Matthew Dickerson, Addison Independent, September 30, 1999 (reprinted by permission)
It's been many years since I've had a summer in which I've fished as little as I did this year. I do have my excuses. First there was the drought. If you looked at the amount of water in my two favorite rivers, you might have mistaken them for drainage ditches. In a desert. Then there was Hurricane Floyd. Which is to say: When it rains, it pours.
Just a few days before the hurricane I did manage to get down one morning to Beldon Falls. Middlebury College had just added to its list of outdoor orientation trips for first-year students a first-ever fly-fishing trip. On a Thursday morning (but not too early, these were college students after all) I joined several incoming students and their two leaders for their first few hours of casting. The group included students from (among other places): Brazil, Florida, Michigan, and Idaho. Some were experienced fly-casters. Others were fly-fishing for the first time of their lives. Fortunately there were plenty of small bass and chubs feeding, and nearly everybody managed to catch at least one fish. But no trout. The water below the dam was the lowest and warmest I'd ever seen it there. I easily waded across Otter Creek at a location that is often six feet deep or more.
So this past Saturday, when presented with an opportunity to head up to one of my favorite mountain ponds and do some fly-casting--in the midst of this season's muted by still beautiful foliage, and with a real possibility of actually catching trout--I was nearly drueling at the mouth in anticipation. I arranged to meet my friend Bill Frey at 3:45pm. I was eager and 5 minutes early. He was fashionably late. But he brought the pick-up truck, the canoe, and a full ice-chest so I can't complain.
We were fishing by 4:30pm. A brisk wind had the surface too churned up for any dry-fly action, so we decided to work the shoreline with streamers. As Bill is the creator of one of my favorite streamers, the "Frey's Fry", it seemed like a good thing to try. We both tied one one, and managed to work almost the entire shore over the first hour, but without any action. Still, we were both glad to be fishing.
As the sun approached the horizon, we played a hunch and pulled the canoe onto shore near an inlet stream. It was sheltered from the wind, which made our casting a little easier. And almost as soon as the shadow from the hill behind us crossed the water, we saw the first splash of a rising fish. Noticing a live grasshopper under foot, I tied on a size #14 imitation of it, and with considerable anticipation laid a nice cast just where the fish had risen. My cast didn't attract any attention. Neither did the next several casts of that fly, nor of any of the several other dry flies I tried on over the next few minutes. So I went back under-water with my other favorite streamer: a little brook trout imitation. That drew an agressive strike on the first cast, and within a minute I had on a nice 10" brook trout. My second trout, a bit larger than the first, followed soon. Being the wily angler he is, Bill quickly took off his Frey's Fry and tied on his own little brook trout imitation. The manuever paid off for him as well (though I do mention in passing that his trout was somewhat smaller than either of mine).
By that time, it was getting dark and we still had to canoe back across the pond. The 6:30pm reading on my watch also happened to be the time my wife was expecting me, and I knew I had at least 45 minutes of travel to get home. (An optimistic estimate, as it turned out.) I had just lost my third fly in the tall grass behind me. Fearing that Bill might catching another fish and tie my count for the day, I suggested we leave. The paddle back across the pond was cold, but not so cold I wished we had left earlier. As we loaded the canoe onto the roof, we listened to a bear calling in the woods just over the hill. We also heard a few splashes in the water behind us and imagined that perhaps they were rising fish. But the day had already been good enough. We climbed into the cab and headed home.