Giants

Every game fish has a dimension beyond which it becomes an exemplar, a paragon, a bragging fish. The dimensions vary, of course, according to species and place. Down south large-mouth bass grow to the size of state-fair hogs, so it takes double-digit weight to be worthy of boasting. Here in the north, cold water and short summers make our bass reach trophy status at about six pounds. For smallmouths the defining number is five pounds; for northern pike, ten; for steelhead, fifteen. Chinook salmon don’t raise eyebrows until they reach twenty- five or thirty pounds.

You have to keep some perspective on this. A one-pound bluegill deserves more praise than a four-pound walleye. And while a three-pound rainbow trout is a stud in the Au Sable, trollers on Lake Michigan dismiss it as small, a mere "skipper." Trout and salmon grow so big in the Great Lakes that they skew the grading curve. A three-pounder makes almost no impression when it’s caught in company with twenty-pounders, especially when landed with tackle stout enough to drag a cow behind a train. But a wild three-pound trout in a river is another matter.

On most rivers where I’ve fished, a sixteen-inch trout is considered a nice fish, an eighteen-incher is a nice fish, and anything bigger is worthy of hosannas. For years a twenty-incher was such an elusive prize that I remember at age twenty being disappointed when I caught a brown trout that measured nineteen and three-quarter inches. Since then I’ve taken a fair number of browns, rainbows, and even brook trout bigger than twenty inches, but most of them were caught in places like southern Chile, which hardly counts, or were taken at night during the Hexagenia hatch, when big trout are more vulnerable than usual. A twenty-inch resident trout from a Michigan river, on a fly, in daylight, when I could see the strike and watch the battle and admire the colors of the fish -- that was an experience that eluded me until I had fished those rivers for twenty years. You might say I finally earned the right, though I’m sure it had more to do with chance. For a long time my luck was bad, then it got better. Throw a fly into the water enough times, and eventually even the biggest fish comes down with a case of the stupids.

After a trout reaches about twenty inches, it’s more convenient to scale it in pounds, yet most anglers I know in Michigan measure even their largest trout by the inch. That might be because we don’t want those trout associated with the ten- and twenty-pounders we see caught so frequently from the Great Lakes and displayed dead on the dock. Also, those of us who prefer to release most or all of our trout -- even, and perhaps especially, the big ones -- can rarely take the time to weigh fish. We measure them quickly and get them back into the water. When a lady in Grayling recently caught a very large brown trout during the Hex hatch, it was the length of the fish -- thirty inches -- that everyone talked about, not the weight. Saying it was a ten-pounder would have lacked punch.

Thirty-inchers are extremely hard to come by, but you can’t believe how many twenty-inchers are caught. Literally: You can’t believe it. I’ve seen so many seventeen-inchers grow to twenty that I’ve become skeptical of every report. Kelly Galloup, who in his shop hears stories almost daily about twenty-inch trout taken from area waters, automatically subtracts two or three inches. He’s been fishing the rivers around here all his life and has caught more big trout than anyone I know. He understands just how big a genuine twenty-incher is, and how rare.

Not that they don’t exist. They do, and probably in greater numbers than most people suspect. The twenty-inch bench-mark has taken on quasi-mythical status on many waters, which is why so many anglers chase small trout while harboring secret hope of the unexpected whopper. According to that way of thinking, a large trout is an anomaly, like an albino moose or a zucchini the size of a couch. A lot of people are convinced that such trout, even if they do exist, are so smart they’re virtually uncatchable.

It’s not unusual for anglers to admit at a certain period in their lives that they’ve given up the quest for big trout, that they care less about the size of the fish than the quality of the experience, that they appreciate a ten-inch brook trout more than a ten-pound brown trout. I can sympathize.

I was once like that. My lust to kill faded and never came back, and I long ago lost any urge to demonstrate prowess. Yet I’m more interested in large trout now than at any time in my life. In my youth I caught some decent fish, but few giants. Now, after thirty years of apprenticeship, I’m arrogant enough to believe that I can occasionally catch one.

Mere bulk is not enough. I like catching steelhead, salmon, northern pike, muskie, bass, even carp when they can be caught in clean water on light tackle, and I will probably shout tributes at the top of my voice for tarpon, bonefish, and striped bass if I ever wet my feet in salt, but I would still rather catch wild, river-dwelling trout than any other fish. I’ll take a twenty-inch brown trout any day over a twenty-pound king salmon. It’s a matter of temperament. On the waters where I fish, salmon are aliens, transported across the continent from the Pacific Northwest, entering rivers not to feed but to complete brief and ultimately fatal mating missions. Catching them is like setting an ambush. Brown trout are aliens, too -- as I am -- but they have been here long enough to become nationalized -- as I have also. They live year around in the rivers, and know their surroundings intimately. When you step into a river, you’re stepping into their kitchen. Catching them requires knowledge of the kitchen, the seasons, the insects, crustaceans, and bait fish -- requires knowing almost as much as the trout. You can sometimes get lucky, but to be consistently lucky you have to be good.

