Fichigan

Small Stream Trout fishing in Michigan

Archive for the month “August, 2022”

27 Aug 2022

Fishing in a Downpour

Feral on the Pine River near Mikado

Fishing in a downpour and the river’s rising. And the water’s getting milky. From my experience this is the absolute best time to be on a trout stream. The trout start feeding aggressively and move out into the middle of the stream. And they can’t see you. They can hit within a foot of the rod tip. It’s the perfect time to put on a slow flashy spinner or large flashy Rapala. Time to see the big ones come out from under the banks.

But that’s not the way it happened for Jake and Feral so the killer story I had hoped to write about fishing downpours, after seeing the above photo of Feral, went right down the drain.

According to Jake, “The stream was low and clear. I caught a 19 inch brown on the first bend. Feral took a good one soon after for the freezer. We had some light rain on and off but were well into the stretch when it started raining hard. Heard some distant rolling thunder. Nice ambiance. We were soaked through when it cut loose. It rained right down the waders making it a sloshy walk back to the truck. The river came up quickly. We couldn’t believe we didn’t catch another fish after the downpour.

Jake with a very nice Brown.

So there you go. My best fishing advice debunked. That said, if they did the same stretch again, right away, I suspect they would have done much better…

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12 Aug 2022
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The Basement Office

After a failed trip to catch a trout ( it happens) I found myself in my home office appreciating the comfortable setting. I’m surrounded by some of collecting I have done at estate sales so that adds to it. You can see the King Kong etching by Michigan artist Bruce McCombs, and the painting, by Feral, of me on the Sturgeon River drinking a beer in the rain. The brown trout mount is a 25 incher caught on the Sturgeon. The guitar is a 70’s Ventura which is a solid maple copy of a D-size Martin. A great guitar.. really sweet tone that just keeps getting better. I have been learning a new song, Times have Changed by Bob Dylan, another masterpiece of metaphors and abstract thinking. It’s actually an old song but new to me. The song won an academy award for best song for the movie Wonder Boys.

The second photo shows the messy side of the office. The easel has some artwork I started for the Calder Arts Festival last June but didn’t finish in time. It’s inked line art of a raft I was on in the WLAV raft race back in the early 70’s. Basically done from a photo. I was going to watercolor it but then froze… not really sure if it would be as nice as I imagined. On the wall behind the table is an acrylic painting I did for a trout camp challenge a few years back based on a white chair spotted on a bluff overlooking the Pine River. Long story but if you go back in the archive of fichigan you’ll find the story. The artwork of a sparely dressed woman painting a nude girl in a white chair was actually pretty tame compared to my fishing buddy’s entries, well, Natch in particular. He really shook up trout camp. The photo on the wall is the notorious Phillips Gang, another post in fichigan. I’m about twenty in the photo.

With my patent drafting work on a slow burner I did some writing last week, a short story for the annual “Write Michigan” contest which I have entered a few years running with no success. But heh, I’m trying. This time I’m entering a horror story born of a nightmare. Woke up thinking there were elements of the dream that could make a very original story. I’m hopeful. We’ll see.

I need to get out for more trout. Will keep you posted.

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