Even as a landowner along a trout stream, I’m getting tired of the peace and quiet of wet long weekends featuring the double uns and multi-overs — unwadeable, unfishable rivers and streams, thus overcrowded local lakes.
But the very name “civic holiday,” or “bank ’oliday Monday,” as my dad used to call it, reeks to me of dull.
We hadn’t been west since the July long, and the rain gauge at the Stump Ranch, maxed out, overflowing at 10 inches, was not a good omen for anything but my studies of the flora, fauna and fungi of the aspen parkland-boreal forest.
Down on the uncut creekside hayfield, Herself took Beau, our Brittany, for a walk (suddenly his running days are over). They came back with her gingerly carrying a bag that had been hidden in plain sight at the Night Hole. She feared garbage, fish guts, etc., but inside was a bottle of very fine single malt and a note, dated July 19 from my friend Neil Waugh, outdoors columnist of The Edmonton Sun.
“The miracle at the Night Hole,” that such treasure could remain there, unstolen for 17 days, is testimony either that bad conditions had kept fishermen away, or that certain scumbags had been by and thought the bag was merely full of empty cans and other litter, such as they routinely leave for the landowner to pick up and pack out.
Not 100 metres away, I had robo-guided Neil to a nice white-tail buck on the last day of the season (a Sunday) several years ago. Robo-guiding is remote guiding: where you mark an X on the ground, advise the dude to sit on it and he’ll see deer for sure, then go away and don’t return until the heavy lifting is done.
The creek looked fishable to me for the first time since May 16, but then I’ve only fished it and looked at it thousands of times since love at first sight 50 years ago.
I was surer that the grasshoppers landing on the windshield as I drove out of the hayfield were a strong hint to a steely-eyed robo-guide.
After lunch my dude, son John, daughter-in-law Darlene and granddaughter Sarah, with her cousin, Josh, not being due to arrive yet for an hour or two, I went auto-foraging for the fungi of fall.
The rain and occasional heat bring on Alberta’s “official mushroom” the edible aspen bolete, but it also produces such lush under-brush that, no matter how red or blaze-orange their caps are, these mushrooms are hard to see while road hunting.
But I did see one, and also one specimen of the deadly, also red-capped, fly agaric, amanita muscaria, but I saw not one specimen of the red-topped “sickener,” Russula emetica.
Forager’s beware: making a red-capped fall mushroom a provincial emblem is a life and death decision.
Back at the cabin, John, preparing to climb down to the creek, wade across, and fish the Cabin Pool, wondered what fly robo-guide would suggest. “There are lots of hoppers,” I replied. When he climbed back up, John reported he caught one small brown trout on one of my Le Tort Hoppers. I can’t get down there anymore, can’t wade, period, but I can robo-guide, still participate, be there by making suggestions, supplying flies.
Later, down in the hayfield, John set the kids to digging holes and throwing rocks on the sand and gravel bar in the Haystack Pool, then he started fishing the Drive-in Theatre just upstream, so-called because you can drive into it and there are usually entertaining shows to watch from a comfortable bench built by my friend, Ken Short.
John rigged one of my lightly-weighted Short Black Boogers suspended from a dropper below the floating Le Tort Hopper. Quickly two large trout took the hopper, but failed to stick.
John briefly considered but fortunately didn’t cut off the sunken booger because it was possibly interfering with hookups on his floating Le Tort Hopper.
Then John noticed the Le Tort Hopper was “dragging” (not floating naturally).
Just in time he got the point and did what you are supposed to do when your indicator fly acts like that; he struck and was into a long battle with a heavy brown trout of better than 50 cm that had taken the sunken booger.
At one point, the big trout launched straight out and up, like a Polaris missile.
This Drive-in Theatre matinee was not more than 10 metres downstream from where Jim McLennan hooked the big brown trout I had located for him earlier for a famous segment of his Iron Blue Fly Fishing TV show, where the Shark (as I had named him) put on the most violent aerial display anyone will ever see from a brown trout.
But that is history, and this is now; a year when it has taken until the early August long weekend to proclaim “Season’s open!”
Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.