A Step Closer

The Hunter Family reunion was, and still is, and annual event in my family and we often spent Labor Day or Memorial Day getting reacquainted with family members and having fun in the outdoors. A common place to hold the reunion was in the Hagerman Valley. Hagerman is nestled in the Snake River Canyon of central Idaho. The River valley offers many outdoor activities to those wishing to enjoy the outdoors and the area is an oasis in the middle of the southern Idaho dessert. There a hundreds of natural springs and waterfalls that litters the steep canyon walls as the Snake River Aquifer comes to an abrupt end and empties into the Snake River. One such place that we camped on a regular basis was Thousand Springs State Park which featured some of the same spectacular water features described above. On the far end of the park, there is the Thousand Springs Fish Hatchery, a place where my brothers, cousins, and I spent hours fishing in the hatcheries run-off pond, chasing wildlife, and generally causing some kind of trouble.

The run-off pond was actually located in front of the hatchery entrance and wound back towards the camping and picnic area of the park before tapering into a culvert that ran under the entrance road and emptied into the river. At the head of the slew right at the hatcheries front gate was an enormous concrete box with a platform and railing set on top. This was where we fished the most often because the runoff from the hatchery spilled out of the top of the concrete box just below the standing platform. The water cascaded down about a four or 5-foot drop before slamming into pool of clear water below. This of course created a slight current and the fish would congregate at the tail waters of the falls. Even back then I realized this was a great fishing hole because the fish were there because of the food that would run out of the hatchery with the runoff water was easy to get. Therefore, a bunch of kids with some globs of Power bait on the end of their lines could easily make a good day of fishing.

What we would do is stand on the platform, make long casts out past the current section of the falls, and then reel back in to position our hooks in the tail waters and wait. The key to this strategy however was being on the platform so casting and positioning your bait was easy. There were some spots just to the sides of the giant box but these spots where harder to cast from and harder to keep your bait in the tail waters. However on occasion, we would be forced to fish from these locations because other people had beaten us to the standing spots on the platform. There was one advantage though that took a fly rod and some old rusty flies to discover.

After the falls come down off the concrete block and create the rapid something happens just to the sides of the current that you might find more common on a river or stream than you would on stillwater. Eddies! Two of them one on each side of the current that curved back towards the bank and created a couple deep pockets perfect for trout to sit and await food falling and drifting from the falls.. We always saw fish in these pockets of slack water but catching one was nearly impossible since the fish either spooked as you approached the edge of the water or saw your shadow and simply did not take any bait you threw at them.  The fish here often seemed larger than most we caught as well so they were very irresistible to a bunch of fished crazed boys. We had tried several ideas throughout the years ranging from regular baits, lures, and scents to outlandish things like threading gummy bears on the hook. Nothing worked but we never gave up.

One particular year when I was 11 my cousin Bob, who was only a couple months younger than I and often my counter-part in mischief, had acquired an old fly rod and box of old musky flies. As I recall the flies and the rod had once belong to his granddad that had passed on to the other side some years before. The rod was old fashioned with an auto reel and silk braided fly line. The flies were an assortment of wings, feathers, and a bit of rust colored stain blended into most of the fly bodies. We didn’t care however and hurried down to the sides of the platform to put the rod and other gear together. Bob picked out a random fly and lashed it onto the leader. He didn’t really cast it out on the water, it was more of a fling but it gave the line and leader enough distance to put the fly in the middle of the deep slack water. Within seconds of the fly laying on the water the first fish was hooked and Bob dragged in the line contained a very nice rainbow trout. We unhooked the fish put in on the stringer and readied for the next cast which resulting in the exact same result of the previous cast. With in about two or three minutes we had a good number of large fish on the stringer when Bob lost the fly we were using. We tried a couple others but the results were not as good. Instead, we packed everything up and headed back to camp proud as any two boys could be with our catch and feeling triumphant that we had finally cracked the secret to catching those fish out of the slack water.  

A few things contributed to our success that day. The first was just dumb luck I think. We really had no idea what we were doing and this was the first time either of us had used a fly rod or flies to catch fish. The second would be that we were able to get to the fish without being detected. The extra long length of the fly rod, being that it was about nine feet long,  made it possible to stand back further from the edge of the water and thus kept us from being detected by the fish. Lastly, we had picked a fly that was similar in some way to what the fish were already eating. This happened without either of us realizing it but the science behind fly-fishing is duplicating the natural food sources of the fish. Therefore, again by luck, we had simply matched the hatch and the results were, even now, astounding.

It was about this same time that my aunt Holly and Uncle Neil had moved into a house just up the street from where I lived. Neil was big into fly-fishing and fly tying, which was something my dad did not do. On a few occasions, Neil would invite me over to learn how to tie flies. The first was just a generic woolly bugger and some leech patterns. My tying lessons would be short lived however, as just before my 12^th birthday we moved from Meridian to a larger house just off the bench in Boise. This move from familiar territory to a new unfamiliar world with new friends, new surrounds, and many challenges for me personally would actually be the catalyst to pushing me further into art of fly-fishing.