Spring Broke

I booked a small cabin at Backbone State Park for seven nights at our spring break, planning to fish like mad with James for holdover fish in the stocker streams and wild browns in some protected ones.  All winter in eastern Iowa it’s been in the 40s, 50s, 60s and mostly snow free.  One day in February it was 73F.  I looked forward to this trip for months.  And so of course the Sunday that it kicked off saw a high below freezing and six inches of snow.  Daily highs stayed below freezing through midweek.  I could have screamed.  There didn’t seem much point sitting in a small cabin looking out at a frozen winter wonderland, so I cancelled the first three nights of the trip and we set out Wednesday.  The forecast was a bit better, but not great.  High in the 30s Thursday, high 40s Friday, 40 on Saturday, high 40s again on Sunday.  We tried fairly hard, kitted out in long thermal underwear and multiple layers of fleece, hoodies, nano puffs, and we more or less managed.  But the wind howled the entire time, gusting to 25 mph, it was cold, there weren’t many fish, and it was mostly an endurance trial.  Still, grim fishing is better than no fishing.

On the the Thursday we decided to explore and hit a couple of new streams near the Mississippi.  First we went to South Cedar.  It’s in a lovely little valley, with a parking spot near a one lane bridge.

The slower pools had ice along the margins and the stream is fairly small.  Most of the stocked water is shown as upstream on the DNR map, but we only fished downstream to the end of the public easement.  We saw trout in the pool under the bridge when looking down from the bridge, so started there.  James had a fish on within minutes.

James used his Nissin Kosansui Fine Mode 320 as usual.  I tied eight #12 black and eight #12 olive Slump Busters, and he used a black one in lieu of his normal avowed “confidence fly,” a black woolly bugger.  He landed a decent medium sized holdover rainbow by dropping it just off the edge of the ice on the far side of the pool.

We worked our way down.  It was basically an empty creek, though there were several nice pools.  The lower part has a mowed path following the stream.  There is no natural reproduction, and almost all the stockers seemed to have been caught.  We weren’t spooking fish, there just weren’t any to be seen in the gin clear pools.  I was beginning to worry about the mockery I was in for if I didn’t catch anything, but I turned up another lonely holdover in a beautiful riprapped pool.

I fished my GM 39 with a tandem nymph rig, beadhead hotspot killer bug top and Frenchie bottom, both size 14.  The fish took the Frenchie.

We got to the bottom of the easement.  Sometimes it’s ambiguous where an easement ends.  Not here.  The landowner had put up a forest of aggressive signs, threatening prosecution, etc.  Fair enough, I guess, but it was well into gratuitous nastiness.  There was worse to come at the next stop.

We went to Buck Creek, not far away.  In his book, Jene Hughes shows three access points and suggests starting at the middle, by an old mill, so we did.  The mill was pretty impressive.

Jene showed the lower portion of the stream as accessible, but it no longer is, including the lower access point.  Although the parking lot has the normal public access signs and a stile, it led you into a vast streamside field of cow dung, complete with cows.  We waded through that, then decided to head downstream. It’s a big stream, and it meanders through pasture in loops, headed for a point where the valley narrows and it enters woods.  There were lots of nice looking pools, but again they seemed nearly totally empty.  I finally found a fish and caught it.

We stopped for lunch when the sun made a brief appearance, but soon the wind really started howling.  We didn’t see another fish, and where the stream entered the woods the landowner had barricaded it with barbed wire and cables across the water, and barbed wire all the way across the valley.  So once again there was no ambiguity.  We headed back, navigated through the festering piles of cow droppings, waited while a whole bunch of cows crossed the stream, and headed upstream from the starting point.  We only got about half the distance marked on the map.  There were more fish in evidence – I hooked one and had follows from two others, and where we turned around we spooked a fairly large trout in a corner pool, looking down from the elevated bank.  But we didn’t catch any, and it was getting increasingly cold and the wind wasn’t letting up.  We called it a day around five.

After we were packed up and I was doing up my shoes, a big pickup truck came down the hill.  First he seemed to be headed right for the front of my car to block us, then he pulled alongside.  I had to quickly close my door because he was so close he was in danger of hitting it.  I rolled my window down.  Some fat grizzled dude did so as well.  He didn’t say Hi.  Instead, he said “What are you doing down here?”  Most people you meet when fishing are nice.  Some kind of just want to be left alone.  It’s rare you run into a complete asshole.  But we had one here.  I was on a public service road and we’d just come off a public easement.  I figured if I stayed friendly he’d stop being a dick, but it wasn’t to be.  I asked if he was the property owner.  Yup.  I told him we were fishing and he said “Okay.”  He said he’d been having trouble with people “walking up off the crick.”  I thanked him for allowing the easement and told him we just stuck to the stream and fished.  He said “Okay” again, as if he had some power to judge.  It didn’t seem like any pleasantries were going to be forthcoming and my attempts to be polite were in danger of yielding to my extremely low tolerance for assholes, so I nodded and rolled up my window and he drove away.

