Fishing, meatloaf and the New Math

I feel like Daniel Murphy of the New York Mets.

The Mets are off to their best start since, er, forever — 15 and 5 as of Tuesday, April 28.

Murphy is off to a slow start at the plate, and he sometimes does bizarre and unhelpful things.

Then he makes up for it by hitting three-run homers.

Feast or famine. That’s what I’m driving at.

This has been a chilly, wet April. The rivers have been high, and the water temperatures low. This in turn means bugs don’t get busy and trout stay lethargic.

Which means that despite application of considerable cunning and skill, I have not had much success in this young trout season.

Except every once in a while, when I catch the equivalent of a three-run homer.

Sunday, April 26, was one of those blecch days — chilly, overcast, a day for tying flies inside. (I don’t know how to tie flies, but you get the idea.)

I made the short trip to the Blackberry River anyway. I couldn’t face another day fiddling around the house, picking things up and putting them down again.

There’s a pulloff on Lower Road in North Canaan that provides easy access to a deep pool. The pool is often crowded.

But mid-afternoon Sunday there was nobody around.

I tried an experiment: using a Euro-nymphing rig on an 8-foot rod.

This involves a long leader and three flies, all weighted to some degree. To keep it all together, anglers generally use a 10-foot rod or better.

But a 10-foot rod is too long for the relatively tight quarters of a medium-sized stream like the Blackberry.

So, I reasoned, if I used an 8-foot, 6-weight rod, and shortened the leader up to about 10 feet in total, I might be able to control the thing.

I immediately started getting hung up. The rig was too heavy from top to bottom.

And when I wasn’t getting hung up I was getting tangled up. 

So I replaced the top fly with a Stimulator dry fly, knowing it would drown in fairly short order but still be visible, and not weigh the rig down from the top.

I left the middle fly alone — a size 14 beadhead Prince, which is one of the most effective general patterns around.

And I kept the big green thing on the bottom.

This worked much better. The rod gave me just enough leverage to keep the Stimulator on or near the surface, and the bottom fly was down in the water column without getting caught on things. 

And that is initially what I believed was happening when I sensed something as the cast drifted past me. 

But what I thought was a rock or stick turned out to be — Mongo, the giant, battle-scarred rainbow trout.

You find these fish in the Blackberry every once in a while. They look like the salmonid equivalent of retired prize fighters — past their prime, perhaps, but not to be taken lightly.

Mongo churned away from me. He came back. He twisted. He turned. He went deep. He ran for the shallows.

I hung on, with one hand, while fumbling for the little camera.

I tend to drop these things in the river, which renders them null and void.

And while they are not expensive, I dislike having to replace them.

Also the buttons are really small. This makes getting the shot difficult, when one hand is hanging onto a fishing rod with a large and annoyed trout on the other end.

Somehow I managed to get Mongo in the net. He courteously spit out my fly, not hard because I always flatten the barbs, and he waited patiently while I snapped what turned out to be rather crummy photos.

I got him back into the current and he powered right off, under his own steam.

I estimate Mongo at about 25 inches long, 4 inches wide and approximately the weight of a meatloaf that would feed six. 

I used the Angling Estimate Formula for this calculation:

T = M x H x (1 + F)

________________

                  L

T (size of trout) equals M (number of Mets fans fishing) times H (hat size) times (one plus F or number of flies) divided by L (lying ability).

L is a constant — it assumes a 20 percent exaggeration in the size of a fish.

Without L, this fish would have been reported as being the size of a Ford Explorer, with fancy wheels.

I hope you have enjoyed this foray into higher mathematics.

Next week: my recipe for meatloaf.