Michigan Trout Unlimited
MICHIGAN Trout
A Few Good Spots
14
by Josh Greenberg, Gates Au Sable Lodge
Fall/Winter 2021
This past summer, I found three new fishing spots hidden within the same river I’ve always fished. A winter midnight’s glass of brown water has reminded me of this.
bouncing off tannic grease. My youngest hyperventilated with excitement. I shipped water netting the thing well before it was ready to be netted.
I spent an unusual amount of time in these spots. Two of the spots became favorites because the pandemic had canceled all of my kids’ activities except fishing with dad, and these spots were right for the kids.
Spot #2: They Only Come Out at Night
None of these spots will be described as accurately as the trout fishing they entertained. Spot #1: The Pandemic Pool, or The Rainbow Well A vast, shallow riffle funnels into a long sweeping left bend with a back eddy for a pool-heart and a giant logjam at the tail-out as an exclamation point. The spring rainbows stage in this pool before shooting up into the riffle to spawn. I fished this pool both on foot with my oldest and by boat with my youngest son. This was during snowmelt and lockdown when just going fishing had a tinge of anarchy. It’s a good nymphing spot. No, it’s a great nymphing spot. At first, I fished the edge of the back eddy by tightline (me) or by indicator rig (kids). But then, on a sunny day when the black stones were everywhere, I saw, just upstream off the middle shelf, the flapping tail of a subsurface-feeding brown, and caught him sight casting a small, weighted streamer tied on a jig hook. God, that was cool. At the time, things were really locked down and unknown. At the fly shop, we were putting orders in a Yeti cooler for outdoor pickup. Things were weird. After work – which seemed somewhat illegal, at the time – I’d grab a kid and just go back to the pool, which I began to think of as the Rainbow Well. You can’t really see anything but nature around it. Nature was the only part of this new life that still resembled the old life. My youngest caught an enormous rainbow there. That fish hooked itself and just went careening through the air, repeatedly, like a drop of prismatic water
Along a marshy meadow, a covert, shallow muck flat above an enormous and well-fished pool fills up with big trout once the Hex flies have begun hatching. I’ve become something of a wading enthusiast. I love to wade fish. I love to fish by myself. I love to fish exactly how I want to fish. And I think that, at heart, fly fishing is a solitary pursuit, though I make certain allowances at times. One of the treasures awaiting the wading enthusiast is the little niches that boat anglers will pass up in favor of more obvious and supposedly greener meadows. I came to Spot #2 after a disastrous night on the South Branch with my friend Tanker. He caught everything, and I caught next to nothing, during a beautiful Hex spinner flight. Being frustrated after midnight is kind of a collegiate thing. But life is short. I left Tanker – somewhat rudely – on the South Branch and drove across the county to try a little spot I’d scouted out earlier that spring. As I write this, I don’t remember much from earlier that night on the South Branch other than emotion. But
