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picture the gorgeous color of this fish, but like four times bigger...

Only in northern Michigan can you get summer, spring, and winter all in the same week.  I’ve been thinking a lot about trout lately, but the warm couple weeks we had really has me thinking about carp, panfish, and smallies.  I’ve got so much water to explore and re-explore over the summer.  And when I think about it, I’ve got to relearn how to fly fish for smallies.

Back in New York, where I learned to fish for them, I was fortunate enough to have some world class smallie water all around me.  The only downside is it was all moving water.  Here in MI, that doesn’t do me much good. I’m in stillwater country when it comes to smallies.  There are a few streams with smallies within driving distance, but I won’t really be fishing them.

I can still remember catching my personal best smallie like it was this morning.  It was during one of those spur of the moment after work/ before English Lit trips when water temps were finally climbing out of their winter funk.

I was surprised to see a truck already there when I pulled into the public parking area. First instinct told me to go elsewhere, but I decided to hop out and see if there were any tails sticking up on the glassy flat below the pocketwater.  I came down the trail of broken concrete and spotted the other guy with a net in one hand, flipping over rocks with the other.

“How’s it going?”
“Alright” He says.

I scanned the flat, then noticed a fly rod sitting on the bank.

“Any luck?” I ask.
“Nah, they’re not biting here. I’m gonna go downstream.”

He picked up his rod and walked up to his old Ford Ranger. I scanned the barren flat for a few more seconds, weighing my options.

Something told me that he was kind of a tool, so I walked up the trail to my car and slid my waders on as he broke his rod down. Not that it would have mattered if he was some sort of fly fishing god, when I’ve got a feeling about a spot, I trust it.  No words were spoken, but body language said he thought I was either an idiot for fishing where the fish weren’t biting, or an arrogant SOB. Either way, he was probably right.

I tied on the fly I call “The Other One.” It’s probably my second most productive fly for carp and smallies, basically a brown seal dubbed dragonfly nymph with lead eyes and rubber legs. I waded out to the slackwater pockets at the tail of the riffles and started working it parallel to the white water.

Strip, strip, strip. Suddenly something descent is throbbing through the cork. Way too big to be a bass.  Visions of carp fill my brain, then it makes what I first think is a half-hearted effort at tailwalking.  Its about then that I realize it was just too fat to get any air.

Not a carp.

It fought like a big brown trout before giving in and gliding in to my right.  I slowly knelt down, completely and utterly blown away by it. It’s the fish I had been chasing for probably 10 years, and the one thing killing the moment is the realization that my camera was home, sitting on my computer desk.

I forgot about the camera and became mesmerized by the mass of its lips.  The fish made my already small hands look tiny.  I touched my thumb to it’s front lip and then stretched my pinky finger as far towards it’s tail as it would go and then touched my thumb to where my pinky just was and repeated. It was just under three hand stretches long, and after a quick calculation, I realized I was holding my first 24-plus inch smallie.

A million thoughts raced through my head  Not just thoughts, but the ultimate internal debate between my ego and my ethics.   My ego wanted to go so far as to build a small dike out of rocks around the fish so I could run home and get my camera- it wasn’t smallie season or it may have argued for keeping the fish.  My ethics said no.  If there was a smallie in the Hudson River that needed to spawn, this was it.

If only I had my camera with me.

I knew what I had to do.  I popped the fly from it’s heavy upper lip, burned the fish’s long vertical stripes into my memory one last time, and then lowered it completely into the stained water.  One second it was there, the next it was gone.