When they’re biting, there’s nothing better

In a country that seems to relate bigness with prestige and satisfaction — three-story lake houses, Hummers, Hooters, Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, etc., — a fly fisher can still find nirvana among a bunch of little gray bugs.

This is one of the reasons I live in the Inland Northwest.

My good friend David Moershel and I broke away from all obligations, big and small, in the dreary weather on Monday to a famous Montana trout stream we vowed to keep anonymous, although I noticed that it flows through Superior.

Being the first week of April, the snow flurries on the drive over Lookout Pass didn’t cause alarm. I had my fly rod, my Brittany spaniel (Radar), a huge sack full of lunch food and a book. I was going to have a good day no matter what the gray skies delivered.

This is a lazy time of year for fly fishers. You can sleep in, have a leisurely breakfast and still drive all the way to Montana before the first hatches emerge, that is, if they emerge at all.

The skwala stoneflies had been less than dependable in March, but the blue-winged olives had been the bread and butter for anglers in the past few weeks. Said Moershel, “The hatches haven’t been starting until about noon or 1 p.m.”

We were making our first casts well before noon, however — just in case.

Before leaving Spokane, I had pre-rigged my fly rod with a Prince Nymph under an indicator, resigned to plying the invisible depths for a while even though my heart was set on casting to rising trout.

But as we approached the stream, I saw the disturbance of a very large fish rising to the surface a few feet from shore. Seeing a huge trout rise as you’re driving up to a stream is like being a kid trying to be calm in bed on Christmas eve after hearing large boxes being deposited under the tree downstairs.

I re-rigged with a dry fly, but Moershel got the first cast at the feeding fish and a very large rainbow thrashed him a good one for several seconds before stealing his fly.

Moershel turned around and looked at me, his fly-less leader flapping in the wind, exhilarated to have stepped up to the batter’s box as the stream delivered a fat fastball down the middle of the plate on the very first pitch.

Yet I could tell he was sick to think that if he’d let me make that first cast he could be the one laying back on the shoreline grass, holding his sides to tame the laughter.

Lesson learned.

The second lesson dealt with patience.

Turns out that was the only fish rising for a mile up and down the river. Radar, at least, enjoyed the search. Having a constant source of hydration means a dog can anoint every bush from here to eternity. He was in river-dog heaven.

But nothing was hatching and the wind had started blowing.

At 12:45 I sat down with Radar, by now nearly exhausted from lifting his leg, and started nibbling on a PB&J sandwich. An angler chucking a nymph under an indicator came by with a buddy in a drift boat and said he wasn’t seeing much action.

Then another floater came by, the only other boat we saw all day. He was rowing his pontoon as though he were heading for the barn.

The second boater couldn’t have been 100 yards downstream when Moershel looked at me and pointed to the river. The surface near shore was suddenly riddled with golf-ball size bubbles created by trout rising to the surface.

The river was crawling with mayflies.

The fishing had gone from zip to outrageous in the time it took me to eat half a sandwich, the other half of which I jammed in my pocket so I could start casting. It was 12:55 p.m.

A good imitation of the size 14 gray mayflies was just another face in the crowd as it drifted downstream with a dozen real McCoys within a square yard.

I tied on a slightly fatter Parachute Adams and immediately started hooking virtually every fish that was rising where I could get a clean drift.

A nuclear war could have played out behind us and we’d have been oblivious right up until we were obliterated.

This is what I live for: Fishing so sensational a mediocre angler can sense the feeling of greatness.

It lasted for about 90 minutes, which is better than sex, uh, at least for some people.

The river was still littered with mayflies at 3 p.m., but the trout apparently were too gorged to surface any longer.

I tried to snap a photo to document the fish-catching frenzy that kept Moershel and I fixated on just a few hundred yards of stream, but the camera lens was smeared with peanut butter and jelly.

You’ll have to take my word for it.