Finding your fly lab
Another critical element in establishing your home waters: having a place to test things out. Plus a new book from Robin Wall Kimmerer and the many (gnarly) faces of lamprey.
Flow-staters: We talked a few newsletters ago about finding your home waters. Let's pick back up there.
Taking the Big Here quiz was good. Kudos to those who did it and shared. But it's just a start.
The quiz helps place you inside the largest possible ecosystem, a watershed. If we're thinking "Powers of 10" that's maybe to the fourth power.
Let's zoom in closer today, maybe just at 10^3, and reach just outside our personal sphere to develop a new concept related to our home waters: the lab.
Having waters that you can consider a fly-fishing lab will accelerate your learning curve way more than a guided trip or vacation somewhere.
That lab just needs to be close to home, and slightly fishy.
The power of a fly-fishing lab
You few, you lucky few, who live on a trout stream, or next to a river or lake, where you can fly-fish at will. Most of us are not so fortunate.
We have to scrimp and save to find opportunities to fish: time off from work, favors with partners, putting off other responsibilities.
And then we have to drive to get there. I consider myself lucky that the closest blue-ribbon trout and steelhead river is a mere two hours away. This is probably how it'll be until I retire, if I'm that lucky.
This puts a beginner in a really hard position when they're learning to fly-fish. All that matters is repetition, and developing vision, and trying new things. Getting chances. But those reps can feel few and far between. When you wait for the stars to align, and once a month you're able to spend six hours on the river, it's going to take years to get better. You'll probably give up before then.
This is why having water near you that you can consider your lab is essential. Whenever I encounter frustrations or setbacks or failures with my angling, I look to good old Marshall Mathers and B-Rabbit (like the true son of Michigan I am):
Back to the lab again, yo, this old rhapsody
The power of a fly-fishing lab
I had a chance to fish this weekend with my pal Mike, and visit one of his labs. (He has several!) Mike's a fly-tier, and belongs to a club where he can access several stocked ponds year-round.
He's caught bigger fish than the stocked rainbows, and he's caught them in a lot more beautiful places. There's a framed photo of him with an Olympic Peninsula steelhead from the Hoh river with a head like a dinosaur above his tying desk.
But the ponds are open year-round, and only an hour from home. They give him a chance to test out his fly designs, or new flies people have told him about, to see how they work on these relatively-easy-to-fool fish. They give him a chance to test technique.
I brought along a newish intermediate line I wanted to dial-in my retrieve on, and worked on moving the fly as slowly as possible using a hand-twist retrieve, to imitate a leech. The slower I crept it along, the more likely I was to get a take, and get feedback from several fish that this was the right approach.
Finding your fly-fishing lab
My first fly-fishing lab was a pair of ponds and a small tributary of Tarabusi Creek in the Rouge River watershed in Southeastern lower Michigan.
Google Earth's historical views won't let me go back earlier than the 2000s, where they were both significantly terraformed to squeeze in a few dozen houses, but here they are. I bet in this photo they still held fish, though.
Key to these ponds was they were close enough to my house to be able to head over there for a couple hours when the urge struck. To practice casting. I knew where the bluegill and pumpkinseed gathered. I'd see the defending their nests when it was spawning time. The ponds would freeze over in the wintertime but they'd always be back. I could jig my little lead-head rubber-skirted lures and coax them out of the weeds.
There are only three real criteria for adopting your lab:
- The water holds fish. It doesn't matter what kind
- The water is close to home. Close enough that on a summer night after work or supper you can nip over and lose in a half-hour of casting
- The water offers year-round access. So you can see seasonal changes, even if you aren't fishing all year
This last bit is key. I'd contend you don't really know a trout stream until you've fished it every month, through every season. And that pattern, of seeing all the seasonal changes, can start with your lab.
As with all scouting-related tasks, Google Earth is your friend. My current spot is a 15 minute bike ride from home.
So, do some digging.
Do you know anywhere right off the bat?
Will you need to do some in-person scouting come spring?
Visit our classroom lab, St. Louis Ponds
The Intro to Fly Fishing class culminates in a fish-along day at St. Louis Ponds, our own little lab. It may not be close to home for everyone, but it's got what we need: willing fish, and enough room for everyone to spread out.
You can always visit the ponds outside of class, just on your own, if you're in the area. They're open year-round. If you're in the Portland area, and are stumped, give St. Louis Ponds, or any of the ODFW's "50 places to go fishing within 60 minutes of Portland" a shot.
The good, the bad, and the lamprey
Prior to zebra mussels, sea lamprey were the biggest invasive foe you heard about growing up in the Great Lakes region. Alien and unknown in a similar way to the eel, with those lovely mouths, they didn't exactly fill you with good feelings.
Well, turns out something called 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol is just the ticket to get rid of them in the region, and they're no longer as feared as they once were.
The sea lamprey, unwelcome in the Great Lakes, has a cousin on this coast: The Pacific Lamprey. Culturally and historically significant, and a critical player in the ecosystem. Fight one fish, save another.
Check out this documentary, including a great scene of fisherman harvesting lamprey at Willamette Falls, just a few miles upstream from Portland.
In search of gifts, great and small
On the topic of gifts and treasures, here are a couple CFS faves in conversation!
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing) interviews Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass) in anticipation of the latter's new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World.
Here's a little bit if RWK's wisdom:
Let’s take your example of water, which might be easy to take for granted, flowing from your faucet. But when you stop and think, this amazing liquid is finite; we will never have more than we do now. Those drops cycle endlessly among us, across space and time. Remember, the water in your glass was once dinosaur pee. How did it get to your glass? These molecules that were once pee, will also be dew, the juice of an apple, the blood of a panda, and the sap of its bamboo meal. They were purified by soil, taken up by forests, returned to the sky, rumbled as thunderheads, and fell as a refreshing spring rain on your garden that made the flowers bloom. Think of it! Free water falling from the sky on every one of us. Did we earn it? Do we own it? Did we make it? Do we deserve it? Absolutely not and yet it comes to us just the same and without it, we would die. To me, that’s a gift. All it takes is attention, not to a “thing” but to a story… and the “anonymous object” is revealed as a gift. This practical reverence reveals the sacred dimensions of two hydrogens bonded to an oxygen, which makes life possible. I think that the pathway to living in a world of gifts is quite simply, paying attention to the earth, whether as water or a peach or a bowl of cereal or a flock of geese in the sky. It’s an act of resistance to reclaim your attention from what the market wants of you. And the happiness attached to gift thinking is a bonus.
Winter spots still available
There are still slots available for our Winter term class (Tuesday evenings in February). Spread the word!
We're in the classroom in the wintertime, but folks who take this class are still welcome to join us at a casting session and fishing outing later in the year when the weather (and fishing) is more amenable.
Current Flow State is a weekly newsletter from me, Nick Parish.
If you enjoyed this, please forward it to a friend.
Read our editorial policy or browse the newsletter archives.
Members support and sustain the site, our community. Learn more about membership benefits. If you're getting value from this material, consider becoming a member and giving back.
