Nobody reads my blog (how could they, as I haven’t actually told anyone about it?), but an imaginary reader who hadn’t read it front to back might be wondering “What the badword does STSNBN mean?” STSNBN stands for Stream That Shall Not Be Named. Q: Why, MarginalTenkara, must it not be named? A: Because uttering its name might risk inviting the Prince of Darkness to enter our world and I, for one, am going to play it safe.
So my resumed fishing career appears to have entered its first existential crisis. I last went fishing well over a week ago. I’ve had my time to myself since then in a way that’s shortly (when university and grade school resumes) going to seem utopian. For all that time and for one more week I can more or less do whatever the heck I please all day every day. What did I do? I didn’t fish. Instead I threw myself back into boring stuff like my life’s work and rarely emerged from my basement study, where I engaged in long daily marathons of granular, obsessive science. In standard neurotic fashion, my reaction to this wasn’t “Awesome! I found my mojo again!” It was instead “I’m really worried I’m not fishing enough.” It wasn’t that I was pining to fish. It was that I wasn’t pining to fish.
There’s basically no situation that I can’t find a way to stress over.
So I scheduled the odd fishing day in there. But inevitably I woke up and thought about it and went into my study and resumed doing science. Until enough was enough. I forced myself back out to STSNBN. Balance, I figured. Find the balance. You can’t suddenly shut off the fishing obsession like a tap.
So I got to the stream around 9. The weather this time was very cooperative, looking at mostly sunny with a high of 80. It ended up hazing over in mid-afternoon.
It was actually a lovely day, not too hot, but almost no wind. And no human noises for the most part (there are usually tractor engines, highway noises, chainsaws, whatever drifting in to partially break the spell). A good day to be alone in the woods.
The last visit had seen the lowest water levels yet. This trip, they were even lower. In the photograph above, all of the exposed rocks are typically underwater. This section is the first crossing, right where you come down. In normal times, you wobble a bit in strong calf-deep current, and get your sea legs going. Now, the water didn’t come up over my wading boots, not even ankle deep. As a result, many chub pockets weren’t just shallowed out, they had completely lost flow. All but the very deepest pools were fully revealed. Again, this is useful information for the future, but kind of a drag to fish. The fish were even spookier than last time. Almost all of the large fish, including the larger chub, were schooled up in the deep pools, the trout holding near the bottom. And it took almost nothing to set off a mass spook. Just an errant rod tip scrambled entire pools. I caught a whole bunch of chub (final totals were 63 creek chub, 22 common shiners, 2 unidentified minnow species, and one smallmouth bass), as they occupied all of the decent moving water. I saw lots of trout, but they were exclusively lying deep and restricted to the pools.
It was a day more for process than results. It wasn’t without trout action. I had a serious follow from a brown at upper twin pool, the first certain trout there. The fish followed the muddler through the entire retrieve and struck aggressively near the end but for whatever reason (mainly, I think, he was right in close and I was partially handcuffed) I missed the hook set. Then in lower twin pool I hooked a trout, but only for a few seconds. This is possibly the first certain trout here as well, except on the very first trip in early May I had a flash from a brown at one of the pools in this section, but I hadn’t learned them at that stage. Shortly afterward I got the hook stuck firm in a waterlogged limb across the pool. The rod and cast was at full extension, meaning I couldn’t actually reach the end of the line at the tip of the rod, it was halfway out over the water. This, I’ve learned, is a dangerous situation, as it’s how I broke the lillian and mount off my Shadowfire. There’s not a lot you can do if you can’t physically get to the snag. Thankfully, I could. I laid the rod down, necessarily with most of it in the water, then bushwhacked around and across and up onto a dolostone slab on the far side near the snag. From there I had a view directly down into the pool, and I managed to sneak up to the edge and look in from above without spooking anything. There was only one trout holding deep, presumably the one I’d briefly hooked. I’m almost certain it was a brook trout, adding to the weirdness from last time (of course, it could have been the same fish – I’m seeing the same fish in the same pools on multiple trips now).
