The Dragonfly Maternity Ward: Part I

Mixed blessings on a day the fish just weren't biting.

“If the fish had been biting I’d almost certainly have missed this completely…

A female, River Jewelwing Calopteryx aequabilis studies her rescuer as she warms back up and dries out following her exhausted collapse into the water at the end of her egg-laying session. She flew off just minutes later.

But they weren’t

…and I didn’t.

It’s a tricky river, the Deschutes; big and powerful, and more than willing on any given day to hand you your ass as meager reward for wading, hour after hour over slippery rocks and submerged boulders, against the current, tossing feather and fur-adorned flies and nymphs into riffles and seams, and ahead of boulders that provide shelter from the endless push and pull of flowing water for silvery, finned creatures who make their livings within it.

A Deschutes Redside and the Elk Hair Caddis fly that convinced it to dance.

Some trout and steelhead rivers come with overly generous rules of human engagement, allowing fisher persons to float along in a drift boat or raft, or pontoon and anchor up; farther out and in deeper water than you could ever possibly wade to, and then simply cast lures or flies to those fish-holding sweet spots, again and again until you’ve managed to fool or harass most of the fish within reasonable casting distance.

Then you raise your anchor, drift a little farther downstream and do it all again.

Oregon’s mighty Deschutes plays by different rules, requiring actual boots on the ground engagements with one’s piscean quarry, which means that for better or worse, fishermen and fisherwomen must actually be standing within or beside the river while fishing, and may not attempt to catch fish while floating in either a boat, raft, canoe or kayak, or hell, hovering above it on angel’s wings for that matter, which, for trout’s sake, makes most of the wild, powerful waters within its fabled riverine miles therefore, unfishable.

A steelheader with a guide. Gotta get out of the boat to fish the Deschutes, thank the gods.

Most of the Rainbow and native, Redband trout, most of the Whitefish and Suckers, Salmon and Steelhead in this muscled river will never encounter the sting of some purposely deceitful human being offering a pretend mayfly or grasshopper, or aquatic moth, or ant, or worm, or spider, or minnow, or fish egg pretending to be the real thing. And that is a very good thing for fish. The less human encounters any wild fish can manage in its lifetime, the better the life. And yes, I understand the sad irony inherent in what I’ve just written.

I had spent more than four and a half hours standing, wading and casting in the river, tying on and tossing anything and everything that should have, would have worked most days, on a long and varied stretch of water that can be both magnanimous and humblingly stingy as hell, having fished it dozens of times over the past thirty years. Something was definitely off.

I hadn’t fished this lonely, scramble down and walk-in piece of water for a few years, precisely because it is so lonely and a pretty tricky wade once you’re actually there in the river, and for a guy fishing alone, nearly seven decades into the big dance, it feels, well, a bit higher risk and noticeably more wearying than when I was forty. If something went sideways way back in there all by myself, there’d certainly be hell to pay getting out; something to think about when you’re in no great hurry to leave.

I’d headed out of camp that morning aimed for a different stretch of water, a mile or two further downriver, one of my favorites that I’d been saving for a quiet Tuesday morning after all the weekend campers and fishermen had gone home and the fish rested, an even more isolated stretch that takes as much as forty minutes to hike into and generally better than four hours to wade and fish carefully back out.

But as I had turned the graveled corner that would drop me down into the campground where I’d leave my dusty rig and hike from I saw a lonely, gold Chevy pickup parked exactly where I had intended to park. My stomach flopped into a barrel roll of dread; a parked pickup without campsite or camping gear in this canyon almost inevitably means, ‘fisherman.’

Damn!

I pulled over at the bend in the hairpin and shut off my engine, then proceeded to glass the distant shoreline a half mile away, just where it disappears around a long, sweeping, fishy, outside corner. No more than thirty seconds into my binoculared perusal I spotted the sonuvabitch who’d beat me to one of my favorite stretches of river, a varied piece of water whose first quarter mile after the ‘git-in’ sometimes fishes so generously before the sun finds it that it seems like you’re dreaming and all that poison-ivy you had to pick your way through on the scrappy, bouldered, snakey rockslide, and sometimes, chest-high grass-meadowed hike back to it feels almost like a friend, because, hell, no one else would be willing to work that hard to get there.

