Rising Trout Madness

Seeing is Believing: How one Trout Can Drive you Insane

If you’re like me, you read a great deal about the fish you’re chasing in magazines, blogs, social media posts and even (gasp!) actual books. In the past few years I’ve developed an increasing interest in trout, where they live, how they behave, what they’ll eat, how they move seasonally and why they do what they do.

It’s mostly because I’m living in Upstate New York, and salmon and steelhead aside, trout captivate the imaginations of more fishermen here than just about any species. Now, since we’ve got great smallmouth water, giant pike and a very underrated muskie fishery in the St. Lawrence, you could make a compelling argument for a number of species that’d rank first in the minds and hearts of central New Yorkers… But, when most people think New York, great trout water comes to mind. We’ve got the Delaware, The Beaverkill, the AuSable, the Neversink, The West Canada and the list goes on.

I was fishing a stream called the Oriskany Creek yesterday, which has the added benefit of a decent smallmouth fishery, when I saw a fish I’ll be hard-pressed to forget.

Have you had this happen: You see a specific fish, and just knowing it’s there, in water you were wading through, gnaws at you? You think: “If I could forget that fish existed, I’d be perfectly contented with the smaller fish I was catching, hell I might even explore new water happily… but no. Now I know that specific fish is in that stretch, and it is the fish by which all other fish I catch there will be judged.”

This was a brown trout that was behaving in a way that was almost perfectly textbook. It was holding in a current seam and rising, periodically, to take flies off the surface. The hits weren’t subtle enough that you might miss them, but they weren’t audacious enough that you’d notice unless you saw one while studying the water. But once you saw one, you could watch the specific seam the trout was in and see it rising, perhaps every 20 seconds or so, to sip another bug.

That sight in of itself would have been kind of a cool way to witness nature in action: It’d just be a real-life realization of the scene we play out in our heads when rigging up a fly rod.

But it was the size of this trout, which veered out of the seam and close enough to me for a glimpse, that’ll just haunt the bejesus out of me to be perfectly honest with you. I will not be one of those guys who tells you he saw a _ _ – inch trout because honestly, who among us can guestimate the length of a trout that’s underwater at 20 yards?

I do not know how big this fish was, only that it was larger than the biggest trout I’ve ever landed, which would have it pushing 22 inches at the very least.

So this 20-plus inch trout sat in a current seam, rising periodically to take flies off the surface and it had absolutely no interest in the small lure I was throwing.

To witness such a large fish in a body of water that is never deeper than six feet or wider than 30, feeding on one specific bug, paying absolutely no mind to a lure that has fooled dozens of his smaller brethren, is to really get an appreciation for what incredible creatures larger wild brown trout are. This fish was keyed into a specific hatch, eating his fill in one seam, at the perfect time of night, and if he saw my Phoebe Wobbler, he dodged it without a second thought dozens of times as he sipped his flies.

The next day I was at The Troutfitter in Syracuse, N.Y. talking flies and filling a cup. Lesson learned.

Every Fish Has a Story: Cans-and-Bottles Brown Trout

Do you ever wonder why, when a stranger pulls out a phone to show you a fish they’d recently caught, you’re not terribly excited? Unless it’s a roosterfish, a recent world record, or a fish in a place we might soon visit, it’s cool, but not necessarily exciting.

It’s the circumstances behind a catch that make it memorable

Our fish photos, however, are exciting (to us anyway) and here’s my theory on why: Every fish is the culmination of a story. That brown trout, brook trout, striped bass or bluefish is the exclamation point at the end of a sentence that finishes a paragraph about how we found ourselves holding a rod, reeling a line, connected to a lure (or fly) that said fish inhaled. And it’s the story, more than the fish, that’s so endearing, so incredible.

I was standing in line at North Star Orchards two days ago, getting some fresh fruit, when I took off my hat, holding my polarized glasses on my head. The glasses hit the concrete and an an ear piece came off.

I’d had these glasses for more than a decade, they’d survived a trip around the country, I’d been soaked and frozen to retrieve them from various stream bottoms, I’d searched for them frantically right before a trip, and I’d managed to hold onto them through moves to and from Cape Cod, New Jersey, Florida, Salem, and New Hartford, New York.

