After cutting a day from my bumpy camping trip earlier in the week, I was still pining for a really hardcore day at STSNBN. I only had one functioning rod left, my Nissin Zerosum 6:4 400 cm. I bought it following the general advice that I should fish the longest rod that I could, with the intention of using long rod/short line techniques. I’d only fished it once, briefly. So if nothing else, circumstances would force me to really give it a chance and get used to it.
I looked at the NWS report on Thursday and saw sunny around home. STSNBN was showing sunny during the day, then thunderstorms in the evening. I didn’t think more about it. Got up, fed the cats, got in the Jeep, and went.
So this was a mistake. As I drove north, I couldn’t help but notice an interesting canopy of low, dark clouds. I drove under it a bit north of Center Point. Around Walker, the first drops of rain splattered against the windshield. I’m sure it will pass, I thought. After all, it’s going to be sunny.
So as I passed Quasqueton, the deluge began in earnest. I stopped and looked up NWS. Forecast had changed to 100% thunderstorms in the morning, then 70% showers in the afternoon and breezy. Well. And to keep my winning streak from this week going, I mindlessly hadn’t brought my rain gear. Going to be sunny, you see.
So I drove to the parking lot, parked, and waited. Impressive lighting and thunder. Pounding rain. Several times I tried to resign myself to getting soaked and once I even got out and fetched the wading pants from the back. But the temperature and booms of thunder checked me. That, and waggling a graphite composite rod around in an electrical storm is courting suicide. So I sat. For an hour and a half. Some gray haired person in a truck with vanity plates made an appearance, looked at me, and immediately left. No idea what that was about, unless he was one of the bait fishers who are a blight on the stream.
Eventually, I gave up. I drove up out of the woods. But then when I was up and out, I could see the edge of the storm to the north. And, bizarrely, bright blue sky and sunlight beyond. On the way.
So I went back. Five minutes later the rain stopped. I’d lost a lot of time, but some kind of day now seemed to be in the offing. I had no idea what the stream level was, or whether the morning’s rain would put it off. But I geared up and headed down.
What I found was the lowest water level I’ve ever seen. So low that many shallow chub pools no longer held largish fish. It was another day where you could see much more of the bottom and the pool architecture than usual, which is useful. The deeper pools were turbid early but cleared later, but the water was so low you could see almost everything.
I first rigged the Zerosum with a Badger Tenkara floating line. It took about two minutes to figure out that this was basically abusing the very soft rod, so I switched to 12.5 feet of number 3 level line. I started fishing with a home tied olive woolly bugger I’d concocted the day before. My chief concern with tying them is that the woolly bugger saddle hackle you can buy is way too large for the sizes I fish (mostly 12). So far, what seems to work best is the Whiting 100s packs. Though this seems kind of expensive to use for woolly bugger hackle. But until I build up a collection of dyed saddles or something, it seems to be the way to go. The Whiting 100s don’t come in olive (I don’t think any of them are dyed) so I used number 12 grizzly hackle, dark olive small chenille, small copper wire, olive marabou, and olive Krystal Flash, tied on a number 12 Daiichi 2220.
I dunked the fly straight into the upper part of starting pool and was stunned to get an immediate flash from a brown. At this point I switched lines to the level line. For some reason, I also switched flies and didn’t go back to the self-tied fly. The browns in STSNBN have seemed to favour black woolly buggers, so I went to what I had left for those for much of the day. The trout in starting pool showed itself twice more, then lay low. This was a pattern all day long – initial interest, rapidly diminished.
A quandary at STSNBN is whether to lean toward cyprinids or trout. The trout are so rare and the creek chub so worthwhile that the cyprinids tend to win out. Then there’s always switching to buggers and whatnot at the really big pools. So I started out with a variety of things in the upper, less trouty stretch of stream: killer bug, Utah killer bug, gold ribbed hare’s ear, pheasant tail nymph. I made a real effort to fish a killer bugger in the hopes it could be kind of a hybrid. I caught plenty of fish with it, but only by fishing it like a regular killer bug. Twitching it didn’t seem to attract anything.
