On an old episode of The American Sportsman, Lee Wulff and Curt Gowdy flew up to Labrador and fished the Minipi River for giant brook trout. The whole episode is an absolute gem (and worth watching just to see Wulff tie a fly without a vise), but there’s one line that Gowdy says that’s stuck in my mind since I first watched this episode a few years ago.
I can’t remember it word-for-word, but Gowdy says that all anglers go through an evolution of sorts. They start out by wanting to catch as many fish as possible—big, small, it doesn’t matter. Then, once they’ve had their fill of tons of fish, they get a hankering for big fish, and that quest for trophy-sized trout consumes them. Finally, anglers get to a point—not a higher plane, just a different stage in life—where their goal is to catch a certain fish, usually a certain way.
Gowdy was completely right, but what’s so interesting about this evolution is the way it manifests in how anglers approach a day of fishing.
At the Lake
Just last week, I spent a week fishing some lakes I used to visit all the time when I lived in Utah. There’s a string of three lakes that sit next to each other in a basin, just about 8,000 feet above sea level. The lowest lake has the smallest fish, the highest has the biggest, and the fishing gets progressively tougher the higher you go.
My friend Alex and I spent three days fishing the lakes, and we started on the middle one. It’s been known to push out 20-inch trout, but most of the fish we caught were rainbows in the 12-14-inch range. The fishing was fast, and I got my pick of style. I could’ve fished dry flies, a double-nymph rig, small streamers, or a dry-dropper, and caught plenty of fish. And that’s exactly what I did.
The fishing wasn’t so easy that I got bored—the fish still wanted the right fly, at the right depth—but I got plenty of feedback about my presentation and fly choice. I never felt like I was throwing tactics at a wall to see what stuck, which is how I often feel on lakes.
Ready to Give Up
When we made it to the highest lake, I felt confident after two days of successful fishing that I’d do alright. This lake has always given me grief, but I’ve been able to catch one or two fish from it—usually nice ones.
The day started out well enough. Alex caught a nice tiger trout almost on the first cast, but I couldn’t get on the board. I tried stripping streamers, letting nymphs sit under an indicator, and even crawling scuds along the drop-offs. If the fish saw my flies, they didn’t like them. But it felt like I was casting to a big empty pond, and I had no way to know what I was doing wrong.
In rivers or other lakes, you often get feedback in the form of a fish rejecting your flies. Or your buddy will fish the same run you just blanked in, and he’ll catch five fish. A simple adjustment—changing the depth, sizing down in tippet, or eliminating micro-drag—is sometimes all it takes to turn a bad day around.
On this lake, though, I only knew I wasn’t catching fish. I traversed the shoreline, alternated the depth of my flies, and switched the patterns out fairly frequently. My only reward were a few small cutthroat that ate without any rhyme or reason.
I was ready to admit defeat. Sometimes the fish just don’t want to play, sometimes my mojo is off, and I’m not all that great at fishing tough lakes. There’s something to be said for pushing through, learning from the failure, and trying to improve my lake game. But when the lake gives up no discernible secrets, I’d rather head back to camp, make an early dinner, and stare at the fire.
Alex is the exact opposite. He spent most of the day at the highest lake fishing a narrow channel near the outlet. The water was clear enough he could see big fish swimming around his flies. They showed almost no interest until about 7 p.m., when Alex finally hooked and landed two splake. For Alex, it was an exhausting—but fulfilling—day.
I was just frustrated.
On the hike back to camp, I thought some more about Curt Gowdy’s words, and realized that there’s nothing wrong with me not enjoying lake fishing. Sure, I should probably work on that part of my skill set, but I think I’ve moved past the desire to catch big fish. I want to catch fish on dry flies, or at least, in water where I can watch the fish eat my fly. That’s my personal pinnacle of the sport. I’m willing to leave a fish alone if it doesn’t want to eat. Alex likes the challenge of trying to get that fish to eat, no matter the cost.
Neither one of us is “right.” We’re just at different stages in the evolution of our angling.
I have to admit it. I left a rising fish. It was on the opposite bank in soft bankside water on the other side of current. I spent an ungodly amount of time casting at it, to it, or however you want to describe what I was doing. I was flinging different flies. I was getting nice drifts, and I was dragging the shit out of my flies. No matter. Fishy kept eating. I’d get an oral exam or even a rectal exam of my dry at times, but always a refusal. I finally said, You know what? You win, pal. You beat me. And it’s okay. I don’t lose that often, seldom actually, but I know when I’ve been licked. And I’m happy, because it’s okay if they win sometimes, too.