There are worse places for a father to be on Father's Day than in a float tube on a trout lake in Utah's northeastern high plains. Like almost anywhere.
This pilgrimage to a lake with 10-pound brook trout was my Dad's Day gift to me. There was a slight chop on the water and yellow-headed blackbirds creaked like rusty gate hinges. A redhead duck flittered past and some water bird puttered in the shallows. I tried to concentrate on the end of my fly line, but it was tough to focus on a bit of orange when the distant snow caps of the High Unitas lay in the background and wind-sculpted sandstone ridges rimmed the shore, like the facade of a beautiful old building. High desert wildflowers decorated the sere landscape like beads on buckskin.
I caught my first brook trout on Thirty Three Creek, a northwest Wisconsin bog stream where you can fish for years without creeling a foot-long trout. Now I was where I could catch the brook trout of fantasy, hook-jawed and dotted with primary colors, like an artist's palette. A friend describes a brook trout as a handful of sunsets. No matter how sporting those little Wisconsin brookies are, they aren't trophies. But this dark desert water hold secrets that only a good angler can unravel.
Leland Stevenson, a Utah contractor, dug the lakes years ago on his 1,200-acre ranch to provide fishing pleasure for himself and clients. Now, it is the L.C. Ranch, near Altamont (you stop at the Conoco station and ask directions), catch and release, with barbless hooks. I finned slowly through the dark water. Sunlight slanting into it created columns of light in which sparkled millions of microorganisms. I was fishing in the finsteps of Tom Selleck and Don Johnson, anglers who happen to be well-known actors.
There was a heaviness and the rod dipped and I raised the tip sharply. No need for subtlety. The tippet was honest eight-pound monofilament. Hard, angry jerks vibrated up my arm and the reel squawked as the fish took line. The only real trick to landing a fish in this open water is not to let it have slack so the barbless point can fall loose. I saw the bright wash of color along the fish's side as it rolled 15 yards away and knew it was a rainbow, not a brookie.
Nothing against rainbows--but I'd caught a dozen the day before, all two pounds of better. The largest was 23 inches. There is a holding lake above each fishing lake. The nursery lakes are stocked with trout fry which add an inch a month, feeding in the food-rich water drained off the High Unitas. In a year, the trout top a foot in length and Nick Stevenson and his partner Howard Brinkerhoff pull the plug and let gravity drain the fish into their permanent home.
"There are fish in some of the lakes that scare the guides," Brinkerhoff says. "They break off even the best anglers. We have no idea how big they are."
The powerful fish are raised from fry in the wild by a unique system. L.C. Stevenson was killed in a helicopter accident in 1980, and his widow and son Nick took over the ranch. It became a commercial fishing operation in 1988, offering world-class fish (as of 1990, the ranch records were 27 inches each for rainbow and brown trout, 24 for brook).
I used a three-foot length of eight-pound test leader ahead of a length of braided sinking leader and a sink-tip fly line. The sun beat hot on my face and I was conscious of yesterday's sunburn, acquired because I forgot to slather on No. 18 sunscreen, not realizing there isn't much atmospheric protection at 6,300 feet. My nose looked like something willed to me by W.C. Fields. My ears were red-rimmed shells and because I was wearing sunglasses, I looked like a panda. A big old woolly bear, with a dumb grin because it was Father's Day and I was fishing in a place too sweet to be true.
I stripped the woolly bugger with baby pulls, two or three inches each, laying the coils of line in my lap apron. It fly pulsed through the water, imitating the swimming motion of a damsel fly nymph. I'd just about given up on dry flies. The trout had been feeding on a hatch each evening of a tiny sulphur-colored insect, so small that my No. 16, smallest in my fly box, looked like a road kill and was ignored.
Every writer since brook trout ceased to be thought of as breakfast and became art objects says they really aren't trout; they're char. On the other hand, they aren't exclusively "brook" trout either, because they routinely live in lakes. John Alden Knight, he of the Solunar Tables, once damned brook trout with faint praise: "While there is much to be said in favor of the brook trout as a game fish, there are several things against him," Knight pouted. He cited the fish's penchant for nestling near the bottom, rather than dining at the surface, a copybook blot to a dry-fly purist. But the worst drawback in Knight's view was that the brook trout is gullible.
"Anybody who knows the barest rudiments of trout fishing can catch brook trout," Knight sneered. And I had been floating in a brook trout lake for a couple of hours with no brook trout takes. I had caught two rainbows: "....quite stupid and easy to catch," said Knight, who believed there were two types of fish: brown trout and trash fish. So, I put Mr. Knight out of my mind. I hadn't read the Solunar Tables that morning and wouldn't have understood it (them) if I had.
I finned away from shore, intending to cross to the far side. There were the Unitas, wearing their white beanies. I paused to admire them. The take was hard, no nonsense. There was no finesse, just a shot to the chops of that woolly bugger, and I instinctively lifted the rod hard and felt a heavy, powerful fish on the other end.
There were no aerial displays, pride of rainbow trout. Just a grudging, head-shaking, grumpy sulk. I got the fish on the reel, frantically cranking until the loose fly line was gathered. Then it was a matter of time. The fish, persistently optimistic, fought for about 10 minutes, but inevitably I slid him in and lifted him onto the apron of the float tube and touched his nose to the zero mark. His tail lay wetly at the 21-inch line. Probably three pounds of sunsets.
Whatever he weighed, he was far larger than the biggest brook trout I ever took out of little Thirty Three Creek. The Woolly Bugger fell out of his pugnacious old jaw. I slid him off the apron into the water and cradled him until he got his bearings. He wriggled free and disappeared down the sunlit corridors to the dark halls where the brook trout of dreams live.
I took a deep breath, knowing this air was cleaner than anything I'm used to breathing, held it for a long time, then exhaled explosively. Far above, a silver speck left a contrail across the sky, the signature of civilization. I guessed it was time to go home to the kids. I'd had my Father's Day.
Copyright (c) 1996 Joel Vance. All rights reserved.
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