It’s everything before the photo that makes a fish memorable

If you’ve got a favorite pair of lenses, a lucky hat (we’ll save that for another blog), hoody or trinket, then you know what I’m talking about.

Let’s forget the facts of the matter for the moment — namely that without polarized lenses, ideally of a light amber shade, it’s harder to make out stream bottom, spot moving fish, or see holes or drop-offs underneath the water’s surface, or keep from squinting all day. Let’s focus on feel. Because when you don’t have your lucky/usual __________ (glasses, hat, hoody) you just feel different. You can tell, on some level, that’s something’s missing.

So, naturally, I drove like a crazy person to the nearest Walgreens, bought an eyeglasses repair kit, ripped it open in my Jeep in the parking lot, said a prayer, and picked the first tiny screw to try to put my glasses back together.

Let’s pause for a second here, shall we? Who in the name of Sam Hell invented these glasses screws. I have felt grains of sand stuck in my eye that must be twice as big as these things. They’re smaller than socks a flea would wear. I can imagine the microscope they must need at the factory where these things are assembled.

This has got to be some kind of joke on all of us right? Let’s see how many people we can get swearing, muttering and cursing while holding a screwdriver a quarter the size of a toothpick? I digress. By some miracle the screwdriver screwed the atom-sized screw back into the sunglasses and they (knock on wood) have held together since.

But now I was running behind, and I’d lost an hour of fishing time. Am I the only one who does this? “If I leave at ____, I’ll get there by _____, and then, well… the sun technically sets at _____, but I can fish until _____, which still gives me _____ hours.” I feel like I have this conversation with myself seven times per week.

Now there was just the matter of gas money. I work in retail, which is fun, interesting, and you meet some great people. I also drive a Jeep Wrangler that gets, by my estimate, a third of a mile per gallon. Basically, my income is direct-deposited into my gas tank, which was empty.

But would an empty gas tank stop you from getting on the water on your last day off before an eight-day work stretch. Of course not, which is where cans and bottles come in.

I had about seven bags of returnable cans and bottles, which were the closest thing to cash I had in my possession. I threw them in the empty-tanked Jeep, raced to the can and bottle return, and … waited.

I was third in line behind two people who, from the looks of it, were returning the cans and bottles consumed by entire sports franchises for the past six months. I tried to do the math in my head to decide if returning them to a grocery store, which would involve a drive, and feeding can after can into the machine, would be faster. When in doubt, stay the course.

What felt like 17 hours later, I emptied the cans and bottles, all five bags, onto the tray in front of the guy who counts them. Whenever I think about any aspect of a job I’m not wild about, I think about this guy. He counts, for hours at a time, other people’s soda-covered cans and bottles.

And you know what? He’s a pretty upbeat, easy-going guy. I always think: If a guy sifting through a town’s empties can be pleasant, what am I going to complain about?

It turns out I had sixteen dollars in cans and bottles, which is enough to get to a stream an hour away and back.

For a number of reasons, Nine-mile creek near Syracuse has become my favorite trout stream. There’s a handful of blue herons that frequent the area, and seeing the enormous, majestic birds always makes me smile. In the upper reaches of the creek, closer to Otisco Lake, there are brook trout, and even some wild ones. And I’ve caught browns to 21 inches in certain stretches, and if nothing else, that’ll make a stream your favorite pretty quick, won’t it?

So, with can-and-bottle money in the gas tank, and glasses held together by a drug-store screw, I made it to Nine Mile.

Not one, but two browns better than 15 inches made the trip an incredible one. The blue herons and a stunning sky on a start-of-summer night would have made it amazing either way, but two beautiful trout made it perfect.

And in-between looking at the photos and trying to put gas from a spare tank that I’d had for the lawnmower into the Jeep so I’d make it to work and back the next day, I couldn’t help but think: It’s the story more than the fish, isn’t it? We might need the fish, but we definitely need the story.

Nine-mile creek at last light.

Luck: A Seven-Species St. Patrick’s Day

Warmer-than-usual temperatures had trout more festive than usual.

