March in Connecticut is the 'tackle fondling' season

The last day in February marked the start of the annual seven-week respite for Connecticut trout (except in Trout Management Areas). “Opening Day� is Saturday, April 18, when merry crowds of anglers flock to the rivers and streams to catch confused hatchery trout that swim in circles and taste like liver pellets.

I look at the beginning of March as the beginning of the end of winter. Signs of spring are everywhere.

Well, except here, where it continues to snow.

But spring training baseball games are already on television. Spring fashions, for those that care and have any spare cash, are in the stores.

And fly-fishermen, driven more than usually crazy by endless, dreary weather, drag their gear out and begin the time-honored ritual of cleaning reels, checking lines for cracking, organizing the fly boxes, and testing the waders for leaks.

This is known as “tackle fondling.�

It is best to be prepared for tackle fondling. Start with a large, clean, well-lit work space. Do not begin by clearing off a small corner of your desk, because tackle has a way of magically expanding and completely dominating every surface in a home, clean, well-lit — or mine.

If you are going to check your lines for cracks, invest in a device for winding the line out of the reel and onto the gizmo. Do not attach the end of the line to a floor lamp and then walk backward  through your house, spooling out line. At best you will never get it back on quite right; the worst-case scenario is your withered corpse is discovered around Memorial Day, completely encased in high-tech fly-fishing line.

Another good investment is a can of compressed air. This gets microscopic bits of yick out of the reels and into your eyes, and if you have a bunch of flies out loose it will blow them into the next century, to be recovered only when you decide to move all the furniture for spring cleaning and you step on them in your bare feet.

(If you are a dedicated catch-and-release angler and your barbs are all flattened, getting the flies out of your feet will be a snap. Otherwise you will have to hop to the hospital.)

To make sure the agony of waiting for trout season is acute, the current issues of the fly fishing magazines contain stories like, “Patagonia: How To Catch 45-pound Brown Trout, Consort With Beautiful Women and Eat Enormous Gourmet Meals for only $6,000 per Week.�  They also run thinly disguised ads purporting to “review� hideously expensive new equipment. 

And after yet another glum, gray, 31-degree day, with a little sleet and snow mix and nothing on the tube except a New Jersey Nets game and “Law & Order� reruns, these articles begin to sound feasible.

“Why yes,� the house-bound angler thinks, “I could buy the new Snodgrass XT-586 with Radium X technology and take it with me to Argentina, where vixens in waders await and the sun never sets without a klutz from Connecticut landing a world-record trout. Yes, this could happen.�

Slightly more realistic is poring over maps of streams that are relatively close. This year I plan to spend much more time in western Massachusetts than in previous years. This was also last year’s plan, and like last year’s spring cleaning, which I am just getting around to now, it didn’t quite pan out.

(It occurs to me that with delaying and obfuscation skills like mine, I should be working for the federal government.)

And it is always while I go through the fly boxes that I resolve to try one of two grand experiments, both of which would require a great deal of determination.

The first idea is “No New Flies.� I must have at least a thousand flies scattered through who knows how many boxes. It’s hard to imagine I would be unable to find something that will work.

I’ve attempted No New Flies before, and it always broke down when confronted by “Where the #&*$! Did I Put The Box With The One Fly I Need Right Now?�

Notion number two is “The Year of the Single Fly� — to go through an entire trout season only using one pattern. Obviously I’d need a couple dozen of the pattern. In different sizes. 

See, it’s already compromised.

I’d have to go with a soft-hackled fly — green body. Or maybe black or dark brown. That way I can fish them dry or wet; with or without weight; upstream or down; any time of day.

(Sigh.) 

Is it spring yet?