the great twitch

I was fishing with my friend Matt, who is the greatest hunter I know. So great that he was able to convince other people to pay him to go to Africa for about 5 years and hunt. And he hunts cape buffalo with a single shot .375 magnum. We were fly fishing on the north branch of the Ausable on a very hot day, and decided to fish hoppers. But we did not have any, so that sucked. I tied some by clamping my vise to the only flat surface available- the arm of one of those aluminum lawn chairs with the vinyl weave that gives you a striped butt. These were hideous miscreant hoppers. Misshapen deer hair heads, lousy uneven dubbed bodies, and wings that looked like I was really trying to imitate a WWI Sopwith Camel. But it was what we had. And they worked like a charm on creek chubs. I would do a delicate presentation, and chub would eat the fly. This went on for hours. We were talking about a creek chub fry. I was younger and prone to anger, and finally plopped the fly down as hard as I could on a bunch of risers. One struck, but it turned out to be a keeper brook trout. I realized I was on to something, and tried it again. Another trout. Not being satisfied, I tried twitching the fly across the surface. This worked even better. I finally resorted to fishing it like a popping bug. This got several more keeper fish. Went back to the delicate presentation, and chubs were on it like pirhanas in B movie. Back to the popping, and more trout.

I finally came to a one of the neatest pools I know- a short run fans out into what is almost a pond, and that late in the summer there were water lilies. In a trout stream no less. There was only one thing to do. I tossed the bedraggled hellion bug as far back in the pads as I could, and twitched and crawled it out. It was like bass fishing. A 12 inch brookie (big in these parts) leaped out of the water, was hooked, and promptly sheared the tippet. And of course it was my last hopper. But it was a good lesson.

The upshot of all this is that dead drifts are great, and often work, but I finally got pissed off enough that day to start fishing the hopper so it acted like a real hopper, and not some stupid-ass moribund ditched Sopwith Camel thing. That was when I started catching trout. Any fool would have realized it- next time you go summer trouting waste an hour of your time catching hoppers and throwing them into the stream. They hate this and usually kick and thrash pretty hard. That day left an impression on me, and after that I always tried twitching the fly whenever I fished terrestrials. It works like a charm. Not always, but I have lost count of the number of times where I have fished a pool for many long minutes with dead drifts, and then had someone rocket up from the deep after the first cast that included moving the fly. And lately I have extended the concept to fishing early season hatches. It doesn't work as consistently, but it can move the odd fish that has refused everything else.

Bonus points to readers who can identify the literary allusion in the title.