Lost in the mail: Tackling the big questions

Let us open the Tangled Lines mailbag and see what the populi is voxing about.

Agnes Day of Spore City, Ohio writes:

You keep talking about wet flies. Aren’t all flies wet once you cast them into the water?

I could go into a detailed explanation of how the wet fly imitates a transitional stage in an aquatic insects life cycle but I won’t, because this is a family newspaper.

I will offer this anecdote:

I was about 14 and fishing Woodland Valley Creek, a tributary of the Esopus in the Catskills. Dries only. I was having some success but occasionally my fly got waterlogged and provoked strikes, especially when I was trying to retrieve it when it was submerged downstream.

I was working a pool right by a cabin. The building was so close to the stream you could fish from the porch. As I puzzled over how to get that fish that was hanging out by the lower part of the pool, the old-timer on the porch was watching me. I didn’t realize it.

He scared me out of a year’s growth when he spoke up. He asked what fly I was using. “Royal Coachman,” I said. He asked if I had a wet version. I replied, Agnes-like, “A what?”

He came off the porch and made his way to where I was perched at the top of the pool. He borrowed my fingernail clippers and cut off most of the hackle on the Royal and left the white wing.

Then he advised adding a couple of feet of finer tippet, waiting 10 minutes for things to settle down, and flopping the thing into the current, allowing it to swing through the tail out.

I did this and after a couple of false starts caught the fish that had been tormenting me.

Afterwards the old-timer said I should try fishing wet flies upstream just like dries. When I objected that I wouldn’t be able to see the fly he said “Yeah but they’ll see it, and if they see it they’ll let you know soon enough.”

Fester Karbunkle of Potzrebie, New Jersey wants to know:

Do you ice fish?

No I do not. Ice fishing involves walking gingerly out on a frozen pond or lake, cutting a hole in the ice, and staring at it for indefinite periods of time.

I want no part of it. Especially the cutting the ice part. The ice is all that is between me and a cold, watery grave AND WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP CUTTING THE %$@# ICE!

Linus J. Scrimshaw of West Cornwall inquires:

What was your best trout in 2024?

This was a difficult year, with way too much rain at some points and none to speak of at others.

So the most satisfying catch was on the East Branch of the Delaware around Margaretville, New York. The stream was very low and I had to hoof it a couple hundred yards through inhospitable terrain until I found a pool deep enough to justify the term.

I could see the trout, and they could see me. So it just turned into a grim battle. Who would give up first?

After considerable time, and several “look but don’t eat” moments, I finally got a fat brown on a Bread and Butter nymph fished naked and alone. (The fly, that is. Not me.)

Then I had to go a couple hundred yards through inhospitable terrain back to where I started. My buddy Gary had wisely stayed put and was yanking a fish in when I fetched up. His fish was better than mine.

Honolulu Jones of East Drizzle, Wyoming objects:

Wait a minute. Didn’t you catch a steelhead back in April?

Yes, and you could argue that a steelhead is a rainbow trout on steroids.

But that trip to Pulaski and the Salmon River was so completely out of the usual run of events that I think of it the way other people think of significant milestones, like marriage, or the first arrest.

I forgot half my gear, sprained my wrist turning the knob in the shower, and almost lost an earlobe when a gust of wind blew a size 4 black Wooly Bugger (with rubber legs) back into my personal face.

And after fruitlessly flogging the water for two days, I absently flipped the Bugger into a deep hole, just trying to get some line out, when the steelie loomed up and chowed down.

So no, my first and only steelhead wasn’t the best fish of 2024. It was a happy accident and nothing else.