I made a last-minute decision to ditch work last week and go fishing, which doesn’t take all that much convincing. We’ve had a mild autumn in Wyoming, which has made every day feel like the last grasp at good fishing weather. It’s hard to get wood split, the leaves raked, or the gutters cleaned when it’s 65 out and blue-winged olives are still hatching in large numbers.
It wasn’t quite 65, and the blue-wings sputtered halfheartedly all day, but I made it to the Green River the day before Halloween for a float with two good friends. We launched around 10 a.m. — one of the many perks of fall fishing — and Alex started throwing streamers while I tied on a small black cricket.
I glanced somewhat suspiciously at Ryan when he recommended the cricket, but he knows the river better than I do. Fishing dry flies, let alone a terrestrial, the day before Halloween wasn’t what I’d envisioned, but you’ll rarely catch fish if you try to make the river bend to your expectations, a lesson I’m still learning.
I didn’t keep track of how many fish I caught, but Alex noted at some point that the dry fly outperformed his streamers, and later a dry-dropper rig, about five to one. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but I did catch one decent brown trout in a lull between blue-wings hatching.
Eventually, I lost that cricket pattern on a bad hook set, and predictably, it was the last one of that size in the boat. I threw a larger one, but the fish didn’t buy it. Alex, meanwhile, had ditched his dry-dropper rig in favor of a Parachute Adams, and I’d swapped places with Ryan so he could fish while I rowed.
I’m not great on the sticks, but I didn’t hit anything, and Ryan and Alex both doubled up on fish while I rowed, so I didn’t mess it up too much. Even with the low water and bright skies, the fishing stayed consistent. There wasn’t much of a lull, which is a bit opposite of what usually happens this time of year. The mornings start slow, fishing picks up around lunchtime, then tapers off again as the sun sets and the temps drop. Instead, it felt like the fish in each run were waiting just for us, a mindset I think it’s easy to fall into when you don’t see another boat all day.
By the time we made it to the take out, all three of us were sore from catching fish, a bit sunburnt, and hungry. The fishing had been steady enough that we never stopped for lunch. As Ryan’s truck crested a rise on the drive back to town, I had enough service for my phone to send me one of those “memory” notifications. Apparently, nine years before, I’d been driving along the same road (where I’d taken some landscape pictures of the sunset) with Ryan as we left the river. A quick browse through the rest of the photos in that memory showed fish with dry flies stuck in their lips.
A lot has changed in nine years. I finished college, moved out of Utah, got married, and my wife had a baby. We own a house, have two dogs, and I sold my Camaro to buy a Tacoma (which I’ve since sold for a full-size pickup, sadly). I’ve put on some weight, but my beard filled in, and my collection of vintage Winston fly rods has expanded.
All that is to say that, even though life now doesn’t look much like it did almost a decade ago, fishing has remained constant. That provides some sort of solace as we deal with doctor’s appointments for our daughter, changing family dynamics, and the existential dread a mortgage brings.
Rivers are always changing, sure, and fisheries do, too. But for right now, they’re where I last left them, and that makes all the difference.
Love it.