A Few Good Spots

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.

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.

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

by Josh Greenberg, Gates Au Sable Lodge

bouncing off tannic grease. My youngest hyperventilated with excitement. I shipped water netting the thing well before it was ready to be netted.

Spot #2: They Only Come Out at Night

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

what happened post-South Branch, at Spot #2, I sense with liquid clarity, if only because I nearly quit fly-fishing because of it. But here goes.

I see the moon over the marshy meadow. I feel the suck of the muck on my knees. I hear the sound of a big fish feeding alongside a single log in what I’d later learn was about eight inches of water.

But what I’m about to describe is an absolute meltdown.

After my terrible evening on the South Branch, I failed to check my tippet. I cast over the big rising fish in Spot #2 and broke the fish off on the hookset. I then retied to the same tippet and hooked the same fish about a halfhour later…and broke it off again. Yes, it’s true. Total true confession. I lost my marbles.

I then heard another fish upstream, and – with fresh tippet – made an absolutely stupid hurling javelin-throw of a cast far into the upstream shadow with all the anger and rage I had in my body powering that loop as far as I could… and that distant, unseen, noise repeated itself. I set the hook with vigor, to say the least, and fought the fish slowly to the net. It would be one of my biggest trout of the year. A beautiful hen brown. It was very late at night.

I developed a tender fascination for that spot. At dusk, the trout would leave the deep hole downstream and swim up over a sand hump just downstream of the muck flat, their wakes, like clockwork, appearing at about 10:15 pm. There, presumably, they would fin in formation until the bugs began hatching. I never did much with spinners in there, just the late hatching Hex. They were great trout, each of them. They were unbothered fish, being as they were nearly in a side channel, and rising, as they did, with imperceptibility. The only bad thing that happened there was I ripped my waders.

Spot #3: The Loaded Log Jam

In the heart of where everyone fishes, there lies a jam that, oddly, no one was fishing for four consecutive nights… so we just kept fishing it. When I had the kids tugging on me to play the part of after school activity, childhood peer, parent, fishing buddy, educator…I just kept taking them to this spot because it was the first available spot we came to unoccupied. It’s not my spot. Hell, it might be your spot. But for four nights, it was our spot.

This was right around the Fourth of July, and there wasn’t a rising trout that hadn’t been worked, and a bunch of them had already been caught, and if the four nights we had in this spot aren’t a lesson in the effectiveness of catch and release, I don’t know what is.

It’s a big, old, historic, south-bank log jam. It’s the kind of spot where the water in an otherwise slow stretch of river is just ever so slightly funneled, and the trout rise all-around the log jam. We named them either by the rise or by what they looked like after we caught them. We had the backwater beast we called the King until the younger caught it. But the King looked so silly, with his pronounced underbite, we called him Doofus afterward, and when we heard him rising the next night, we said that’s Doofus and cast at the other ones. We had the roamer we called Shifty. We had the Fish-With-No-Lips that I couldn’t get the hook in. We had Heron Spot – the nice brown with the scar that I know was also caught in April. And we had a few that we called a-holes.

One night, we had use of a friend’s night vision goggles. Say what you want, but they were awesome! They cost $125 on Amazon, and we never used them in a truly unsporting fashion.

By the end of those four nights, we knew every fish in that spot, including the sucker that showed up near the end of each night to kiss at the accumulated bugs within the logjam. We caught most of the trout. Not all of them, but most of them. And at the end of those four nights, they were all back to rising. That last night my oldest hooked and lost a new and enormous fish from behind the jam. He managed, also, a bright, silver bullet rainbow that we’d not heard before. It was a beautiful midsummer Hex dream, except every fish – picked over and rising in a full moon – was caught on a repurposed brown drake spinner fished on 4x fluorocarbon; a sort of unmatching of the hatch that would make for a very weird Fly Fisherman article.

After we finished fishing that last night, we heard a curse from the only other vehicle in the parking lot. I knew what it was: A man had locked his keys in his vehicle. We gave him a ride to…nowhere. It was two in the morning, and the tow truck couldn’t be reached for some reason, and AAA earned an “F” for usefulness. I decided to loan him my vehicle, and he drove two hours to his home so he could grab his other set of keys – and his seriously unhappy wife – to return to his secret trout spot to reclaim his car, return my truck and, to my delight, gift me a bottle of excellent whiskey, the sipping of which, on a cold February night, spawned this quick reverie; though the words of it, like that gifted whiskey, have suddenly run dry.

Authentic Wilderness

John Gubbins

John Gubbins has done a ne and masterful job as biographer of the rather clandestine life of Theodore Gordon, one of America's truly great y shers....anyone interested in...some really great angling tactics and ideas will nd this book not only informative, but also fun to read. Gary Borger, Author of Presentations, Nymphing, and Designing Trout Flies John Gubbins has given us a great insight into Gordon's life, as an angler, a y tier, a writer, a person of many secrets, and most importantly to me, a conservationist. I found it hard to put this book down once I started to read it. Bert Darrow, Author, Guide & President of Theodore Gordon Fly shers John Gubbins has taken all that Gordon has written by and about Gordon, lled in a few gaps and reveals him a real human being...not only did [he] read everything available about Gordon, he painstakingly tied the ies Gordon developed and shed them. The ies work. So does the book. Harry Peterson, President Emeritus, Western Colorado University

The American Fly Fishing Experience Theodore Gordon: His Lost Flies and Last Sentiments

For Books and Inquiries: Amazon - Kindle and Paperback John Gubbins, 665 Tony's Lane, Ishpeming MI 49849 PH: 906-869-6679 ∙ profoundriver@gmail.com (paperback with endorsement gratis)