Trout Season

It's Opening Weekend

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It’s opening weekend for New York’s trout season (you could officially wet the line yesterday). For angling obsessives this day come with a sense of renewal. This is also a time of misplaced faith, since fishing in spring in high, cold, off-color water, is not always conducive to catching trout. But that’s just fine. With long johns under the waders and a wee dram in the flask, we’re ready to step into our favorite frigid local stream and re-start our angling affair. 

This ritual is more poignant this year. After a true winter of discontent, casting a fly feels downright cathartic and catching a trout an unimaginable luxury. Fly anglers are susceptible to a certain amount of romanticization of their sport, even if they’d had their heartbroken enough times to know better. Fly fishing requires a worldview that is in no way practical. In that sense it’s like driving an old car with a manual transmission, temperamental engine and frequent trips to a wary mechanic. 

The sport goes hand in hand with frustration. A trout’s brain, anglers are often reminded, is smaller than a pea. Yes, these exquisite animals can cause tears of frustration to stream from our faces. We are also prone to secrecy on the level of a John le Carré character. There are stories of anglers being escorted blindfolded to a particularly good stretch of stealth water, so they could not retrace their steps. One friend made me promise not to mention what region of Canada his private salmon club was located. Now that seemed a bit extreme to me, until I told somebody they couldn’t disclose the nearby towns from my favorite stream, in what I felt like a safe boundary of, say, twenty miles. I finally rounded up to fifty and we left it that. 

Anglers can be left doubting their tactics, as line tangles around them. But when it works, nothing feels simpler. The dream is when “a jerk on one line feels a jerk on the other,” in the late Robert Hughes’s immortal phrase. Suddenly, you are connected to a wild living thing and, in that brief dramatic moment, the river forms the contour of your world. And it’s a complete world. You bring a fish to hand and marvel at it—the pattern of every trout is different, and each one beautiful in its own way. The river keeps moving and you feel lucky to be back on the water again.  

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