The reason I usually give has some Zen cachet and is backed by a quote from
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “If you go expressly to look at the moon, it becomes tinsel.”
That’s to say, if you go intentionally outdoors to find Beauty and Peace in
Nature, you’re likely to end up with a contrived “tinsel'' experience unless you
have something to occupy the nagging, goal-oriented, rational part of your mind.
To free the part of you that can actually sense Beauty and Peace, you need
something else to focus on instead of Beauty and Peace, so that you’ll actually
be able to see and experience the ineffable surprise of Beauty and Peace in the
odd moments when your focus lapses. And where better to focus your mind than all the
fussy details of fly fishing, as it leads you wading and kayaking and hiking
into inarguably beautiful river, pond, and lake environments?
I’ve recently discovered an excellent way to even further complicate that
tortuous logic: Science. Take that, tinsel! What if my fishing activity
actually advanced scientific knowledge? What, further, if those efforts to
scientifically gather and interpret data were motivated and guided by
enlightened conservation goals?
Thanks to an old friend of mine who is a scientist and an educator at an Eastern
university, I got a taste of what it’s like to fish for science. You could
fairly safely say that my old pal runs in a circle that's a bit more scienc-ey
and enlightened than my own usual silicon valley crowd out here. Through his
contacts he has undertaken the unique job of helping to manage a sizable private
tract of land in the Northeast. They're not managing it as pure wilderness—a
well-appointed cabin on the property is enough to prove that—but on all
evidence, they are managing it very carefully and actively in good faith.
The non-tinsel treasures found on this fairly large piece of conserved land include forests, meadows, swamps, trails, primitive roads, creeks, and a couple of really beautiful ponds. The handful of people that have access to the property use a sophisticated suite of data collection and visualization software to keep track of the various treasures. For the roads and trails and trees, good data already exists. But for the ponds, which have a distant history of storied trout fishing in the days of the Vanderbilts, data has been scarce. That’s where I came in: a guy with barbless hooks in his flies and, hopefully, the skills to get some trout to grab them. What *is* swimming in these ponds that have barely been fished for a period of 25 years?
Needless to say, I was abundantly eager to sign up to try and help answer that question. All the highest expectations lay on that wondrous fish, a longtime friend of mine, the trout. And not just any trout: it’s possible that these isolated ponds would contain undiluted genetic strains of salvelinus fontinalis. I suppose it could refer to a colorful brown, but in my imagination this line from Richard Hugo’s “Trout” always described a brookie: “say red is on his side like apples in a fog.”
Late August is not the best time to go looking for brookies in the top of the water column. However, some clouds and cool showers gave us a degree of hope as we arrived on the scene right around dusk. I had pictured fishing from a canoe on these ponds, but with limited light left in the day we loaded into a small wooden motorboat tied to an old dock and embarked on the first attempt at data collection. My traps were oiled: a 4wt with a nice double-tapered floating line whose long fine leader was tipped with an elk hair caddis; and a 6wt strung with a clear-tip intermediate line and a beadhead wooly bugger. Nothing fancy or hatch-specific—there were no bugs visible on the surface anyway—but these are flies that should have appealed to any brookie that hadn’t seen the point of a hook for a dozen years or more. The elk hair caddis always fools the non-native but thriving brookies I see in alpine lakes in the Sierras, and the biggest brookie I ever caught, a memorable fattie from a pond in Patagonia, took a wooly bugger. Not sure if that is pure science, but it’s what I started with.
In a half-hour’s initial effort we stealthily approached downed trees and beaver dams and other likely cover and delicately offered up the caddis: no takers. Same result for a smaller parachute Adams. The mood sank; it started to not look like the pond was full of hungry, unsophisticated trout. My friend and his son seemed to be a little less impressed by my fancy fishing rods and unfurling loops each time they failed to produce a strike. Switching to the wooly bugger, we got hits! But I am sorry to report that when the first of these hits were solidly hooked and dragged to the boat with great anticipation, the catch turned out to be that least trouty of catches, a largemouth bass.
There’s science for you: it may be a negative result, but it’s information. In fact, the landowners had feared exactly this result. In recent decades some of the lakes in the area have actually been intentionally stocked with largemouth bass for their sport value, where sport refers less to fly casting and more to fast boats plastered with colorful stickers -- even “tournaments,” I imagine. No such activity was allowed on the private ponds, of course, but it truly is a fact of Nature that everything is connected. Property lines can’t stop bass fry from swimming up and down creeks, property lines can’t prevent a heron with some fertilized bass eggs stuck to its legs from flying from lake to lake. And once bass are on the scene, they are quite capable of subjugating other species to oblivion with their large hungry mouths and aggressive ambush feeding.
That’s a sad outcome for science and for conservation. But I cannot look anyone in the eye and say truthfully that an unfished pond full of bass is a sad outcome for a fly fisher in possession of an 8wt with a weight-forward floating line attached. When my friend left the next morning on the long drive back to the university, I put together my folding kayak and went out with the 8wt and a hypothesis: I wished to discover whether every likely piece of cover, every weed clump, down tree, and rock along the entire shore of this lovely pond, held an aggressive largemouth bass. The terminal experimental equipment was a balsa bass popper, and I think you can guess the result: positive.
With the aid of an all-terrain vehicle and some intense off-road driving that I wouldn’t have expected from a professor, we had also sampled another of the property’s ponds by canoe. This smaller pond is a lot more promising for a population of brookies, as it is significantly deeper and colder than the main pond. We worked the dries and wooly bugger there as well, and, while we couldn’t find a brook trout, we notably didn’t find any largemouth bass. I think if bass were there, they would have attacked the bugger unhesitatingly. We also tried a string leech, just to be sure. But the only catch was small sunfish that barely got their mouths around a size 18 Adams. We left believing that if we came back in springtime before the summer heat inverts the thermocline, we might have a fair chance at finding brook trout.
Hopefully that sounds scientific, and hopefully some well-meaning fly fisher (who hopefully will be me) will get a chance to try out that hypothesis. I can tell you that I really, really like fishing for science. Philosophical and personal reasons for fishing are real and will always count; but add in an actual, practical scientific goal in the service of conserving natural resources (and thereby ensuring the survival of meaningful fishing), and you can feel very, very good about your fishing. I’ll add that paddling and fishing all day in a lake that is basically all yours, and then falling asleep in a hammock while rain hammers on the cabin roof, can really make you feel good about being alive on earth. Much gratitude for my friend and the landowner who made that happen.
