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. ~ Tim Giger
Originally published March 17, 2008 on Fly Anglers Online by Tim Giger.