Rainbow Elephants and Circus Peanuts

 

    For the past month and a half, my home state of Pennsylvania has been in the struggling gripes of a drought. Philadelphia recorded 40 days without precipitation of any kind and our rivers in the Central Appalachians have been running consistently low, low enough that fishing during the day didn't feel right. Trout like to lie in fast deep-water, waiting for the current to bring them and endless supply of food like an all-you-can-eat buffet of mayflies and baitfish. However, lack of water makes them feel exposed to osprey-shaped perils from the heavens, and so fish will tend to hunker down in the bottom of the deepest holes or the thickest piece of available cover. 

    I've been fishing, but only for night-stalkers, the brown trout that leave their hiding spots under the cover of darkness to slink around the shallows and chase baitfish. I've been spending my nights wading through ink, listening to the rustling of reanimated oak-leaf corpses shaking on the branches like windchimes, beneath those dancing stars. 

    Yet on the second week of November, a whistling gale finally came through and brought with it a decent serving of liquid. This may have been a dull omen, as the 29 men on the Edmund Fitzgerald found out nearly 50 years ago to the day. Yet as a pollywog and land-dweller I brothe a huge, cold, foggy sigh of relief as the rain fell through the valley and soaked life into all that was green and gray. High winds canceled my morning Forestry classes, so I made a plan to do some streamer fishing in one of my favorite local spring-fed streams. 

    I threw a circus peanut for pretty much the whole time, tossing an olive articulated streamer at every undercut bank, log jam, and into seemingly in every willow along the riverbank. From the first underlying piece of wood I threw my fly at came a rainbow that swiped at the peanut broadside, turning its pink streaks out, flaunting its colors. Next cast, it ate properly. 

    As I walked upstream, one changed topographical feature that leaped out at me was the redds. Fall is spawning time for brown trout, and everywhere I looked there were fish laid out on circular, lighter colored patches in the gravel. This time of year, make sure to watch where you step and make an effort to not fish for trout on redds. Unless you're in the Great Lakes tributaries, where for some odd reason fishing for spawning fish is not only allowed but considered the season to do it. 

    A blindly thrown cross-current cast and suddenly something slams my circus peanut on a tight-line swing. A huge green-backed, pink-bellied fish surfaces, thrashing its head back and forth, trying to shake my fly. I get downstream of the fish, but it on the reel, and it runs upstream in a burst of drag. There I hold it as best as I can with a 6wt, each time I bring the net closer the rainbow freaks out and darts forward in another burst of speed, until it finally got tired enough fighting both me and the river and I manage to float the net around it. 

    This fish marks my second big rainbow I've gotten on a streamer this fall, while their European brown counterparts are busy with their ancient spawning dances. I'll admit, the denizens of this stream are a little strange, with mixes of wild fish, stocked fish, and mutants that get washed down from the trout club several miles upstream. I don't know how much it counts, or how wild/stocked that fish truly was. Fish are strange, fish politics are strange, and that's something that'll never truly change.