After the first contact with a trout, there wasn’t another for a while, but this is normal. The day did turn out to be a real lunker chubfest. I caught four or five of the largest chub I’ve seen, including probably the single largest.
There were very recent footprints along the stream, though they didn’t go all the way down to the bottom. My blood pressure rose at main pool when I found discarded worm containers and empty plastic water bottles. I picked up the trash, but it didn’t help with my efforts to resist stereotypes of bait fishers. I try fairly hard to be reasonable about it, because it seems like the DNR catering to bait anglers is a big reason we have a trout fishery in Iowa in the first place. But, sorry, bait fishers should not be allowed near a fragile, non-stocked, naturally reproducing stream.
At corner pool I caught a bluegill. So far, we’ve never caught more than a single bluegill in a day.
It was clear that the cyprinids weren’t going to approach the usual numbers. Partly this was the late start, partly the low water, but a lot of it also is I’m choosing to leave the shiners alone where possible. You can’t avoid hooking them as they’ll bite anything, well above their weight class. But they tend to try to swallow the hooks, and they’re small enough that catching them just means hauling them straight out. I’d rather leave them be, so in situations where it seemed clear there was a school of them I just moved on.
As I entered the trouty stretch, I started seeing and getting follows from browns. I’m getting a lot better at spotting the trout deep. The larger chub tend to be darker, to hold at multiple depths, and to hold at an oblique angle to the current. The trout look like gray ghosts among them, are generally larger, and are almost always near the bottom and facing directly into the current. The only fish that resemble them at depth are white suckers, which get as large and also have pale leading edges to their fins. The suckers tend to roam around in large groups, though.
With the water level so low, I could see the fish, but boy howdy, they could see me. I worked pretty hard to stay low, and the 400 cm rod helped me to stay back and still cast effectively, but it was a day to watch spooked trout swim very, very quickly. Where I did manage to get a fly near them without (or before) spooking them, it was as I said above – lots of interest the first cast, some interest the next couple, then the odd flash, then nothing. It seemed pretty clear it would take an early strike to catch them.
We’ve been working on a pretty good streak of failure with these browns. Nothing in the last three trips, but four times during the run we’ve had fish right up to the net and lost them. I was really hoping to get things back on track.
It looked like it was going to happen in slow pool. At the center of the pool is a cross-stream casting position to a large rock with a dead stump beside it. I haven’t caught anything, but I’ve gotten follows from a large fish on two separate trips. I wasn’t getting any strikes on the buggers, so I decided to try the muddlers I’d recently bought. I thought they were wets (they have tinsel bodies) but they showed no sign at all of sinking. So I broke out my new selector pack of micro split shot and squeezed two of the largest ones onto the line directly in front of the fly. That sunk it all right. I first cast into the approach to the deepest part from upstream. A brown charged out as I was retrieving into the shallower water, but turned back. On the next cast it followed into the shallows. I’d completed the retrieve and wasn’t real sure what to do, as the fish was still sitting there looking at the muddler. So I just left it, jiggled it slightly, and it struck. Okay, c’mon, here we go, please let it be over. Aaaaaand once again, net out, handlined down to the tippet, fish escapes. I at least know what happened this time. I smash down the barbs as a matter of course. The fish was hooked in the lip and as I switched hands with the net while handlining it, there was a brief slack, and the hook fell out. Cost of doing business, coupled with a mistake.
This was getting to feel like a curse. But I moved down to the cross stream position and cast again, not thinking it likely there was another fish in the vicinity. On the first cast the fly was aggressively hit. One more time, pleasepleaseplease, just get this miserable streak over with. And for once I played it in without fuss and netted it. Then I looked in the net. And the streak wasn’t over after all. It was a brook trout. HUH?
The only way I can think of that he got there was to come up from a stocked tributary, but the nearest is several miles downstream. There wasn’t supposed to be anything but naturally reproducing browns, nor have I ever seen any other trout. But there it was.
