Email this article

Keeping secrets . . .

By Steven J. Meyers

I'm not sure I believe it, and I saw it with my own eyes.

A beaver pond, one in a series of three, some a hundred feet away from the main stem of the creek that was running full-tilt-boogie with runoff. I'd fished the creek a hundred times, but had never tried to fish it during snowmelt. I'm not sure what possessed me to go there that spring, but whatever it was, I'm glad I did. The stream was roaring, so I took a peek at the beaver ponds. Finning quietly in the shade of the tangle of willow branches that constituted the dam of the middle pond were five brook trout. The nearby creek had given up hundreds of brookies over the years, trout that weighed ounces not pounds and usually measured between 4 and 8 inches. But the trout that rested near the dam were not at all like those I'd caught in the drainage before. I'd read about such brookies - usually in books or magazine articles written by fishermen who'd gone to Labrador. Although I had not yet held one, I was sure they were nearly a foot-and-a-half long. The sight of them, suspended in that absolutely clear water took my breath away.

I had no idea how I was going to cast to them without sending them scurrying for cover. There was nothing to hide my line, nothing to disguise the disturbance it would make landing on the water, nothing to make my nymph look like anything other than the fraud it was. But I cast anyway and watched the inevitable unfold. My fly line landed 14 feet from where they were resting. My weighted nymph connected to that line with a long, fine leader splashed into the water over their heads. They scattered, disappearing into dark hiding places, leaving the smooth bottom of the pond looking utterly lifeless as the nymph slowly settled into the soft sediment.

I walked away temporarily defeated, but hugely inspired. I had no idea brookies like that existed here. Just knowing such trout were so close to home was reward enough, but I wanted to figure out how to catch one.

I've had a lot of angling mentors. Some have been wonderfully generous older fishermen who graciously took me under their wing. Others have been authors who gave me the same sort of gift from a distance. One such writer was Ernest Schwiebert, the precocious angler who'd written Matching the Hatch as a college student and introduced into the fly fisher's vocabulary a phrase that would last forever.

By the time I spotted those huge brook trout, he'd also written a two-volume masterwork titled, quite simply, Trout. In it, he briefly mentioned something called, the poacher's retrieve. The poacher's retrieve was simplicity itself. You simply tossed your sinking fly into the water and let it sit. You let it sit however long it took for spooky trout who'd scattered to forget about your presence and resume feeding. Once they had returned from their hiding places and begun to feed, you slowly retrieved the nymph imitating the behavior of a natural insect. That just might work, I thought.

A few days later, I returned to the beaver pond, cast my nymph over those timid trout, saw them scatter, watched the fly settle to the bottom and waited. After a few minutes, the fish came back and resumed feeding. Slowly, I retrieved the fly, and one of the mammoth brook trout ate it! I struck, and a few minutes later had a truly spectacular fish in my hands, dark green speckled in white and neon blue with hot pink rings, his black eyes glowing. That trout weighed pounds, not ounces, and at the time it was by far the largest brook trout I'd ever seen let alone actually tricked into eating my fly. I released him back into the pond to get on with his life.

I was giddy with my accomplishment. I was so proud I just had to share my discovery. Over a beer that evening, I told a fishing buddy about my find, about the technique that had fooled that very large, very old, very spooky trout - and swore him to secrecy.

A season or two later, when the snow was melting off the mountains and the rivers and streams again were huge, I returned to the pond. A stranger was there. He had a stringer with him, and on that stringer was a handful of huge brookies, their eyes and spots gray in death. I walked over and said hello, trying to hide my sadness. I asked him how he'd discovered the place, and how he'd managed to fool those spooky old brook trout. He said he'd been told about it by a friend who'd also mentioned something called the poacher's retrieve. His friend was my friend, who'd sworn him to secrecy.

In the years that followed, I rarely visited the pond. When I did visit, there were fewer and fewer large trout in it, until the time came when there were no large trout at all. The pond was filled with the same ounces-heavy fish that the nearby stream held throughout the summer. I haven't returned in decades.

We have some largely unknown but spectacular salmon fly hatches on hidden streams nearby. There are a few creeks that still hold big, beautiful natives. Will you understand if an angler keeps these treasures to himself? And if a buddy one day shares such secrets with you, will you now know why he asks you to keep them to yourself?

Steven J. Meyers is the author of On Seeing Nature, Lime Creek Odyssey, Streamside Reflections, The Nature of Flyfishing, Notes from the San Juans and San Juan River Chronicle.