Though I follow an established but mostly indistinct game trail to work my way back to the ‘gettin-in’ place, I had never once, in nearly forty years of fishing it encountered another fisherman way back there on that gorgeous stretch of water unless I had been the one who convinced the fool to come there with me.

He’s in there. Look close, a third in from the right and a third up from the bottom.

Dude was, standing there, at about the halfway point, backlit in knee-deep water, fly rod held perpendicular under his right arm while perusing his fly box. Bastard was tying on another fly.

“Dammit!’ I muttered under my breath. “I knew I should‘ve fished it yesterday.”

Actually, I didn’t. Second-guessing oneself is a time-honored tradition among fishermen and fisherwomen. I had thought myself wise to wait an extra day for the fish to settle down after any possibility that someone might have worked their way even halfway back to my ‘gettin-in’ spot over the busy weekend, harassing those hungry fish in the last half of a wade that I could usually work slowly and methodically, catching fish for most of a day.

So much for playing the wise-guy and the long game. I spit a few more invectives in the direction of the backlit fisherman standing in my favorite stretch of water, secretly respecting his moxie, then mentally began moving to plan B.

Plan B, a very fishy stretch of river that requires a very steep scramble down a hundred foot basalt scree slope, but a much shorter hike in, as seen here making longtime fishing buddy, Paul look like a total flyfishing badass on a perfect day, way back in 2012.

Surely it didn’t help that the river was more than a foot, maybe a foot and a half higher than normal. Rocks that should have been showing, well out of the water, often topped with crayfish shell bits and otter poop, were eight inches beneath the water’s surface and scoured clean. A wild, rain-heavy thunderstorm had blown through a few nights earlier, dumping massive amounts of water between a thousand, deafening thunderclaps along a hundred miles of the river’s drainage, from her crystalline headwaters in the central part of the state all the way through to this larger, lower stretch beginning its final, roadless race to the Columbia Gorge.

And though I was well out of cell phone range, camped down there, deep in the canyon and thus unable to check river flows on the internets, my ‘standing-in-the-river’ observations told me that someone upriver must have decided to let a bunch of that newly acquired storm water past the dam to cool and flush the river below, helping to recharge it and make life a little friendlier for its occupants. Which, really is great for the river and those who live there, overall but generally not great for fishing, for at least a few days following. Trout, like people seem to need a little time to adjust to the off-putting nature of such rapid change.

Whew! All that prefacing, just to get to my point that fishing was brutally slow. I had managed to bring only one, thirteen inch Redside to hand (which I’d promptly released), and one shiny, little, wriggling ‘dink.’ Tough river.

I’d had a shy handful of flashy refusals, and two LDRs (long distance releases), one an impressive, rolling jump as the fish headed for the fast water, but after hours of tricky wading and hundreds of casts in a piece of water that might normally have yielded a dozen to twenty nice fish, I had played just one to the net. I’d fished everything from small, tan, elk-hair caddis dries on 4x and then 5x tippet to immense, green and brown ‘Jimmy Legs’ nymphs dredged through deep, bouldery runs beneath high-floating, big bug attractor patterns tied on with 3x. The fish just weren’t interested.

It was past two when I finally waded over to a sandy, broken-shade, little beachlet to sit down and eat my fisherman’s lunch; a tin of sardines in olive oil, a pack of saltine crackers, a Trader Joe’s snack packet of kalamata olives, a fat bunch of sweet, red grapes, a blood-orange Pellegrino soda, lukewarm, and some sun-warmed Oreos.

With the gnaw of hunger effectively tamped back down I leaned back, feet and legs submerged still in the cooling river and began to notice several small goings on, all around me.

Beyond that playful, Yellow-breasted Chat in a riverside snag just upstream, who seemed determined to study and taunt me without being seen, most obvious were the emerald green dragonflies. Correction; damselflies.

To be continued:

Substack says this story is well past the proper email length so, given that there is more story and more photos, and yes, some pretty cool video clips, I’ve divided it into two parts. You’ve reached the end of part one. I should be able to get part two posted up tomorrow.