Home Waters by Jim Fergus "...I still don't know exactly what -- some combination of water level, temperature and insect hatches triggers the trout to start feeding on the surface." Home waters are small, comfortable and, well, home-like. It usually happens around the Fourth of July, the day my ranch neighbors traditionally turn off their irrigation ditches. In an average year, run-off is more or less over by then. The snow is mostly gone from the high country, and the small creeks and rivers that constitute my home waters in northern Colorado are running clear -- a rich amber color, the color, say, of ginger ale, or the tawny color of a brown trout, come to think of it. With the added irrigation water put back into them, the rivers and creeks rise slightly at this time. Then something -- after all the years of fishing them, I still don't know exactly what -- some combination of water level, temperature and insect hatches triggers the trout to start feeding on the surface. And I mean all the trout, so that at every bend in the river, every pool, every riffle, alongside every undercut grassy bank, the angler sees the dimples and rings of rising trout -- big trout, little trout, medium sized trout -- mostly browns, but some brookies in certain stretches. This surface-feeding frenzy lasts for maybe a week at most, more likely just a few days, so that the angler has only a small window of opportunity to catch it just right. I wait all year for this brief, magical time, and as it approaches I drive several times a day down to the bridge that crosses my favorite creek, eagerly studying the water for signs that optimum conditions have arrived, that prime time is about to begin. The fish aren't the least bit selective this time of year. Though I have my favorite flies it is not necessary to match the hatch, and the trout rise eagerly to caddis flies, Royal Coachmen, Adamses, Humpies -- it doesn't really seem to matter. Even the big fish, the three- and four-pound browns that you can scarcely believe even live in these little creeks, are feeding indiscriminately on the surface. The only thing that differentiates their rise forms from the smaller fish is a certain delicacy and economy of motion as they sip insects from the surface with minimal expenditure of energy, making only the slightest disturbance. While they will take nearly any fly, it must be perfectly presented or the big browns will fade shyly back to the undercut bank where, I suspect, they spend most of their lives. The creek is old and crooked, with deep pools formed by the many winding switchbacks, which form a series of lazy S's, punctuated occasionally by long straight slicks and riffles that run into the pools. Because browns are territorial, the bigger fish claim the best and safest feeding positions, usually tight against the grassy bank, or beneath an overhanging willow branch, where the insects drift directly overhead, and the trout barely need to move to sip them. Today I am casting a yellow Humpy, which, though not necessarily more effective than others, is a favorite fly of mine in this particular creek. To have a chance to hook one of the big browns your cast must be right on the money, for they will ignore an insect drifting six inches outside of their lane. Not only must it be a perfect cast but, of course, it must be a perfect dragless drift, your fly bobbing along at exactly the same pace as the naturals on the water. It is one of those perfect summer days, mild and windless, the creek burbling along without a care in the world, and it is prime time for sure. All up and down the creek telltale rings of rising trout are showing. While rigging up my rod it occurs to me that this will be my twenty-fifth summer fishing this creek, my home water. Nothing about it, oddly, has really changed much since I first came up to this valley a quarter-century ago, driving an old Volkswagen van in which I camped out for a week up on a bluff above the river. A few years after that I moved up to this country and have been fishing it ever since. You'd think I might get tired of it, fishing the same little creeks and rivers year after year, and it's true that perhaps I fish my home waters less frequently than I once did. But this is partly just a function of the increasing busyness of one's life at a certain age, the fact that I'm on the road so much, and that I must keep going further and further afield. But it's just as true that sometimes the best journeys are to right back where you started. What is particularly fine about home waters is the comforting sense of familiarity they offer; we know them as well as we know our own spouses -- better in some cases. We know every bend in the creek, every pool, and each holds years of memories. In the same way, every year recalls a previous one, and together they form a continuum of angling recollections that are like the flowing river itself. Indeed, the recollections seem to inhabit it, so that when I fish my little creek during prime time, it is in a genuine sense like reliving my own past. Here then, beneath an overhanging willow branch in a long slow slick ahead, is where I caught my big brown in 1983. I was fishing with Steve and Leigh, and I caught the fish, a four-plus pounder, on a Royal Wulff that Steve had tied for me. Here is the crooked lodgepole pine tree under which Jon and Sarah and I ate our lunch one summer day in 1981. Sarah has long since moved away, but Jon and I still stop here to eat our sandwiches. We remember her when we do. Here in a willow thicket between pools is where my old, long-dead fishing dog, Caddy -- then just a puppy -- and I jumped a Bull Moose in the summer of 1980. And here, just around the next bend, is the pool we named "dumb Brookie pool," because we never fail to catch a bunch of brook trout there, one right after the next. Every year and every stretch of water offers up like a gift such an event from the past. So I walk carefully along the bank, casting to the rises in a timeless, familiar rhythm, casting to the memories of fish caught, in anticipation of those about to be caught, and to the memories of old dogs, old friends. Copyright © 1999 Jim Fergus. All rights reserved.