Angling in dark puts trout in new light

"That's a good fish," he said, assessing the tenor of the splash.

As he spoke, Dave, a lefty, loosened a couple of rod lengths of line, looped the line ahead, false cast once and delivered his fly against the opposite bank, watching as the river current carried it downstream.

Nothing.

Again, Dave put his line in the air, dusk now morphing to nighttime, 10 p.m. well and gone.

This time as the fly drifted, the river boiled beneath it. Instantly, Dave reefed back on a brown trout that, when brought alongside the canoe, pushed 19 inches, thick around the girth, too, a real specimen.

"That's quite a fish," I said.

"Quite a fish."

We pushed downstream, gently paddling. But the night was not unfolding as we wanted. We saw very few Hex duns on the water, the stage of the fly that appears on the surface briefly before becoming airborne.

More unfortunately still, no spinner fall was occurring, this last marked by the falling of Hex flies that, having risen from the river and mated, die and fall back to the river, triggering, usually, a hellacious trout bite.

Around shadowy river bends, alert for the sound of trout rising and the sight of spinners falling, we paddled. We saw none of the latter but intermittently detected the former, taking turns casting as we did.

This small-stream traveling at night presents its own form of trout fishing, particularly so on a river marked by so many deadfalls. Casting 7-weight rods with heavy, short leaders, the undertaking, in boxer's terms, is less light-footed punching than stand-and-slug.

"Once you hook up, you need to keep the fish out of the brush," Dave said. "Sometimes you have to 'horse' them in to do that, which is why we use the heavy leaders."

My biggest trout of the night I fooled when darkness had so overcome us I could have cast no less effectively with my eyes closed.

Lying in wait, unspeaking, we were pushed up against the left side of the river, our paddles in the soft river bottom, holding the canoe in place.

Downstream, a muskrat broke the river surface gently, plying his trade. Otherwise, save for the laughing of distant coyotes, and the occasional bark of a hen mallard, the evening was as quiet as it was black.

Then, upstream, we heard a splash that registered high on the Richter-like scale Dave uses to gauge the size of rising fish.

"Good fish," he said.

Deftly, like assassins, we back-paddled against the current, hugging the river's edge, until we were slightly upstream of where we had pinpointed the rising.

Again we waited.

And waited.

Hearing no more risings, I looped a blind cast into the darkness, judging the drift of my fly intuitively.

Fishermen, real fishermen, measure time not in minutes, hours or days but in trips past and future, and those under way.

It was 1 a.m. when we pulled the canoe from the river, strapped portage wheels beneath it and toted it over a very long stretch of swamp grass to Dave's truck.

Into the black night we drove.

As we did, I thought about that trout, imagined how big it was, and thought, too, that I should have set the hook more quickly.

Maybe then, in the dark, I would have fooled the fish. Instead, he fooled me.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.