filled with individuals who are waiting for their ship
to come in but they are always getting to the dock on
the wrong day or at the wrong time. ‘You should have
been here yesterday, last week, a couple of hours ago,
are comments that are heard all too often in the world
of fly-fishing. The water is too high or too low, it's
too early for that hatch, or you're too late it happened
last week, are just a few of the words that no angler wants
to hear after driving all night or just at the start of a
short vacation. To help avoid some of these disappointments
I would offer a few things I have learned from over a half
century of chasing fishing opportunities.
Some people operate on the theory that if you throw your
lure into the water often enough eventually you will get
lucky. Even though I am now retired my time is too valuable
to adopt that approach. If you have tried to plan your
fishing trips based on the ‘cross your fingers and hope
theory' may I offer the following approach that will help
reduce the number of trips where the only thing you
accomplished was getting out of the house.
It has been said that nothing succeeds like success, and
nothing insures success more than knowledge. My formula
is – knowledge +experience = opportunity. Part of the
joy of any activity is gaining the essential knowledge
about that activity so you can enjoy it to its fullest
extent. Essential to fully enjoying the sport of fly-fishing
is to know when the appropriate time is to be at a certain
location, or when to be on a certain piece of water. For
example, you don't come to Montana in May or June and expect
to find the streams running at summer levels. It's not rocket
science but every year eager anglers show up expecting to find
the Yellowstone or the Madison running cool and clear in early
June, and they are shocked to discover them bank full of cold dirty water.
More demanding is the knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of a particular
stream or a given hatch. This is where it gets to be fun, and it's
what separates the average angler from the proficient angler.
A few years ago I was planning on fishing one of my favorite
streams during a specific hatch early in the season. The
weather had been favorable and all the reports were positive.
Unfortunately just before I arrived the weather took a change
for the worse, and a day of heavy rain turned this normally
clear stream a light chocolate color and raised the level by
nearly a foot. Most of the anglers who were planning on
fishing there changed their plans and went elsewhere, but
I was there to fish.
I had come expecting to fish dry flies, but the conditions
ruled out any dry fly fishing for several days. This is a
tail water fishery and once before I remembered that when
they had suddenly raised the water level overnight that
they had flushed lots of worms into the river and the trout
went crazy feeding on those delicacies. While not exactly
the type of fishing I had expected, a large San Juan worm
bounced along the bottom produced a fish on almost every
drift. For a couple days I had the water almost completely
to myself and I enjoyed great fishing. Knowledge + experience
equaled opportunity that all those other anglers failed to
capitalize on because they did not know the idiosyncrasies
of that particular water under those conditions.
While many similar occasions come to mind after so many
years of fishing another more common experience serves
to illustrate the point.
It was a perfect day in early July, and I was thigh deep in
a beautiful trout stream. The water was gin clear, a few
caddis and an occasional stone fly were bouncing around
on the surface, and there was just enough activity to keep
things interesting. This activity continued most of the day,
but by late afternoon the sporadic caddis/stonefly activity
faded away.
There were several other anglers in the parking lot when
I ambled back to my car to retrieve my thermos of coffee.
One by one they stowed their gear and drove away leaving
me alone. This was high summer in Montana, and I knew that
barring some unforeseen condition that the best was yet to
come. Just upstream from the parking lot was a long flat
that pinched down into a short riffle near the tail of the
pool. With my thermos of coffee, I walked upstream to a point
where I could watch the length of the pool while reclining
against a convenient cottonwood.
As the shadows lengthened, a cow elk and calf came down to the
stream to drink, and as the cool of the evening began to replace
the heat of the day several doe mule deer with their fawns eased
out of the coulees to feed on the lush meadow grass.
The pool was as flat as the top of a pool table without a single
trout nose breaking the silk smooth surface, and I began to wonder
if I should have folded up my tent with the other anglers. The sun
dipped behind the top of the mountains, and a delightful cool breeze
wafted down the length of the valley. The wind ruffled the cottonwood l
eaves as it rushed past, and then the calm of evening settled like a
cloak. A great blue heron flapped slowly upstream, and a robin began
to sing its night song. I sat and watched as the stream flow passed
until the meadow was a bowl of liquid blackness, and the first stars
began to twinkle in the rapidly gathering darkness. There would be no
spinner fall tonight, no blizzard of egg laying caddis, but if I had
left earlier I would not have witnessed any of the wonderful things
that I saw while relaxing under that cottonwood. It was an appropriate
time to sit and soak in God's creation, and as I walked back to my car
in the gathering darkness I was thankful for the opportunity. ~ Neil M. Travis, Montana/Arizona
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