The weather was slightly warmer on Friday, but the wind was even worse, and it started to get really frustrating.  We tried Hickory Creek first.  It was running fairly clear, but it was extremely high.  We fished it through the first downstream meadow part.  Some other guy turned up at the bridge, geared up, and tried for a while, but soon gave up and left.  The wind gave us fits.  I got follows from a few browns, but didn’t hook anything.  Eventually James got snagged in a tree.  While trying to clear that I got my rod tip snagged in the same tree.  One fit of rage later, the tip section of my GM 39 was broken.  That ended the Hickory Creek portion of the day.  The backup plan had been Sny Magill, but it occurred to me that we were already halfway to some of the prime northern water we’d never seen, so now was as good a time as any to at least figure out how to get to some streams.  So we set off for French Creek, one of the famed “northern triangle” along with North Bear and Waterloo.

I drove up through Waukon on roads that were new to me, and found the upstream parking lot without any trouble.  There were two trucks in it.  I was surprised at how small the stream was.  We headed off to find the downstream parking lot.  It had one car.  We waddled out to have a go.  The wind was even worse.  There were oodles of brown trout visible – it’s a famous catch and release only stream, and it’s clear it’s famous for a reason.  Most of the time we spent at it was dealing with various snags, wind snarls, and tree adventures.  I had switched to a TUSA Sato with a long line (bad idea in the wind) and the same tandem nymphs except reversed.  When I did manage to get a cast down one nice run, I caught a small brown.

We got tired of fighting the wind pretty quickly.  To end the day we went a bit north to one of two Clear Creeks, this one a fingerling stocked stream in a wildlife management area.  We arrive at the upstream bridge to see another fly fisherman just returning to his vehicle.  We spoke with him for a while and he was friendly.  He’d been to North Bear and caught a few,  but said Clear had lots of small browns that spooked instantly whenever he approached.  We went down the little stream for a while.  It was in the woods so the wind wasn’t as bad, but it was still nasty and was compounded by endless overhanging trees.  We saw lots of trout, spooked them all, and truly our hearts weren’t really in it.  We explored for a while then packed up.  A one fish day, but at least we saw a couple of new streams.

On the Saturday I was hoping for something a little better as we visited a favourite protected stream.  We arrived mid morning and there was nobody there.  We walked up to the top.  It was colder than the day before but sunny.  And the wind was blowing just as much.  A variety of things delayed any real fishing, from someone announcing Number Two and the various steps in dealing with that to an unusual amount of trouble just plain tying knots in the wind.  We crossed over and started at the beaver dam pool.  James pretty much found a tree with every back cast, so still no fishing got done.  I managed to save the Slump Buster every time, once needing to get a ten foot dead branch to whack it down after the tippet broke.  I looked up to see some guy with a spin rod approaching us.  Frustration threatened to boil over.

Well, he was nice.  We talked for a good long time about various streams and fishing with our sons (I got the impression his was now fully grown).  When we were done he went back downstream, but he’d just fished most of the length of the stream.  I caught a small brown in the beaver dam pool.  We went up to the beautiful bend pool above it.  James hooked into a decent sized brown with his Slump Buster, but it jumped and shook the hook.  I hooked two small browns but didn’t land them.  James eventually caught a creek chub.  We started back down, me letting James have first go at most of the water in an effort to get him a trout.  Mostly he got more trees.  When we could see down to the parking lot, we saw an astounding number of vehicles, then started seeing fishermen dotted all over the stream.  Sigh.  They were all fly fishing.  I greeted the first one from a distance, told him when asked we’d just caught a couple.  He said it beats sitting at home watching the NCAA.  There were four other cars in the lot, not counting the spin fisherman who had left.  I’ve never before seen a single other angler at this stream.  Many dudes, I said to James.  We did not come here for many dudes.

At that point our endurance sort of ran out after three days in the wind with not a lot to show for it.  We had the cabin for one more night, but heading home and watching the hockey sounded like a pretty goood plan, too, so that’s what we did.

So, could have been better, should have been better, but we’ll take it.  There are no bad days on a trout stream.