Finding trout in unexpected places

Trout can be found in some unusual places. Texas. Israel. Puerto Rico. And apparently a small drainage ditch in Switzerland. 

There's a small animal park and playground near my home, and today I stopped by with my young daughter, figuring I'd let her get some energy out before we braved the Swiss Saturday shopping crowds. There's also a duck pond full of geese, carp, and you guessed it, ducks, and while it's entirely fenced in and obviously closed to fishing, I can't help but fantasize about those dark, two foot long shadows cruising through the weeds. Today I found something that only increased my desire to fish there, namely a dozen or so brown trout in a drainage ditch the size of a large car. The biggest was 8 inches or so, and the smaller ones were 3 or 4 inches long. How they got there, how long they've been there, how they survive and apparently reproduce, are there any sizeable ones lurking out of sight underneath the undercut sides...so many intriguing questions, so few answers. They looked healthy and vibrant, but I can't help feeling bad for them in a way. They belong in a crystal clear stream, not an oversized puddle in a playground parking lot.

The ditch.

The trout.

The trout.

The spotter.

I'll be back regularly to check on them. It certainly makes a playground full of yelling kids a bit more bearable. What's the strangest place you've come across trout?

The International Rodsmith?

I've always been fascinated with bamboo rods, but scared away by the steep price tag. A decade or so ago, John Geirach's "Fishing Bamboo" inspired an impulse purchase of a (relatively) cheap little 2 weight rod on ebay, sight unseen, but never got around to really trying it out until last year. It cast like a broomstick with a 2 weight line, eventually I'll get around to trying a 3 weight and maybe I'll see an improvement. Later that same season, I met a guy fishing on our beat who was invited by one of our members. He had three bamboo rods with him, and after speaking with him for a bit, he gave me a chance to cast all three. I think they were all 5 weights, and I loved the action, one in particular. It took a little getting used to, but when I was done I had a huge grin on my face and he had a leader full of wind knots. He handed me his card and told me he'd be happy to show me how to be build a rod from scratch. After over a year or so of back and forth and conflicting schedules. we made an appointment for a couple of days at his workshop in a small town near the entrance of the Gotthard Tunnel, picturesquely and fittingly situated a short cast away from the milky blue Reuss river.

The rod shop itself met my expectations. Culms of bamboo lay everywhere, and dozens of bamboo rods in various states of completion were leaning in every corner. The smell of heated bamboo permeated the room, a heady, warm, comforting smell that couldn't possibly rub anyone the wrong way. A window in front of one of the workbenches offered a direct view of the chalky freestone river. Walls of cork rings, drawers full of guides, reel seats, a veritable rainbow of hundreds of spools of wrapping thread, a lathe, drill press, saws, a tubular bamboo oven, and countless other things I overlooked or simply didn't recognize. This was a man obsessed. I want to be this man.


First things first. We spoke about bamboo for an hour or two, he showed me the culms and explained the desirable and less desirable aspects of each individual one, introducing me to concepts like power fibers and node spacing. He showed me some of his countless finished rods, many of which I held and inexpertly waggled while listening to him tell a story behind each and every one. Over the next few days I would see the beautiful matching pair of swelled butt rods he made for his wife and himself. His whippy one piece seven foot five weight and his hefty salmon rod. His quadrate and octagonal rods, and his bamboo ferrules. It was a substantial amount of information for an absolute beginner to digest. He wanted to know if I wanted to do everything from scratch and fully by hand, or did I want to use "shortcuts" like Tom Morgan's handmill, and send some of the straightened strips through a machine to do some of the rough planing. I'm pretty impatient, and while I have a very understanding wife when it comes to fly fishing, I also have a young daughter I hate being away from, another kid on the way, and a full time job from which I have to take days off of in order to drive two hours each way to come do this in the first place, so the choice was easy. Get this rod as finished as possible in the next few days, or end up spending another year juggling schedules to arrange a few extra days of planing. I want a fishable, functional rod, I don't need a work of art. There's plenty of time to build one of those when the pace of life slows a bit.

He handed me a culm, and I got to splitting. I made my strips, and then I straightened them as best as I could while gently warming them over a heat gun, bending them, and repeating the process. I also used to the heat gun to flatten the nodes in a vise. After a few hours of this, the straightened and flat strips were fed into a power beveler which gave them a roughly triangular shape, but still no taper. We wrapped the pieces in twine and put them in the oven while we had lunch. The afternoon was consumed with planing. Twelve strips, six for each rod section, had to planed down to an exact taper. Tom Morgan's beautiful hand mill beckoned, and once the proper measurements were set, I got to work.

Tom Morgan's hand mill, top down view.

After I finished the butt section, my hands had blisters, and we epoxied the strips together, wrapped them again, and put them in the oven one more time.

The 6 pieces of the butt section, ready for the epoxy.

When it came it out, it was a lumpy, gluey mess. I removed the twine, scraped the epoxy away, and realized for the first time that I was making something that was pretty nice. The sanded, cleaned butt section, straight and six sided, was more precise than anything I had made before.

The next day, the process was repeated for the delicate rod tip. I was particularly careful while planing when it came to these ridiculously thin strips of bamboo.

The 6 pieces of the tip.

The next day, we finished up the tip section, added and shaped the cork handle, turned the reel seat on a lathe, mounted the ferrules, and prepared the guides for wrapping. It was coming together and I could hardly wait to fish with it.

