Dark Waters

I like researching and then fishing new wild trout streams. I enjoy the novelty of fishing a place for the first time with all the possibilities that come with the experience. I love to work my way up the stream’s course and see each new pool or trouty-looking stretch of holding water as it comes into view around the next bend. Usually, the first time I try someplace new, the experience is more consumptive than contemplative. More gulping than sipping and savoring. I work quickly, scurrying up the creek like I have an appointment in ten minutes at the next bridge and driven by a hunger to see and know what is coming next as I fish up through. I want to see it all or as much as I can in the time I have Next time I come, I will slow down and work the better water more thoroughly, slower and with more discipline. But this first time is for finding out everything I can and swallowing the place whole in one sitting. Its how I’ve always been and I don’t see it changing much if at all. I’m almost 60 and when I fish a place for the first time, I still move through it as if I were 30.

But there is one kind of stream that is an exception to my usual frenetic approach. I call these places “dark waters”. Virtually every trout region where I have hung my fishing hat for any length of time has these sorts of streams, from the North Carolina Blue Ridge to my native Pennsylvania to my adopted current home waters in Wisconsin and Iowa. Some areas have more of them and some have fewer, but there are a scattering of them almost everywhere you find wild trout.

When you pull up to the bridge at a dark water stream and see it for the first time, you whistle to yourself and murmur “oh, my my…”. Because you know that dark water means (or can mean) big fish. And the possibility of big fish is enough to slow down even a scampering stream rabbit like me. You can just tell by the look of the water. Even in normal flows that have not been tinted by recent rains, there is a cloaking murk to the water and more often than not, when you are knee deep in a dark water stream, you can’t see the laces of your wading shoes. (Well, unless you have red laces on your wading shoes, but that’s another essay.) The pools in dark water streams are slow, deep and often criss-crossed by sunken logs. Their bottoms are places of mystery and you just know that they hold trout as long as your arm. Or at the least, since you cannot see the bottom, you can convince yourself that it is so. That’s almost as good. So, I take my time on dark water streams. They hold too many mysteries and surrender too few clues for me to not take my time.

Dark water streams do not flow so much as they glide and slink along past the high clay banks and submerged root balls of fallen trees that frame the deep pools. There is no glitter of sunlight off the dancing water in the chutes and riffles. The sun neither penetrates nor reveals the mystery of dark water. Dark water streams are often brooding and sullen and I sometimes feel as if the stream itself does not want me around. On occasion, they can even seem downright unfriendly. If they are big enough, I may be unsure as to whether I can cross them, even in the places where it seems safe. I may find firm footing on rocks or gravel all the way across or I may sink to my waist in silt and sand. When I am on dark water, there is a feeling that I may meet up with something that is more than I can handle. That in the next pool upstream, my nymph will be stopped in mid-drift by a fish that will wreck my tackle and leave me sitting on the bank weak-kneed and mumbling to myself. The potential of what may lie beneath dark water waiting produces a strange but highly addictive mix of anticipation and apprehension in me.

Dark water is made for the nymph angler. Sure, from time to time, there will be enough insects flitting along the clearer edges of the flow to produce some surface feeding, but the real show is down there in the heart of the mystery on the bottoms of the deep, opaque pools and runs, in the places we cannot see. You throw your nymph out into the current tongue at the head of the pool and it is swept down into the depths. Then, suddenly it stops dead and so does your heart. You bring the rod tip up to set the hook. Sometimes you find yourself fast to a chunk of sodden hardwood or debris. Scratch one nymph.. But other times, the line will begin to move and through the murky flow, you’ll see the amber flash of a good brown. The rod will begin to buck in your hand and line will zip off the reel with the first run of the fish. You’re on your own now. You’ve violated the mystery and it is not pleased with you. Your fish may wrap you around a log and break off and be gone. Or you may luck out and eventually land him. If you do, there is a good chance that he will be one of the best fish of your season. That’s the reward that’s always out there on the edge of the possible for the angler with the courage and willingness to challenge dark water.

In my fly fishing travels, I’ve been fortunate to always have a good variety of wild trout streams to choose from when it comes time to load up the wagon and have at them. I love them all, but there is a special place in my angling pantheon for my dark water favorites. The Willow, Billings and Knapp Creeks in southwest Wisconsin and the lower Mecan in Wisconsin’s Central Sands Region. The Oswayo, Allegheny Portage and Pine (Warren) Creeks back home in Pennsylvania. The Middle Branch of the Escanaba and the Carp River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Iowa’s Bloody Run and French Creek. These are just a few of many. For fish numbers, sparkling water dancing over beds of multi colored gravel, carefree dry fly fishing with a searching pattern and a chance to work on my tan or take in the first warm afternoon of the new Spring, give me any of the hundreds of my regular favorite clear water creeks. But for a chance at big fish, an opportunity to solve the mystery and just a bit of a feeling of living dangerously, give me dark water every time.