Kelly is one of the best you’ll ever meet. It’s not quite accurate to say he’s a big-fish specialist -- I’ve watched him spend many hours casting dry flies to eight-inch brookies -- but much of his time on the water is spent targeting giants. His success at catching them is partly due to the fact that he sees through the many misconceptions and bits of untested conventional wisdom that bog down so many anglers. The first summer we fished together, I mentioned something about big brown trout feeding primarily at night. That nugget of information is gospel in every how-to book in my library and is a staple of fly-fishing seminars everywhere. I’ve heard it all my life. And since I had caught so few big brown trout during the day, it was easy to believe they didn’t feed until midnight.

Kelly listened without comment. The next day he drove me to a stretch of the Manistee that is among the most heavily fished on that popular river. We waded downstream, at noon, on a bright Thursday in early July. Kelly rigged a six-weight rod and reel with a full-sinking line, a type-six Cortland 444 Rocket Taper. I don’t ordinarily endorse products, but that particular line is so well suited to the way Kelly fishes that it deserves mention. It is much smaller in diameter than most sinking lines, which allows it to sink quickly, yet it is light enough and flexible enough to cast easily. Ease of casting is crucial when you’re fishing streamers the way Kelly does. He casts with pinpoint accuracy to specific structure in the river, and does it for hours at a time. Lead-core lines are too heavy and clumsy for the job.

Right away Kelly destroyed another cherished myth about brown trout. While I tied a small bucktail streamer to a nine-foot leader tapering to four-pound tippet, he knotted a one-foot section of twenty-pound test to his line, added a one-foot midsection of ten-pound test, and finished with a foot-long tippet of eight-pound test to which he attached a very large, bulky streamer. His total leader was three feet long and strong enough to land tarpon. When I expressed surprise, Kelly said he’s convinced that a trout charging a streamer is motivated as much by territorial imperative as by hunger, and that in either case the trout is not looking at the leader. With dry flies, yes, they can be extraordinarily leader shy, but if a trout is intent on killing an intruder, it will attack whether the intruder is attached to a leader testing two pounds or twelve. A heavy leader also makes it possible to land the fish quickly so it can be easily resuscitated and released.

We waded downstream, and Kelly cast his big streamer tight to the bank, slapping it as close as possible to sunken logs, stumps, overhanging bushes, and every other place that offered cover. He slapped the water with the fly because he’s found that brown trout, like largemouth bass, are attracted to such stimuli. The moment the fly hit the water, he began stripping it back, causing it to swim rapidly downstream, a couple of feet beneath the surface, darting like a sculpin or other baitfish trying to get the hell out of Dodge.

I went first, fishing my conventional rig, and in an hour caught several twelve-inchers. Kelly followed immediately behind, close enough to chat, and cast into the same water I had covered, but tighter to the bank and just above or below the deep pools, especially in places where sunken debris and beds of weeds made microhabitats in two or three feet of quick current. Where I had caught nothing, he caught a twenty-inch brown and an eighteen-inch brown. I became a believer.

Kelly’s tactics have changed my entire approach to trout fishing. I still prefer fishing to risers during a hatch, but I’m no longer disappointed when there are no risers. Most of the time, after all, there aren’t. And since I’m not content to spend all day waiting for bugs to appear, I’ve become a maniac for streamers. I fish them all day long. My casting hand is nearly as callused as it was when I swung a hammer for a living. And I’m catching more big trout than ever. Not as many as Kelly -- this student will probably never match his teacher in skill -- but more than I ever expected to catch.

The most efficient way to hunt big trout is in a boat, especially one that allows a casting angler to stand. We often use Kelly’s McKenzie River drift boat, two or three of us taking turns rowing and casting, covering ten miles of river in eight hours. When you fish with Kelly, you have to be prepared to spend all day on the river making cast after cast after cast, each with deliberation and concentration, placed just so, the streamer slapping the water as close as possible to every bank, stump, and rock. The streamer’s escape route takes it streaking past a sunken log or parallel bands of sand, mossy bottom, and shadow, or past the woven, algae-encrusted sticks drowned near a beaver lodge -- places where giant trout stake out territory and guard it. We sometimes cast all day without a single strike. Or we have six strikes and land three fish. One or two will be about sixteen inches long. Another will be over eighteen inches. Once every three or four days one of us catches a trout over twenty inches. My biggest is twenty-three inches. Every season Kelly gets a couple over twenty-five.