The partially completed rod with the Reuss river in the background

I started wrapping and made some hideous wraps, finally getting the hang of it after an hour or so, at which time we called it a day. The rodmaker kindly finished up the rod for me and I picked up it a few weeks later when the varnish was dry. He offered me the use of his shop whenever I wanted to make another one, and I know I'll do it again sooner rather than later. I can split the culm and straighten some bamboo strips in my workshop at home, and bring them down to his workshop to fire them up in the oven, and then finish up the blank at home, where I'm planning on making a homemade wrapping jig and cork lathe from a drill. The whole experience was great, and for someone who has to spend the majority of his time in front of a screen, working with my hands and really creating something precise is cathartic, so much so that I'm planning on wrapping some rods over the winter, along with fly tying and making furled leaders. Anything to stay busy in the off season!

The stripping guide, with honey wraps.

The completed rod along with a nice handcrafted lanyard that I won recently.
It matches pretty well, and I find myself reaching for it along with the bamboo
when I head out the door to fish my home river.

I've had the rod for about a month now, and am learning how to cast it. It'll never win any beauty contests. It's not particularly straight, the finishing is utilitarian, there's no second rod tip, the rod tube is a scratched, grey PVC tube, and the rod sock, as soon as I either get around to sewing it or successfully pester my wife to do so, will be a green and white scrap of Ikea fabric. But it's fishable, eminently fishable.

Fly fishing, St. Michel-im-Lungau style.

Our annual fly fishing trip was rapidly approaching, and the absolutely horrific weather outlook wasn't improving. Friday, the first day of our three day fishing trip, looked grim. The forecast was for a torrential downpour, and in an alpine stream, that means no possibility of fishing. Nonethless, we hopped into Mark's champagne colored convertible land boat and began the 6 hour drive deep into the heart of Austria, ready to fish and full of optimism.

Six or seven hours later, after some horrific bouts of traffic, we arrived at our unbelievably cheap and well outfitted B&B, ran an extremely wet 10k along the absolutely unfishable Mur river, went out for some good food and beer, and hurried back to read our kindles. (Seriously.)

The next morning we met our contact, the man with the priceless fishing permits. Surprised that we even showed up, he took pity on us and gave us a hefty discount on the pricey day cards (50 euros a day, by far the most expensive part of the trip), spent 45 minutes explaining every miniscule section of river in great detail, and then showed us the old, defunct hotel he lived in all alone. It was an impressive place, full of history and dark wood.

We shook hands, took our permits, and made our way up to the Rotgüldensee, an alpine lake that was part of the section we were permitted to fish, and one that would present our only possibility to catch anything.



We hiked for about an hour, climbing 400 meters into the mountains, and saw a beautiful lake, albeit one that had a very high water level and extremely steep sides. It wouldn't be easy to fish.



We walked around for a bit and found a a small river flowing into the lake. Char were visibly feeding a mere yard away, and while there was maybe a doormat sized space for each of us on either side of the outlet and any sort of conventional cast would be impossible, this was clearly the only place we could fish in the current conditions.



Fortunately there were fish rising within rollcast distance. A few hours later, we'd caught 20+ fish, mostly small, but very feisty. At our feet were char feeding subsurface, 10 feet further out were trout, and at the limit of our messy rollcasts were grayling, eagerly pouncing on surface insects. I'd never caught one before, and on this day I ended up catching three, the biggest was 14 inches with linebacker shoulders.



We were getting cold (there was visible snow, not a first for our august fishing trips), called it a day, and headed back down the mountain to enjoy some more good, cheap food, and hope that the river calmed a down a bit by the next morning. At least the skunk was off, and we both agreed that even if we didn't catch a fish at all the next day, the trip would nonetheless be a success.

Back at the lodge, we met a pair of older French guys, who'd been coming to fish the Mur for decades. Naturally they told us of the good old 60+ fish per day days, and how good the weather was the previous week, but they also gave us some location tips, and even a few hand tied flies.



The river had certainly gone down, and cleared up quite a bit, but it was still high, and fast. The wading was slow and dangerous, so we moved our way upstream to where the water thinned out a bit, and managed to get some more trout on dries.



I spent most of the day at a deep pool, trying my luck for something bigger with a weighted streamer. The force of the waterfall was ridiculous, and standing in the wrong location made casting an excercise in futility. I didn't catch the big one I was hoping for, but I did catch my first, and only, traditional rainbow of the trip, as well as a smaller trout with an oddly deformed dorsal fin.



We slowly made our back to the lodge, stopping at plenty of places to fish along the way. It was an great trip, and we both agreed that had the weather cooperated, it would have been a phenomenal trip. We'll be there next year, this time with a float tube, assuming they're allowed.



 

Fish Report: Beschlinger Weiher, Austria 12/07/2009

One of the many benefits of joining a fishing club in Switzerland is that they’ll generally organize trips to places you wouldn’t otherwise know about. The Beschlinger Weiher in Austria is one of those places. It’s a gorgeous little steel blue pond in Austria just over the Swiss border, outside of Nenzing.



It belongs to an Austrian fishing club, and the rules are pretty strict. Flies only, no streamers, and no large hooks. (I forgot the exact size.) About 5 of us met at a Gas station outside of town where we purchased our day licenses and some beer and lunch, and we made our way to the lake. Trout were pretty visible, but there were few rises. Nonetheless, we all started out with dry flies, and after an hour or so of nothing I switched to a nymph and hooked a 32cm trout. It was the first time I’d tried out my new Sage Fli 6 weight, and this was a fitting debut fish.



I hooked but lost another one shortly thereafter, had some lunch, and called it a day after no one caught any fish for a few hours. I found out later that there was evening rise, and everyone else caught multiple fish, but as a new father, my fishing days have been limited to mornings lately. As always, I’m just happy to be out fishing, even if it is for a just a few hours.