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Cabin Fever, the Shack Nasties, whatever you want to call
that madness that strikes in the heart of Winter when the days
get short, the air gets cold and the water gets too hard to fly
fish, hit particularly hard this year for a couple reasons. Probably
the biggest was the fact that northeast Kansas has had the first
winter in several years that's really deserved the name. The last
few years have been fairly mild. A week of iced over lakes here
or there, but it's thawed quickly enough and you're right back
out there fishing. The warm water bite is slow to say the very least
in January and February, but at least you were able to get out there
and do it. This year we've been pretty much iced up since New Year's
and it's March already.
The weather's one reason, sure, but I blame a lot of it on Joe Hyde,
too. He put me on to those big wipers last fall. I've had the twitches
ever since waiting for the spring run to start. The guys in the south
haven't been much help either, posting all those great fish pictures
on the bulletin board. Don't get me wrong, as long as I get to choose
my own torture, those are the kinds of things I'd pick every time. It
just made this winter sooo long. All the new catalogs showing up in
January didn't make things any easier, nor did the magazines.
The usual cures started out well enough. Long evenings spent in front
of the tying vise relaxed me a bit, and figuring out new patterns
distracted me from the fact that it would still be a couple months
before I could try them out. Soon, however, the boxes I depleted
over the summer and fall began to fill, then overfill. I was left with
fewer and fewer new things to tie and more and more new flies to
ponder how they are going to work when the time finally comes
around. I had the fever pretty bad, and the days were still
persistently short, cold, and the water stayed frozen.
So you can imagine how I felt last Tuesday when I found myself
with a day off work that corresponded with about four days of
weather warm enough to melt the ice on my favorite little farm
pond here by the house. The temperature was in the 40's which
seemed like summer, the sun was out, and soon so was I. My wife,
who has the shack nasties almost as bad as I do by now was working
in her office and couldn't get away. I grabbed a handful of the new
patterns, my trusty 4wt, kissed Marguerite, promised I'd catch one for
her and was out the door. Okay, this wasn't the first time out this year,
but it was the first promising day, and the first nice one. I felt like I'd
just been paroled.
It's been a wet winter (first one of those in a while, too) so the
pond was plenty full when I arrived, and there was still a rim of
ice around the shady edges and where the water had backed up
into the shoreline weeds. But thanks to steady breezes the last few
days, the rest of the pond was open and ready to be explored. I
started, as I always do early in the season with a soft hackle of
some sort, in this case a soft hackle version of the copper John.
Whoever built this pond must also have been a fisherman. There's
a shallow bay right in the northeast corner where the sun is on it
most of the day, which seemed like as good a place as any to test
a new fly.
The water was still just a little above freezing and the fish were
still slow. I've always had the best luck on these days with
something that has a lot of natural movement retrieved at the
slowest rate possible. A take is often nothing more than just a
slight hesitation in the leader, no more than you would expect
from the fly bumping a rock or stick under the water. After 20
minutes or so of setting up on twigs and moss and debris, I lifted
the rod and the line moved off sideways. Fish on. I soon landed
what, by the idiot grin on my face, an onlooker might have expected
to be a monster, but in fact was about a seven inch bluegill. Not huge,
but very pretty in his winter colors which always seem to darken as
the water warms around here, and more importantly, it was a fish
and it ate one of the new patterns I'd tied over the winter.
I soon followed that up with a couple more, then things
slowed down. I stayed in that little bay for a little longer
before moving up the bank a ways to try a few casts around
a tree that had fallen in the water after the last ice storm. Nothing
for quite a while, but then, I was out of the sun here, but I had to
give it a try. I know it will be a great spot later this summer. As if
the pond were agreeing with me, on my last cast to the outermost
edge of the tree, I felt a little tug. The little tug turned out to be a
largemouth of small stature, about nine inches long. But, again, it
was a fish, and if it goes to the trouble of letting me catch it, I'll
show the proper appreciation, no matter how large or small it
turns out to be.
As I worked my way back to the truck, I picked up a couple
more bluegills and two more baby bass. Not a spectacular day
by any means, but enough to finally offer a little relief from the
shack nasties and a promise that spring, though certainly not
here yet, is at least on the way. ~ David Merical
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