Giants
by Jerry Dennis
Every game fish has a dimension beyond which it become an exemplar,
a paragon, a bragging fish. The dimensions vary, of course, according to
species and place. Down south largemouth bass grow to the size of
state-fair hogs, so it take double-diget weight to be worthy of boasting. Here
in the north, cold water and short summers make our bass reach trophy status
at about six pounds. For smallmouths the defining number is five pounds;
for northern pike, ten; for steelhead, fifteen. Chinook salmon don't raise
eyebrows until they reach twenty-five or thirty pounds.
You have to keep some perspective on this. A one-pound bluegill deserves
more praise than a four-pound walleye. And while a three-pound rainbow
trout is a stud in the Au Sable, trollers on Lake Michigan dismiss it as small,
a mere "skipper." Trout and salmon grow so big in the Great Lakes that
they skew the grading curve. A three-pounder makes almost no impression
when it's caught in company with twenty-pounders, especially when landed
with tackle stout enough to drag a cow behind a train. But a wild three-pounder
in a river is another matter.
On most rivers where I've fished, a sixteen-inch trout is considered a nice fish,
an eighteen-incher is a nice fish, and anything bigger is worthy of hosannas.
For years a twenty-incher was such an elusive prize that I remember at age
twenty being disappointed when I caught a brown trout that measured
nineteen and three-quarter inches. Since then I've taken a fair number of
browns, rainbows, and even brook trout bigger than twenty inches, but
most of them were caught in places like southern Chile, which hardly
counts, or were taken at night during the Hexagenia hatch, when big trout
are more vulnerable than usual. A twenty-inch resident trout from a
Michigan river, on a fly, in daylight, when I could see the strike and
watch the battle and admire the colors of the fish - that was an experience
that eluded me until I had fished those rivers for twenty years. You might
say I finally earned the right, though I'm sure it had more to do with chance.
For a long time my luck was bad, then it got better. Throw a fly into the
water enough times, and eventually even the biggest fish comes down with
a case of the stupids.
After a trout reach about twenty inches, it's more convenient to scale it in
pounds, yet most anglers I know in Michigan measure even their largest trout
by the inch. That might be because we don't want to trout associated with
the ten-and twenty-pounders we see caught so frequenty from the Great Lakes
and displayed dead on the dock. Also, those of us who prefer to release
most or all of our trout - even, and perhaps especially, the big ones - can
rarely take the time to weigh fish. We measure then quickly and get them
back into the water. When a lady in Grayling recently caught a very large
brown trout during the Hex hatch, it was the length of the fish - thirty inches -
that everyone talked about, not the weight. Saying it was a ten-pounder would have
lacked punch. ~ Jerry Dennis
Continued next time!
About Jerry Dennis
Jerry Dennis lives in Traverse City Michigan and feeds his
obsession for fly fishing (and giant trout) by spending as much time as
possible on the Boardman, Manistee, and AuSable rivers. He has been
a full-time writer since 1986, writes for numerous magazines, and was
the recipient of the 1999 Michigan Author Award. His seven books
about nature and the outdoors include A Place On The Water,
The River Home and From a Wooden Canoe. The
River Home was name Best Outdoor Book of 1998 by the
Outdoor Writers Association of American and is now available in
paperback.
Excerpt from The Riverwatch
The Quarterly Newsletter of the Anglers of the Au Sable.
Lighter Side Archive
|
