Maine Outdoor Journal

Ever have the misfortune to fish beside someone who is catching fish as fast as he can reel them in, while you’re catching nothing, or almost nothing? We’ve all experienced that. You might be separated by a few yards, or you might even be fishing out of the same boat, using the same fly and fishing it the same way, and you’re getting skunked while your friend (or at least you thought he was your friend, until then) keeps hauling ‘em in.

“Oh, geez, I got another one,” he exclaims, with a maddening chuckle. “Heh heh heh.”

The Bro has done this to me and it drove me nuts. There we were, in the same boat, fishing a drake hatch on Tim Pond. We were using the same fly. I thought I was fishing the fly the same way he was. He caught fish. I did not.

One day I was the guy catching fish, while two guys in a nearby canoe were simply practicing their casting. I could tell that they were getting more and more steamed with every brookie I brought to the net, until finally I heard one of them mutter darkly, “Let’s ram his canoe and sink the S.O.B.” In that case, I knew the solution to the mystery: the trout were taking nymphs just below the surface, and it was a size 16 pheasant tail or nothing. I invited them to paddle over and I gave them each a pheasant tail nymph, and they started catching trout right away.

Sometimes the mystery is deeper and defies a solution. The other day the Bro and I in our canoes were bracketing a friend’s boat; there were just a few yards separating the three boats. The friend kept hauling trout to the net; we were lucky to catch one to his five or six. Or seven. I asked him what he was using. He told me. He even showed me the hand-tied Muddler. Cast, sink, retrieve. Pretty simple. Worked for him. Not for us.

He finally pulled anchor and headed for shore. I said, “You must have caught twenty trout today!”

“Twenty-three,” he replied.

So, what happened? What malicious imp of the perverse was watching over the pond that day, favoring one of three anglers? Was our pal’s technique that much better? His Muddler was not much different from the flies we were using, and it certainly didn’t resemble anything living in that pond. But the trout flocked to it. Did he have better karma, a contract with the Devil, or what?

Ah, the mysteries of angling! They are what keeps us going back to the pool, to the pond, the river and the sea. We’d hate it if we ever figured them out.