The night I could do no wrong

I went fishing with my friend Jim J. . This is generally an intimidating experience, because no one outfishes him. Ever. He is one of the most observant guys I know, has the patience to work a pool until he catches the largest fish, and has a knack for figuring out what they are doing and when they are likely to do it. And he can work flies so the fish come rocketing out of their lairs to strike.
So I was prepared for complete and abject humiliation.

We were on Michigan's Pine River, and I had decided to go for broke. The night before the Brown Drakes were hatching. I saw four risers all night, and got all four on a Robert's yellow drake. The next night had to be the big night, so I took only a small box of dries and a 7 foot four weight cane rod that I had made myself. And of course, there were no rises. I poked around in the one fly box I had, and discovered a small muddler. It was a double error- I usually keep all the dries in one box, and the pattern was a bastard muddle that I had tied from memory. It had a black chenille body, a ragged deer hair head, and a couple of strands of crystal flash. Since it was an hour until the brown drakes, I greased it up and presented it as an early season grasshopper. This produced nothing.

The strange part came when the fly got waterlogged. Toward the end of a cast it finally gave up the ghost and sank. There was an immediate strike and I landed and released a nice brook trout. Next cast, the now-slimed fly sank again, and a nice rainbow was hooked and released. I thought, OK, if that is the way they want it ..., and pulled the fly under water and did some short strips. This time it was one of those browns that make you wish you had brought the net.

Thereafter, it was a glorious and inexplicable insanity. Toss out the fly, strip or twitch it once or twice, and a fish would be on it. Nothing huge, but an honest 10 - 12 inch fish on nearly every cast, and every once in a while a 13 incher. Mostly rainbows, but a few browns. It went on and on. I came to long deep pool and put the fly in a log on the opposite bank. Way too deep to wade to it. I did a roll cast, it popped out and landed in the water where a respectable fish ate it. A few minutes later I sent my lone precious emissary way up into a poplar. It looked like a cat's cradle about 25 feet up. I pulled, the fly popped free, and the entire mess slithered out of the branches and down into the stream where, you guessed it, a fish hit it.

I began to wonder if the fish were crazy, and tried other patterns, including a black stone that I had overlooked in a corner of the fly box (the only other subsurface fly with me). Nothing. Dry flies. Nothing. Back to the weirdo muddler and there would be a strike. Before I knew it, it was dark and we met back at the canoe launch. Jim had been throwing everything in his box with nary a strike. He had even dropped his favorite mouse pattern while tying it on and had to watch it drift out of sight. And although it was hot, still, and humid, neither of us saw a single brown drake.

I have no idea what happened. There were no rises, and the fly did not imitate anything that I could imagine. Caddis swimming to the surface? No caddis hatch. Sculpins migrating? It was black, and being being dead drifted at the surface with an occasional twitch or strip. All fish in the entire watershed concentrated at the canoe launch? Hard to imagine. I came to the conclusion that I will never know.

And flushed with success, that little black muddler was used on many following trips. It never caught a thing again.