All Fishermen Are Liars Read Online Free PDF

mountains—so I knew that by the end of the month there’d be a hard frost, a glaze of morning bank ice along the river and maybe a dusting of snow. Butfor now it was still hot, windless high summer: the kind of indolent weather that makes you think of a lawn chair in the shade and a good book. Mark said the last group they’d had in had landed over three hundred trout from this stretch of the White in two days. That’s a good testimonial, but it also meant that most if not all of the willing trout there had felt a hook recently and no doubt still remembered it.
    Mark left me at a deep, complicated bend pool with an overhanging cottonwood on the far bank and walked upstream to the next run. I ran a size 12 hopper through several current seams and finally got a fourteen-inch brown trout. Then I made a long cast with a hard upstream mend to the shady slick on the far bank. Three things happened simultaneously: I saw that I was at the wrong angle for a good drift, a large trout turned downstream after the fly and the fly itself began to drag enough to leave a wake. Naturally, the fish smelled a rat and disappeared. Chances are he’d had an unpleasant run-in with a grasshopper in the recent past. I waded upstream and made a dozen more casts with better drifts, but the fish was spooked and wasn’t about to take a second look.
    The rest of the day went very much like that. We started at the top end of the ranch property and leap-frogged downstream, cherry-picking the best-looking runs. This was beautiful water with long, cool, oxygenating riffles pouring into deep, fishy pools, glides and cut banks. But as good as it looked, strikes were scarce and what at first looked like good takes were often large trout turning away at the last possible second, splashing the fly with their tails. Buzz joined us for a few hours in the middle of the afternoon and landed the biggest trout that was caught: a fat cutbow I’ll guess at seventeen inches. But for the most part, the fish seemed reticent and spooky, and even those that were tempted usually thought better of it in the end.
    I tried a weighted nymph dropper behind my grasshopper, but it didn’t help. Neither did swinging a Muddler Minnow. Fishing a brace of nymphs with weight in the deeper runs got us whitefish. Some ofthem were nice and big and plenty of fun to catch; they just weren’t what we were after. The few trout we did get were the smaller ones, at least compared to the dripping hogs in the snapshots at the ranch.
    There’s an entire school of fly-fishing literature dedicated to techniques for catching trout under difficult conditions. None of it is wrong, but much of it ignores the obvious fact that even the best rivers have their off days, just as even the finest musicians have those nights when they’d rather be home watching I Love Lucy reruns than playing another gig. The truth of the matter was put succinctly by the hundred-year-old Michigan angler Rosalynde Johnstone, who once said, “Any fish will bite if the fish are bitin’.” Taken either literally or metaphorically, that may be all you need to know.
    Buzz left after a while to do more unspecified work. Mark and I fished until dusk, hoping for an evening caddis hatch, but nothing much happened. As hot as it had been during the day, the air chilled quickly when the sun got low, and there weren’t many bugs. Mark seemed a little disappointed, as guides often are when what they know to be good water doesn’t fish as well as it could. I wouldn’t have minded hooking one or two of those big trout that refused my fly, but mostly I was just glad it was me fishing instead of a paying customer who might not have felt he was getting his money’s worth. Those high-score days the trout counters are after do happen from time to time, but it’s easy to forget that they have lasting if not permanent effects. By all rights, a stretch of water like this should be rested for a week after a three-hundred-fish