My father and grandfather with a haul of nice bass during the Good Ol' Days.

My life as a fisherman has always been defined by what I can only describe as desperation. This isn’t so much an emotion of the moment that causes me to behave as a madman. It’s a vague feeling that I’ve missed most all the good stuff and I’m missing whatever’s left when I’m at work as opposed to fishing. As a fisherman, how can I not feel this way? Fishermen are fed stories about the good ol’ days from the minute they first pick up a Zebco spin-caster. We see old magazines filled to the brim with bass of unholy proportions, trout the size of submarines, salmon in untold numbers. We see faded photos of old guys in overalls and straw hats with monstrous finned creatures only barely recognizable as largemouth bass lying dead at their feet, awaiting their place on the supper table. Early photos of Yellowstone National Park display what we would later recognize as disastrous catches of cutt throat trout. As recently as the 1990s, it wasn’t unheard of that competent fishermen would haul in 20 or more cutts over 18″ in a single day on the Yellowstone River. Invariably, things just seem worse now. In most cases they actually are worse, and we as fishermen, being the world’s great pessimists, can’t help but believe they’ll continue getting worse until there’s basically nothing left to catch except a few bighead carp and snakeheads.

And so I feel desperate. I feel like my time is slipping away. What few fish left to us are currently being caught by other anglers. I’m missing out. This feeling or emotion or whatever it is affects my approach to a lake and especially to a trout stream. A good trout fly fishing trip only comes a few times every year, and I feel an undeniable need to catch a fish immediately. As soon as the stream comes into sight, my patience disappears, my desire to attack the fishing puzzle logically, the need for spiritual peace with nature — it is all consumed by my desperation to land some fish. The desperation directs my trip planning, my general attitude, and my natural competitiveness. I do not want to be this way. I want to be the patient, thoughtful fisherman who sits down awhile, thinks things over, and carefully chooses the correct presentation. I want to take an entire day on occasion to learn a new technique. I want to take time to enjoy the surroundings, learn to identify the trees, become an ameteur entomologist, learn to be at peace with nature and my place in the universe. All that stuff that fishing is supposed to bring. Instead I find myself rushing to decisions, choosing flies and lures based on past successes rather than current conditions, ignoring the surroundings, becoming frustrated by others’ successes when I’m struggling.

Unlike most undesirable character flaws, I know and understand the source of this one — and it has nothing to do with my mother for you Freudians out there. It’ all those old photos, all those old stories, and all the bad news in the current fishing media. The sky is falling every month it seems. Fish populations are down everywhere. The environment has been destroyed and there’s nothing we can do to fix it. Even the local oral tradition among anglers supports this gloomy outlook. The fishing on Lake Guntersville was unbelievable in the 70s, pretty good when I was a kid, not so bad now, and is headed straight for the crapper in the future. The reasons for this prophecy are many: increase in fishing pressure, decreasing fertility of the lake, hydrilla choking out shallow areas, increase in bed fishing during the spawn, etc. The result is that both size and numbers of bass will plummet in the near future so that when I’m on the lake today I can’t help feeling that I MUST catch my fish NOW! I can’t count on them being there in another 15 years. I don’t have any photos of enormous bass lying at my feet! It may already be too late. I’ve missed out.

Trout fishing in particular is riddled with fear of future doom. If you listen to some, there’s not really much of a reason to fly fish for trout at all any more. Global warming, drought, pollution, progress of civilization, whirling disease, New Zealand mud snails, lake trout, dewatering for irrigation, and ever increasing fishing pressure have conspired to ruin the sport for good. Fly fishing is full of tales of the glory of the old days, lamentings on the current state, and dire predictions of future disaster. Pretty soon all the trout will be either dead or living in the remotest glacially-fed pond at 12,000 feet far, far from me. So when I finally get on the stream I cast with a melancholy, pleading desperation fueled by the feeling that this might be my last chance. If I don’t catch the big brown now someone will build an amusement park on the remote headwaters, washing tons of sediment down the stream killing every desirable living thing in its path. And if I do manage to catch a nice fish, the enjoyment is rather short-lived as I resume my attempt to accumulate a suitable catalog of successes to be remembered in my later years as part of the “good ol’ days.” You can’t call it the “good ol’ days” if you haven’t got a faded photo of yourself, preferably dressed in overalls, with a 20″ brown trout or 10 lb bass.