We all believe that luck plays at least some role in our success on the water, but the degree to which we’ll admit to relying on this vaguely defined cosmic force in our day-to-day fishing lives can vary.

Here’s the undeniable part: Any fishing adventure, no matter how well researched or planned, is ultimately reliant on chance to a certain degree. Let’s face it, you’re hoping a wild creature in a body of water you’re either wading through or boating over mistakenly eats a man-made object that it takes for prey — nothing’s guaranteed. Never mind the fact that your taking to and returning from the water without incident — regardless of whether or not fish are caught — is luck in its own right. (In the past year I’ve misplaced a rod while trying to fish a lure off a branch, taken a dunk in the river, mid-winter, and had a serious motor-vehicle malfunction on a main highway at 70 m.p.h.) When framed with the right perspective, just getting to and from the fishing destination in one piece is… relatively lucky.

When I saw weather forecasters calling for highs in the (gasp!) 50s on St. Patrick’s Day (we dare not hope for much more until mid-May in these parts of Upstate New York), a day I happened to have off, it seemed like the ideal time to test luck’s influence on angling success. After all, despite a German last name (Bach), I’m the descendent of McCabes on one side and Gillorens (after Killorglin County) on the other, so Ireland’s history, lore and culture have always played an important part in my life.

An Irish-American story if ever there was one: The tale of James J. Braddock.

After about 4.5 hours on the water on St. Patty’s, my faith in luck’s existence, and the role it plays in the lives of fishermen, is as strong as ever.

Let’s start with the fact it was 50 damn degrees, mid-March, in Upstate New York. If that’s not luck, I don’t know what is. Sure, you’ll say we’re cooking the planet and the next generations will have to deal with global catastrophes that will threaten the life of anything that’s not a cockroach in 200 years, and you’re probably right but… it was 50 degrees! Consider that during this same week in 1993, a storm dumped 42.9 inches of snow on Syracuse while winds gusted to 40 m.p.h.

Mother Nature pulled out some of her finest colors for the evening, as brilliant shades of red and orange lit up the sky. A hawk soared overhead searching for a meal throughout the afternoon, a beaver lazily meandered down the stream, a pair of geese honked at me while I slowly waded toward their stretch of water, and red-headed woodpeckers, sparrows and ducks rounded out the menagerie of critters making cameos on the water.

The evening’s last light reflected on the water.

And three brown trout cooperated to make it just about as perfect a day on the water as you could ask for. Of course there were fish that hit and came off…. and of course, they were bigger than the ones landed… did you really need me to tell you that?

A few eager brown trout cooperated.

But less than a mile away a city bustled, citizens struggling in the midst of a pandemic, strapping on masks, washing their hands, hoping for stimulus checks — a weary world we all return to these days after any trip onto the water or into the woods. But just wading up a beautiful stretch of water, underneath a blanket of crimson clouds, it was hard to feel anything but lucky.

The moon’s reflection on the creek’s surface.

In The Depths of Winter….

As we embark into February, many anglers are thinking: “This is as far from the beauty of short-sleeve, carefree, see-your-reflection-in-the-water fishing as we can get without coming back.” And you know what? You’re right.

My father was a philosophy major at Syracuse University, and I followed in his footsteps. We were both likely thinking the same thing: Examining the ideas behind ideas is fascinating and gives us a foundation for further critical thinking as move through life’s challenges and unexpected experiences… AND… this might serve as a good undergraduate degree for law school.

His favorite philosopher was a man named Albert Camus. Camus was famous for espousing existentialism, which focused on the absurdity, or absurdities, we encounter in everyday life. I recently purchased The Myth of Sisyphus at Barnes & Noble, in an attempt to greater understand the philosophy that drew my father in at Syracuse. Camus’s existentialism basically touted that life was a meaningless struggle unless… unless… we were devoted to cooperation, solidarity, and joint effort.

Camus concludes that to look elsewhere for meaning in our everyday lives is pointless, but we can find the exact, precise hope and meaning we are searching for in ourselves, in one another.

It is a strange paradox that years after his passing, I understand my Dad more with each passing day. He found his meaning in helping others, namely, those who were fighting uphill battles in courtrooms. He defended and supported people who almost no one else would.