Kelly, who is an innovative fly tier (his Troutsman Hex and Troutsman Drake are the best imitations I’ve ever used for Hexagenia, brown drakes, and Isonychia spinners), invented a streamer he calls the Zoo Cougar specifically for casting with sinking lines on rivers filled with structure. The writer Bob Linsenman, who’s had some big days with that streamer, came up with the name after he decided the fly had the cynical and overfed look of a cougar confined all its life behind bars. It can be grouped with Muddler Minnows and other streamers constructed with heads of spun deer hair, but otherwise it’s revolutionary. It’s tied with a yellow marabou tail, gold tinsel body, and a wing of calf-tail hair overlaid with a mallard flank feather dyed lemon and seated flat over the body, not edgewise as is traditional with most streamers. The head is deer-body hair dyed dark yellow, spun and trimmed loosely with a razor blade. The finished fly has a substantial profile and markings suggestive of a sculpin. Most important, the flat position of the wing and the broad deer-hair head cause the fly to swim in an undulating hula dance. There are days when trout will eat no other fly.

Kelly also likes big bucktail streamers dyed the brightest possible chartreuse, and bushy combinations of marabou and rabbit fur tied to give them a broad silhouette and enticing action. He dislikes using streamers weighted with lead wire or bead eyes, believing that unweighted flies are more lifelike in the water. And he likes them big, on the reasonable assumption that oversize flies attract oversize fish. When his marabou streamers are dry, fresh from the box, they look like Angora kittens charged with static electricity. As soon as they hit the water and sink, they come alive. It’s a wonder any fish can resist them. Any fish, that is, big enough not to be afraid of them.

Casting big flies for trout is not for everyone. It’s hard work, and it contradicts many of our favorite myths about fly-fishing -- that it’s a gentle sport for contemplative sorts, that purity of intentions and good equipment and careful application of your skills will be rewarded whether you catch fish or not, that big fish are beside the point. With streamers the way Kelly ties and fishes them, big fish are most emphatically the point. If you’re the kind of person who needs constant reward, you’ll get more satisfaction from catching small fish on dry flies. But I’ve discovered that I have a deep longing for trout capable of yanking the rod from my hand. Funny how eight hours of fruitless casting can be forgotten the moment a big brown or rainbow charges out of nowhere, turns, engulfs your streamer, and tries to drag you into the river.

All this is just prelude to what happened one day last year on the lower Au Sable, what Bob Linsenman calls his "crick." Bob, Kelly, and I were floating a stretch that has the broad sweeping bends of a western river and is known for its big trout. It looks like big-fish water. We fished it with big streamers and sinking lines and kept our reflexes set at hair trigger. It was one of those days when you figure out fairly soon that you’re not going to catch many fish, but maybe you’ll get a giant. But the giant didn’t come. One of us was always casting from the bow and another from the stern, while the third rowed. Periodically we traded places. We cast and cast. We fished all day without a strike.

Late in the afternoon, on a cast no different than the five hundred that preceded it, to a spot along shore that looked no different than any other spot along shore, I was stripping one of Kelly’s Zoo Cougars deep toward the boat in maybe five feet of water when a sizable section of the bottom underwent a sort of seismic shift. I saw motion, a hint of surface disturbance, and then -- clearly, with the aid of polarized glasses and an advantageous angle of the sun -- the bronze flash of a brown trout turning toward the fly. And I saw dimensions. This was no mere twenty-incher. It was three feet long if it was an inch.

In fishing there is always a risk of diminishing returns. You can set out on a hedonistic course, always searching for larger and more difficult fish and greater and more enduring thrills, but the search can become like the notorious progression from marijuana to heroin. It’s possible to get strung out on giant fish and fall victim to the Hemingway syndrome. Hemingway, you remember, abandoned the brook trout of northern Michigan to pursue monster billfish in the Gulf Stream, and his life went downhill from there. It’s safest to avoid temptation. Instead of always seeking bigger fish, be satisfied with small ones. Spend most of your time catching ten-inchers on dry flies. They’re nice fish, and great fun on light tackle. Be reasonable. You don’t need to wrestle giants every day.

But in that two or three seconds, while the biggest brown trout I have ever seen turned and flashed in the Au Sable River, I discovered that I’m not a reasonable man. Not by a long shot.

I didn’t catch the trout. Didn’t even hook it. At the last moment it turned away, its wariness winning out over the curiosity, hunger, or plain meanness that had spurred it to move. Adrenaline shot from my head to my groin with so much force it felt as if it had been launched from a fire hose. It surged through me, bursting open a window to my core. While the window was open I got a good look inside. There was no mistaking it: I have an addict’s heart. RWOL

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