Good Old Boys & New Tricks

It’s time to start knocking things off the “to do” lists and getting ready for summer. Spring is around the corner and the sun seems to be announcing its arrival a bit more each day. So this week I decided to get a few things done I had been meaning to for a long time.

TO DO: Doctor

Monday: I went to the dermatologist which I had been meaning to do for the last few months.

I came home and realized that Rala, my female golden retriever had NEVER been fly-fishing and was already a year and a half old!

With Tonks, my previous golden, I trained her using all the commands from the books, she could do directional hand signals, long distance retrieves and a bunch of other things that are really only useful for a duck hunting dog, and not something I really needed as I have been duck hunting 5 times total in my life and Tonks was gun-shy to boot.

So with Rala, we (my wife and I) chose to teach her commands and skills that we used every day first. She was running alongside a skateboard at 4 months, she learned high five to untangle from her leash, she plays with toys and entertains HERSELF for hours at a time. But she still had never been fishing. Well, time to check another thing off the “to do” list.

TO DO: Introduce Dog to Fishing

Tuesday: Rala and I head to the Boise River together. She finally gets to see what those funny wet clothes (waders) that smell like fish are for that she is so curious about each time we come home from a trip. AND SHE LOVES IT!

She gets to go swimming, plus she gets to be next to a human in the water! Happy dog! So after a few battles leaving her tied up and teaching her to be OK with being left behind, I let her heel while I have the leash attached to my belt. She is a smart dog and watched what I was doing intently but didn’t seem to care as nothing ever happened. Then, the indicator sank! I struck and there wiggling back towards me- flowing with the current- as I frantically strip in line, is a STICK!!! (As an aside, if you have never been in the woods with a golden retriever before you cannot understand, so let me paint a picture for you: a new mother shows half of the joy when meeting her newborn child that a Golden displays for a good stick in the woods.) Rala was amazed - now our activity included swimming, with a human next to her, and that strange ball of floating yarn can turn into STICKS! That night, I like to think she fell asleep thinking of her day.

However, my “to do” list was far from accomplished. Rala could navigate some parts of a river, and was learning some skills, but she hadn’t even met a fish yet. And furthermore, I needed to accomplish a few things for myself.

I have spent my entire life on fishing adventures across the west and have had a great time with friends, family, and clients. However, I have never fished solo much and I have especially never gone “destination fishing” alone before.

TO DO: Fishing trip.

Wednesday: I drop Kelly, my wife, off at work and come home to finish packing the car, fishing gear, 3 thermoses, 2 rods, and one dog with a new experience on the horizon. We arrive at the Owyhee in Oregon after getting my license and cannot find a single piece of- even poor- water to fish. We finally jump into a meager piece of water for the sake of training and because otherwise we were going to lose our only shot at a stretch of river to a couple of spoon casters. Needless to say it was frustrating, Rala wanted to RUN and SWIM and I could not fathom actually CATCHING anything out of this run regardless of all other factors. So we left and went driving. I decided to go all the way to the dam to look for potential runs and never found a stretch of water that was empty. We turned around hungry, frustrated and discouraged. My only plan was to return to some water Kelly and I had fished the week before and claim it as my own until the fish started rising and then fish it. We got lucky, the spot was free (it was the second to last spot I know about on the drive out)! I parked the car and ate lunch so that we could calm down and to give the river a rest in case the water had already been fished.

Feeling reinvigorated but not optimistic of my chosen spot (bluebird sky and moderate wind is not good for midge activity), we wandered off downstream. I brought Rala’s leash but she was free of it and wandering at her leisure. Halfway on our walk to the nearest other fly fishable water a car pulled up between us and our spot, well that’s not very nice or lucky, I think. But Rala is friendly and curious and ran up to the fishermen, perhaps a father and son team, with glee. I walk up and talk to ‘em. “We was just gonna head straight out from the car and upstream”, the younger one says, as they pull out spin rods. I negotiate with them and we find that our fishable waters have no overlap and we all continue merrily toward our preferred water.

As we approach the run I notice a few dry flies starting to emerge but have yet to pay them any mind. I have a dry and a dropper on, of course, because the Skwalas are supposed to be coming off soon, right? As my two fly patterns continue to fail me and Rala is getting less and less patient- tied to a willow- not being allowed to romp free everywhere I decide I should read the signals of the river and make a fly change. Actually a tippet, fly, tippet, fly change (which is why I was reluctant in the first place since tying four knots whilst telling a puppy to STAY is a challenge).  I finally get all the tab ends clipped off the knots, I look up to see a nice gust of wind blow across the riffle and spray white across the drift. DARN, I was too slow, there isn’t a single fish eating dry flies in sight and it’s an obligate right handed pool- so I have to fish switch. Oh well, I’m out here to fish, so I throw anyway, a #16 parawolf adams with a trailing LRO midge emerger into the feed line- and everything disappears! Perhaps because the rod was in the wrong hand, or perhaps because nothing had happened up to that point in the day, but I had forgotten why we were even at the river by this time and eventually remind my brain that I am fishing, and strike.

And there connected to the end of the line is the most silvery shiny wiggly funny smelling stick anyone has ever pulled out of a river - and Rala meets her first rainbow trout. This is better than a stick! It’s sentient and tries to get away splashing!! Now I have a fishing friend! I let her off the leash and start canvassing the water properly short to longer left to right working from inside to the outside seam. Rala watched the fly every cast for the next three riffles and was rewarded several more times by wiggling fish! 

 We moved up to the spot our car was parked and it was a great decoy, we still had the run to ourselves. We jump in and I start casting to very SPARSE rises in the slow water, however Rala has noticed something else entirely: mayflies, exactly like the pattern I have tied on are beginning to emerge from the water and fly away. Once as I am watching a drift come back towards me I look over and she is rising up from the nose nearly as tall as I am onto her hind legs sniffing an emerging mayfly. Here is where she finally makes a connection and starts “hunting” emergers.  As they break the surface and start to dry their wings, Rala pounces and its “bobbing for mayflies.” Between the naturals and the artificial producing fish, Rala learned that afternoon how to be a fishing dog, who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

Rala "hunting" emergers (Ctrl+click to follow)

As the day wrapped up I found a few more large browns (which was the point of the trip). Rala’s enthusiasm for each fish was proportional to its size and fight, which made me just as excited as she was. Periodically throughout the afternoon, I would look behind me and she would be swimming out to an object in the middle of the river. From observation, there appear to be two distinct reasons to swim to something in the river. The first is to retrieve it, and the second is to stand on it. The caveat is that all things in the middle of the river must be examined for these two possibilities. Occasionally I would hear water dripping off of her coat and look back to where she would be searching diligently to see if a fish we had released in that spot had returned yet, even lying down a few times to wait for the fish to return while watching my fly from a distance. 

The evening started to approach and we left, earlier than normal but Kelly would be worried as I was out of cell range. As Rala and I left that day I felt a surprising amount of pride in that little dog. A different SPECIES from my own, yet we communicated and learned from each other and in two days learned how to co-exist on flywater together. As I drove, I went over in my head what the next steps toward teaching her to be a fishing dog were: river crossings, log jams, rapids, reading currents and more.

As I fell asleep that night I know that we were both thinking of our day. I was so proud and giddy I think I fell asleep giggling telling Kelly stories from our day.

Rala with her first white fish

TO DO: make a garden and yard.

Tomorrow…

Owyhee Brown Trout

Yummy!

Watching, always watching

Tight lines!

-Blake Schnebly