Mother's Day in the Stream

My little New England town lies between an upper and a lower lake, and they are connected by a short stream running right through it. In spring of a good snow year the stream at first is a roaring whitewater with standing waves, sending a brisk tongue of current out into the bay for a hundred and fifty yards. Smelt run up it (though not in their former numbers), and landlocked salmon follow. That's the time to stand bankside and throw an old-time streamer like a Grey Ghost or a Hornberg across the heavy current, and let it be carried swinging out into the bay. A crisp smack (and smarting knuckles if you daydream) will announce that a salmon is fast to your offering.

As May begins the current, still swift, has settled to a smoother surface, and the big lake rainbows join the salmon. About then, or a week later, smallmouth bass will appear. Worthy fish, all of them. The water is now wadeable though deep and cold, and wade you must if you want a good drift, for dry-fly time has come. A fisherman in the know, especially a local one who can return to the water often throughout the day, can have fishing as good as anything you'd reach by crossing several time zones followed by a float plane ride ending in a hard hike.

There will be some impressive splashy rises to distract the unwary. These are suckers, and out-of-towners are welcome to cast to them all day. They're bottom feeders, burly and strong. They'll take a nymph, give you a great ride, and leave your net slimy and stinking, but they won't respond to a fly on the surface and their splashes mean nothing to the wise angler. Ask me how I know.

Watch closely, and you'll see delicate little sips, sometimes just barely there so you're not sure what you saw. But you're seeing it all right, and if you can cover them with a size 14 dry of almost any kind you'll find what you seek. It may be a smallmouth, rainbow, or salmon, but in any case it will be theatric and acrobatic. They will head for open water and you can't follow them so have a plan and enough backing. You will probably have an audience to see you fall in and/or get cleaned out, since you're in the middle of town.

For all its vigor, it's actually a small spot. After five or six hookups you will have spooked the pool, so there's no real sense in driving all day to get there. But the local can just go to work and come back at lunch. And on the way home. And while he's been sent out to get milk. And before work, and on weekends before the household wakes up.

As Mother's Day approaches the water is smoother still, the current tongue doesn't reach out so far, the smelt are gone, and the fish are closer in and still sipping. Now they're picky, though. Now it's clear that they took your size 14 by mistake or reflex, because what they've been feeding on is really tiny. They will ignore your dry flies along with the streamers and Power Bait flung by the hardware types. But you, being the crafty local, keep at it. Once in a while a size 20 Griffiths Gnat will work, sometimes a tiny Needham such as the Farmington River guys use. But nothing reliable.

Having such a resource at your fingertips can make you lazy and cocky, of course. If you stop by three times and only have a .33 average you're still having a better fishing day than almost everybody. It's not as if you took out a mortgage to get there (well, maybe you did, but not just for the day). It took a solid skunk day to finally make me show some respect.

As the other frustrated anglers were beginning to give up with that special disgust that means you can't come back for quite some time, maybe not until next year, I dragged out too. But this time I put down the rod and knelt with my face close to the surface of a little eddy. There were tiny down-wing surface flies, about 22s or 24s, looking like miniature house flies. The body was dark olive. They didn't look like the black flies which were just then beginning to buzz around my eyes and nose. I'd never noticed them before, but then of course I'd never really looked at the water, just the air over the rises.

So I hurried the half-mile home to my vise and dug out some # 22 dry fly hooks and put on my cheaters. I was still a pretty new fly-fisherman in those days, and 22 seemed impossibly small. I found myself holding my breath and chewing my lip, as if that would help. A body of olive thread, a small bunch of clear antron fibers tied in over the bend, divided and folded loosely forward and tied in behind the eye so they made a small loop over each side of the body. A short turn of ostrich herl ahead of the wings and tied off. Viewed from below it had the delta shape of the natural's wings. In thirty minutes and several tries, I had two of them.

Back on the water, I tied on a size 14 Parachute Hare's Ear dry, a favorite general purpose fly, and to it added a 6 inch dropper of 6X with the new fly. As the parachute bobbed past a riser, something--I can't say exactly what--happened nearby and I struck. I had 18 inches of very irritable landlocked salmon on my 6X. The last of the stragglers returned to the bank at the sound of my reel. Two more salmon took after that, then a rainbow kept the fly. Then two more salmon, then a third broke me off and I was out of ammo.

That's when the guy called from the bank, "Hey buddy, what are you using?" "I don't know, I just made it up." "Well OK, whatever it is, I'll give you twenty bucks for two of them." "You'll have to ask that salmon over there. He has my last one."

Back home, I told the tale to my youngest boy. I said I hadn't known what to call the fly. "That's obvious, Dad," he said. " It's the Mother's Day Fly."

Oh, yeah, come to think of it. It was.