Fishing the entire country showed me that our nation and the world that we live in is a an inherently good place, full of beautiful souls, and you only need to open your front door and find the courage to explore it to realize that reality in its fullest. Raising money for melanoma research deepened that faith in me more than I could ever articulate. People helped me on a mission through a tunnel where the light at the end is, right now, faint at best. The hope for a cure, like the hope to start a fishing magazine from scratch that readers all over the country love, read and contribute to, is existent, but it necessitates work and faith before we have something concrete to continue to build on.

One of the quotes most famously attributed to Camus is one that I think is appropriate as we head into some of February’s darkest, coldest, days.

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned  that within me there lie an invincible summer.”

That invincible summer, in me, was created and maintained by hope and help from so many of you. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

 

Teacher Appreciation Week: Five Teachers that I’m Grateful to Have Had

Bill Glavin was a teacher that impacted each of his students enormously. 

It seems in the era of social media, every day has some online significance. All you have to do is Google the date, and you’ll find something that happened on this day in the past, and only so many dates or weeks can be noteworthy. But I saw that this past week was Teacher Appreciation Week, and I could not let it end without trying to articulate what the teachers in my own life have meant to me, from the ones that I was born with in my family, through my time at New Hartford Senior High School, to Syracuse University, and finally to Emerson College, where I’ll (finally) be graduating this coming weekend. These teachers have had a profound impact on my life, and I’m grateful daily that I encountered them:

Tara Healey: Tara is my aunt, my mother’s sister. She began the long and arduous (and largely thankless) road of becoming a teacher years ago, and now she helps learning disabled students in my native Upstate New York. She does a job, daily, that I can’t imagine doing, and she does it all with a spirit and a smile that reminds me why we’re here in the first place: To help those who we’re capable of helping. She’s one of my heroes.

Marilyn Montesano, New Hartford High School: Mrs. Montesano was a 10th-grade english teacher who brought so much enthusiasm, humor, and kindness into the classroom every day, that it even made Shakespeare fun. If she ever had a bad day, she didn’t let it show in the classroom. I’ll never forget her gathering us as students into her classroom on September 11, 2001. We were all somewhere on that day, and I’m glad I had a teacher as kind, patient and helpful as she was that afternoon.

Bill Glavin: (R.I.P.), Syracuse University: Bill Glavin taught magazine journalism at Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Communications, and there aren’t words to describe this man’s enthusiasm and humor. Anyone who ever sat in his classroom will remember the voice that fluctuated between soft rumblings and booming punch-line deliveries. He told a story that I’ll always remember, and one that I think of every time that I write. He told his students about a student reporter who went to a football game to write a story for the paper the next day, and witnessed a blowout. The student in the story came to Glavin afterward, and explained that there was “nothing to write,” it was a lopsided victory for the home team. Glavin asked about the experience, and the student said that, standing in the tunnel before the game, and listening to the deafening roar from the home team’s crowd, he knew that the visiting team had already lost. “That’s the story!” was Glavin’s enthusiastic delivery of the punchline. That reminds me to be constantly cognizant of everything around me when reporting: Often the story being played out in front of you isn’t the one that you came thinking that you’d find.

Bill Beuttler, Emerson College: Professor Beuttler teaches here at Emerson, where I’m finishing my master’s in Publishing and Writing, and has gone out of his way to help this student. He offered me an internship listening to and transcribing interviews with some legendary jazz musicians, and even took me to a show. His class structure allowed us to act both as aspiring writers and editors, working with other students, so that we could get a better feeling for how we might interact in the publishing world in similar circumstances.

Gian Lombardo: After losing my father in my first semester at Emerson, I felt compelled to do something to raise money to fund a cure for melanoma. I undertook a small Catch a Cure project in Florida through the kind people at Outdoor Sportsman Group, and asked if there were any way to use a repeated trip, with more sponsors, in an academic capacity. Professor Lombardo found a way to make it work, helping me design a survey to distribute to get feedback from fishermen around the country. Even if he knew that my dream of starting my own magazine was a long shot at best, he didn’t dismiss the ambition out of hand.

Each of these teachers has had a profound impact on my life, and I’m enormously grateful.