River has a different feel at night

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Nighttime on the water capsizes the senses.

Daylight gives you perspective. Waypoints on the shore and in the water allow you to gauge distance. You can also see into the water. Besides obvious things like rocks and wood, the water also gives distinct color codes. Dark green patches denote moss. Tan patches are clean bedrock. Look closer, and you can often see fish.

At night, your eyes are useless. You must listen. And feel. Those who frequently fly fish at night have acutely developed senses of touch to feel the subtle take of a tiny fly or nymph in the current.

I don’t have this. My sense of touch is oriented to impulses from spinning gear.

During a recent fishing trip on the White River, I joined Gary Garth, outdoor editor at the Journal-Record in Louisville, Ky., for a twilight fly fishing respite at Gaston’s White River Resort. I felt as lost as a wedding ring in a pawnshop. I couldn’t see my strike indicator or my line, so I couldn’t read the current or determine the drift of my fly. Because my rod was so stiff, I couldn’t even feel the fly come off the water when I loaded a cast.

Garth finally announced that he had to go to his room and finish a column. I went back to my room and got a spinning rig. I overheard someone say earlier in the day that big brown trout were hitting “high and loud” at night. I interpreted that to mean they were hitting stickbaits on or near the surface. I tied on a Long A Bomber in a rainbow trout pattern. Of course, color is irrelevant because fish don’t see color at night. A lure only makes a silhouette. They hunt by sound and by vibration, as do I.

Big floodlights below the cabins at Gaston’s shine on the water. I decided to wade there so I could at least avoid stepping into a deep hole. This artificial light is helpful for fly fishing, but it distorts a spin fisherman’s perspective. You can see color bands on the bottom, but you can’t judge depth, and the movement of current makes you feel like you’re wading in a cloud. It’s almost enough to cause vertigo.

Fish broke all around me. One big trout slammed prey against the bank at the edge of the shadows. I couldn’t cast to that fish because of the thick moss bed inches under the shallow surface.

Instead, I waded far into the river, near the shadow line. I cast far across the river into the darkness and upstream. I reeled in the slack and jerked the lure as I would if fishing for largemouths on Bull Shoals Lake. My only reward was fouled hooks from when the lure plunged into the moss.

I adjusted the running depth by varying my retrieve speed and the severity of the jerks. I tuned in with every cast. I felt the lure pitch and yaw. I felt it wobble, and I could felt it dart.

More important, I heard fish hitting the surface.

I cast to the shadow line and let the lure ride the current. I twitched it lightly, creating gurgling, popping sounds that the rattles inside the lure seemed to amplify. It felt right, and it sounded right. Sooner or later, a trout was going to smack that lure.

It happened as the lure crossed the shadow line into the light. A big fish hit the lure from below and knocked it into the air. I set the hook while the lure was airborne and ducked to avoid a collision with the six-barbed rocket. That was a mistake. I should have let it fall back to the water because the fish probably would have hit it again.

A short time later, a fish that looked to be about 3 pounds followed the lure to the end of its retrieve. It looked at the lure before I pulled it out of the water, and it dashed away.

A voice jolted me from my reverie.

“Excuse me, sir!”

I turned to face a man on the bank above me.

“There’s a boat ramp about 200 yards downstream,” the man said. “They released about 3,500 trout there this afternoon. You can probably catch a lot there.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said over my shoulder.

I should have acted on it. Big brown trout love to eat stocker rainbows.

That’s probably where the giants were, and that stickbait would have made a nice snack.

Sports, Pages 24 on 03/20/2014