There’s something about being on the road that makes me reminisce. Not boredom; there are endless things to catch up on during a long drive, especially for a married guy with two very small children. Among them music, podcasts, and phone calls with old friends and relatives. My wife calls these my “vacations” and of course she’s right. Maybe the sights and sounds and smells are just nostalgic and light up those old synapses. Today I’m thinking about my childhood and, as usual, about trout.
Growing up in West Virginia I wasn’t disinterested in trout, but it was a strange fish to me. The only trout I had seen came from the back of a dump truck and flopped into Laurel Andersen lake in Wine Cellar park every spring. It was an odd activity this dumping. Three-pound fish gyrated through the air then produced spectacular fish flops. But before they even started flying, hundreds of locals would line the shore and their hooks. The latter with salmon eggs, neon colored Powerbait, nightcrawlers, and peanut butter balls. Immediately after landing fish would start gorging on their equivalent of fast food. A few hours after the spectacle began it was over. Everyone had their fish fillets and their grip-and-grins. The local paper would pick one and publish it the next day. I was too nervous and too bad of a fisherman to participate and besides my mom denigrated the whole thing by saying “why don’t they just stick out a net and catch them before they hit the water.” She was right but I’d still sneak up there a few days later with my Zebco reel and try to catch a straggler. I never did.
The memory of actually catching my first trout is one of my favorites. I’m happy it wasn’t a dump truck trout. Like most of my childhood memories, it comes back to me blurred on the edges and distant. I was 11 or 12 years old and my family was camping on a small stream somewhere. I have no idea where we were or where we were going. The stream was just 10 or 15 feet across but with a healthy springtime flow. In my memory, I can see clearly the classic trout lies. I loved to fish at this age with an ache I can still feel but I didn’t know how to fish in a river. My mom was a damn good angler who liked to fish as much as I did. She skewered a night crawler. To do this properly you have to weave the hook through 3 or 4 times so the worm stays on the hook and alive so the rest of the body writhes in the water. Mom cast the original squirmy wormy into the fast, deep, blue-green water. (pro-tip: fish love worms) I had no idea what she was doing. But she did and she hooked up immediately and landed a gorgeous wild trout. She could have caught all 6 or 7 fish in that run but she passed the rod on to me and my brothers. We all took turns catching these colorful fish with sleek, smooth bodies. I had never seen anything like them. As I do to this day, I tried to pry fish from that river an hour too long, well after the sun went down. There were some nice fish caught but I was the one that really got hooked that day.
When we moved to Longmont 2 years ago from Los Angeles I was certainly predisposed to like the watershed. After all, fly fishing was one of the top 5 reasons I wanted to move to Colorado. But this type of affection isn’t automatic. I remember the chills I got during my first drive into South St. Vrain canyon on SH-7. That grainy first-trout memory flashed through my brain as I drove, and I knew in that moment this was going to be special home water.
My days have become a chaotic but satisfying mix of running my business, materials science, fly fishing and tying, chores, and kids. On the days I decide not to work in the office, it’s almost too easy to volunteer for the school drop and then spend several hours fishing on the St. Vrain. I started thinking about the watershed often when I wasn’t fishing; about its health and the health of the fish, about litter, about headwaters and tributaries. I thought about the water when I drank it, showered in it, sprayed it on my grass. When the water dropped in the North Fork this winter I got the final nudge to get involved. I’ve been a conservation minded angler and paying member of TU for a while now, but it’s time to do something more. I’m not a professional fisherman but I love it. I am a professional scientist and I’m fluent in the language that’s written on our collective tea leaves – I’m feeling the responsibility to leave things in better shape than they are. I see myself being involved in this chapter in many ways but would like to invite you into some my fishing adventures around town and elsewhere. I won’t bore you with technical fishing reports. You can find plenty of those elsewhere. Most of all, I hope to provide some added inspiration for you to look at trout (and their environment) the way I did that first time and the way I still do today.
Where I’ve been:
The fish are healthy and plentiful in this stretch which is awesome to see. I may have overreacted a bit this winter seeing the low water but would still be interested to know if there was any significant fish kill. Trout are awesome (obviously) but I’m still impressed by how they survive the winter. They are so crafty with fine-tuned metabolisms. Those metabolisms are getting into high gear now due to the early warm up! Fish are looking for the big spring midges, which are everywhere. Over the past couple weeks there have been lots of suspended fish, a fair amount of risers mostly eating emergers and maybe a few adults. As of April 1 I have seen no mayflies. Because they seem to be keying in on the emergers, I’ve been dropping Egan’s Rainbow Warrior (size 20) into that mid-to-upper column (8 – 20” dropper depending on water) and getting very consistent action. Some of the aggressive rainbows are taking the size 12-14 Hippie Stompers and Chubby Chernobyls that I’ve been using for the indicator fly. That’s always fun!
Article by: Brian Conley | April 2021