Predictions of gloom and doom appear to be born out by my own experience. Most everywhere I fish now isn’t as good as it was before. In some cases, it’s much, much worse. In others, it’s still pretty good. Probably good enough that I should consider that my feelings are purely irrational, part of some kind of universal fisherman’s longing for the past. But, in most cases, it’s likely to be objectively proveable that the fishing in the areas on Guntersville Lake that I frequent isn’t as good right now as during my childhood. But I suspect this doesn’t point to some cataclysmic process categorically destroying my favorite fishing waters. Just the natural ebb and flow of things.

Take, for instance, North Sauty Creek on Lake Guntersville. When I was a child, this was the best all-around creek on the lake. There were productive shallows and sheltered deep water spots. This large tributary to the Tennessee River supported impressive numbers of large bass. Beginning in the late 90s, the fishing began to noticeably decline. The reasons were many. Heavy fishing pressure during the spring obviously harmed the bass population by disrupting the spawn. Many shallow areas have silted in considerably in the last 20 years, covering prime spawning habitat with muck. Fishermen have gotten smarter (or purchased smarter gadgets) and have uncovered many previously undisturbed deep water areas. Interestingly, fishing pressure on North Sauty has decreased over the last few years. I suspect the fishing will improve with a few years of decreased pressure, especially during the spring. It’s already showing a few subtle signs of rejuvenation.

Or take Mud Creek on upper Lake Guntersville. This was the best shallow water area on the entire lake when I was a kid. During my high school days, the milfoil that was the life blood of the fishery began mysteriously disappearing. Some said the result of herbicide spraying by TVA, which TVA denied by the way. Others said a parasitic fungus was attacking the grass. Whatever the cause, milfoil almost completely disappeared from the creek. The bass congregated in breathtaking numbers around the few remaining grass beds. For those who knew the locations of these grass beds and how to fish them, it was a gold mine. I experienced bass fishing for numbers and size that I will probably never see again. A typical (I’m not lying) day of fishing involved around 50 bass with many in the four to six lb range. My brother Jonathan and my father brought in five bass weighing 27 lbs in a small local tournament. They caught all of the fish from a grassbed not much bigger than my bedroom. One bass weighed 9.5 lbs. My records show that I personally boated around 30 bass over 6 lbs during the first two years of the milfoil’s retreat (at least I have that as fuel for some legendary tales of my own). Unfortunately it didn’t last long. More and more milfoil disappeared and more people found what was left. For five years or so the fishing was horrible. We were lucky to catch a handful of 12 inch fish in a day. The general feeling was that “things” had gone to the crapper and weren’t coming back. Today, the milfoil has returned and so have many of the fish. Though not what it was when I was a kid, the outlook is promising. Over the rest of the lake, a similar up and down pattern can be seen. The lower lake around the town of Guntersville wasn’t a big producer when I was a young child, whereas now enormous limits of bass are brought in from the area almost every week in the local tournaments.

Examples such as these are plentiful in fly fishing. The Yellowstone River. The fishing was unreal in the old days, got bad in the 60s and 70s, got good again, and is now worse than ever. I don’t doubt it’ll pick up again some day. The same ebb and flow can be seen in the histories of many of the nation’s most popular and storied tailwaters and streams.

Still, even after reasoning this stuff out, I can’t quite bring myself to totally relax when fishing. On the recent Yellowstone trip, I felt relief as opposed to excitement when catching my first cutt throat from Slough Creek. I couldn’t shake the persistent feeling that if I didn’t land a Yellowstone cutt throat on this trip, then I’d never catch one at all. They’ve got a good shot at becoming extinct, you know. The doom-and-gloom rhetoric in fly fishing can really get the best of you.

Any way, maybe once I’m older with lots of experience under my belt, I’ll be able to relax and just take things as they come. I’ll have a memory full of my own “good ol’ days” and I won’t constantly feel as if I’ve missed out on all the good stuff. I’ll be able to regale my own grandchildren with stories of those days gone by and depress them with predictions of how all they’ve got to look forward to is things going in the crapper.

-hawgdaddy

Tags: desperation, fishing, fly fishing, mud snails, whirling disease

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Commentary, Essays, Fly Fishing, Other Fishing. The author is Nathan Kennedy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.