For example, I’ve mentioned before the 15-16″ brown that lives in a small side pool in the trouty stretch. There’s a submerged dolostone slab with a big undercut base, and it lurks there. Often it’s out in the pool. This time, I got to deliver one cast coming and going, then it spooked wildly. Same basically every trip. Same big fish in the same little two square feet of stream. Another example is at bottom pool, where there’s a pale fish at depth that I’m pretty sure is a trout, with a weird half-black head. As in, one side of its head shows at depth as completely dark. The other side, and the rest of the body, is pale. I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted an adipose fin on it. Anyway, I see this fish every trip now. The message seems to be that on at least a week to week and month to month basis, the trout population is pretty finite and individual fish tend to stick to their neighbourhoods.
Slow pool, where I caught a brook trout and hooked a brown trout last time, was frustrating. In the faster moving, shallower upper portion there were a couple of reasonable sized fish holding among some northern hog suckers (distinctive because of their mottled tiger striping on their backs). I couldn’t work out what they were, until one turned in the current and lit up in the sun and I could see a bass fin. Given their size, they had to be smallmouths, the first I’ve ever seen at STSNBN. I cast a pheasant tail nymph to them and one took it. Sure enough, that’s what they were.
The deeper part of the pool where I’d caught trout the previous trip yielded an instant Mass Spooking Event. I don’t even know what I did. I was creeping into casting position. There were masses of chub and suckers holding at various depths, then suddenly beneath them there was a murky explosion of trout rushing in circles and darting downstream. This happened at every single decent trout pool for the rest of the day.
I usually stay on the stream until nearly dark. Today, not so much. The complex nice pool below slow pool yielded the regular spook of the big one in small pool. Then the nice tail of it, where I had four trout follow on the last trip and landed one, yielded another mass spook. Trout pool below that, I hooked a second and final trout, but again only for a few seconds. At bottom pool I managed to get a decent follow but no strike, then the rod tip caused another mass spook on the second cast. I had no real desire to plod on downstream to the chubby pools. It wasn’t even 5 pm, and I was done. I kept the rod out and tried the trouty spots again on the way back, but saw nothing.
So…hm. Didn’t exactly put renewed fuel in the bunker. The water levels aren’t helping. And it has to be said…STSNBN was kind of magical when I discovered it. I couldn’t believe something that cool and isolated could be hidden away in the midst of everyday Iowa farmland. Now I know every inch of it and the human intrusions are more obvious. It’s probably a mistake to kind of fish it into the ground in the absolute dog days of summer as the poor thing slows to a trickle. It would be nice to have a wider range of streams to choose from. STSNBN is special because it isn’t stocked, it isn’t a tended drive-up bait fishing destination (though as I’ve noted, it has a bait fishing problem), and you can more or less leave civilization behind and find solitude on a very walkable stream. It’s certainly a challenge when it comes to trout. On the stocker streams I now seem to be able to turn up and land a dozen or so trout with some consistency. STSNBN is humbling. More than half the trips, I’ve failed to land a trout, though I’ve had one or more on the line on almost all of these. The wild browns don’t mess around. They spook on a hairtrigger, and they don’t give you many second chances. It’s much more fun fishing for them when the water level is higher and they’re occupying moving water late in the day. All cooped up in deep pools, them visible to you and you visible to them…I think it’s time to leave them in peace for a few weeks.
I don’t have many new places within reach that aren’t heavily fished public stockers (Glovers, Otter, Joy Springs). But there are a couple of intriguing targets. Next on the list is Mossy Glen Creek, in its own tiny state preserve. Wild browns, special regulation, difficult to reach, rutted disused road recommended for four wheel drive with clearance, no trails or paths in the preserve. It sounds pretty similar to White Pine Hollow, another little mini-wilderness. I didn’t for certain even see a trout at White Pine Hollow. But these little tracts of protected habitat are their own reward. I wish there were more of them.