There were a couple more trout showing in slow pool, one follow from a large one and a fairly big one sporadically rising in the tail of the pool, but I got no further strikes. Moving down to the next complex pool, which is beautiful but so far has no name, I spooked the usual large fish in the little side pool. This is a 15-16″ fish which basically has to be a trout, which we’ve spooked almost every single trip. This time I hunkered down upstream and used the long rod to toss in the muddler. The fish came out to look before spooking, but on the second cast spooked and shot off downstream as the fly entered the water. Still amazed that a fish that size habitually lives in a pool that small, even in low water. Anyway, this pool is always really bad for spooking with its high banks. I got down to the big elliptical pool at the tail and managed to cast without spooking the fish in it. At least four browns charged the fly. One of them was huge. Naturally, the smallest of them won the race.
At least I netted it without difficulty, and so the streak was over. I’d finally landed another brown at STSNBN. There was the standard diminishing interest in subsequent casts and I didn’t get another strike. I switched to a black woolly bugger, the last battered black one in the box, and used it for the rest of the day.
It was fairly late, but I decided to explore further downstream than I’d been. It was another of these situations where there are no signs to indicate the end of public land or that you shouldn’t fish on private property. At bottom pool I heard an engine. It sounded like an ATV, got nearer and louder, then stopped. And some guy appeared a little bit downstream on the opposite bank. I waved. He didn’t wave back, turned around, got on his machine, and left. Um, okay. So it turns out that the furthest point downstream isn’t nice and isolated – there was a track leading away into the woods. What I don’t understand is that I’m almost certain this was still on the state preserve. I suppose it could have been a DNR guy.
Anyway, after bottom pool the stream emerges from the woods and runs through open valley, swinging in against the valley side and one steep wooded bank on occasion. I walked a good long way, most of it along featureless shallow sections. There were a couple of good chub runs, absolutely heaving with fish. There were about three decent pools on bends.
At the best, I cast in a deep slot along a dolostone boulder and hooked what I was convinced was a trout. It escaped but I thought I’d seen enough to be sure. But then I quickly caught several of the very largest chub I’ve seen. So I’m not sure. I didn’t see any other signs of trout, just masses of chub and shiners.
It was getting nearly dark, so I gave it up and turned around, still fishing with the ancient black woolly bugger. I tried all the real trouty pools on the return trip in gathering dusk, and got definite follows from two separate browns at cliff pool, the first conclusive sign of trout there. No strikes, though the second one was still making motions toward the fly when I gave up because I didn’t want to be stumbling up the stream in full darkness.
In the fading light, I got one more surprise.
Lo and behold, a little green sunfish. So, two species not previously encountered here.
I made my last few casts at main pool. There’s been no sign of the huge brown we saw a couple of times; it’s possible the bait litterers got it. As I was finishing I heard a roaring of engine and squealing of tires coming from the parking lot. Ah, the rural lands. Nine on a Friday night and some (presumably) young males with a truck with big tires were finding that doing doughnuts in the mud parking lot of a beautiful little state preserve was a fine use of their time. I’ve picked up discarded beer cans, cigarette packs, etc., from the parking lot in the past. I got a bit worried, as my Jeep was parked in the tiny space, so hurried back the last part. It got totally dark and I used my dorklights in my hat. The parking lot was soft from the rain and now had some big ruts. This made me think bad words. This and bait fishers littering main pool while hauling out rare wild browns.
So, another somewhat bumpy trip, but interesting results. A very surprising six species day, with a brookie and green sunfish turning up. A brown finally landed again. And a bunch of absolute monster chub.
A final note on the long Zerosum. What a beautiful rod. It’s too long for some parts of the stream, but when not chucking around heavy buggers/streamers it was a revelation to cast. There was an adjustment period – it’s amazing how different an extra half an ounce feels. But turning over the tippet with a killer bug on was effortless. Given the way I was using it, a 7:3 might have been a better choice. Using it in the way it was intended it almost felt like it cast itself. A 360 cm version is high on the list of rod wants.