Another Season
I said my annual good-byes to the Skagit on Wednesday. I hiked up to the Mixer, lugging my heavy neoprenes and other gear in a backpack. This time I took along a six-section pack rod and DT6F line to work the frog water at the bottom for dollies in search of outmigrating fry. Rigged with a dark beadhead bugger and small Muddler, the nine foot rod felt like a toy. Surprisingly, I got no action. Perhaps I should have used a sink-tip. Then it was back to working part of the long drift with the big Alltmor. No action, once again. Could that water be a little too fast for optimum steelhead holding?
Another 25-minute slog back to the car, then ten miles upstream. A delicious dinner at my favorite upstream eatery. Sorry that Tootsie wasn't there; chatting with her has become part of my ritual.
Then across the highway to where I'd parked; back into waders and along that obscure path through the woods to the upper end of my favorite steelhead drift, bar none. This time I rigged the 16-footer with a floating line. When the water is fairly low, like now, a heavier hook will cover that gently sloping bottom just right. And then downstream, step by step for an hour or more, while the evening sunlight encrimsons the higher peaks upstream. The snowpack is thinning fast and the trees are fully fledged, a far cry from the beginning of the catch-and-release season. Why must the season end now, when the river is looking so vibrant? OK, I understand, it's "for the children"...
Easy 90-foot casts, like a metranome, so that I can concentrate on the setting. A pair of ducks whistles upstream through the darkening air. Why does the bottom here have to be such tricky wading? Soapy-slick rocks, in inconveniently random spacing, and too many of them unachored. Well, this is what ideal holding water feels like underfoot. It gets to be murder on my back, though.
The line comes alive, out there in the dusk. Two measured yanks, to set the hook. Is it a steelhead, at last?....Is it a steelhead that's not much of a fighter? I'm willing to settle... So, it's just another dollie. No, I refuse to disparage this beautiful eight-pound fish for being itself, not another species.
I get the barbless point of the black-and-purple maribou out with minimum tooth-damage to my thumb. She revives quickly, and is away to midstream. I fish on a little longer, and reach the path back to the parking area just as it gets too dark to see my fly land on the water. After so many years, I know how to time my evening devotions.
I walk stiffly through the dark woods, my eyes sucking in the last ambient light, but my back muscles protesting. Sitting on the tailgate of my station wagon, painfully kicking out of the bootfeet and sipping the last of the thermos coffee. Two hours of glaring headlights between here and home. One more season done. How many more?