Trout School: Lessons from a Fly-Fishing Master

PRAISE FOR TROUT SCHOOL

This is a wonderfully entertaining book about some of the best and most challenging trout fly fishing in the world and how a legendary angler and fly tier reads the water, the insects, and the fish. Its lessons will be learned and profited from by inquisitive anglers imbued with a love for the fish and the sport as is the author.

FRANK AMATO, PUBLISHER OF FLYFISHING AND TYING JOURNAL

An entertaining, educational book on fly fishing Kamloops lakes by one of the best. Mark has captured the essence and history of fishing with Mo Bradley, sharing their combined knowledge and lifetime of fishing experiences. A ‘must have’ book for any fly fisher’s library, especially for those who lake fish.

KATHY RUDDICK, INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED FLY-FISHING INSTRUCTOR

"An Easterner, I came late to stalking Kamloops rainbows; access to Trout School would have substantially shortened my learning curve. Mark Hume has skillfully woven together the story of his fly-fishing mentor, Mo Bradley, with Mo’s proven practical tactics and fly patterns for catching the world-renowned Kamloops rainbow trout."

PAUL C. MARRINER, AUTHOR OF STILLWATER FLY FISHING: TOOLS & TACTICS AND MODERN ATLANTIC SALMON FLIES

Mark does a superb job bringing history and entomology to life in this entertaining and fun read.

APRIL VOKEY, OPERATOR OF FLY GAL VENTURES AND BLOGGER AT FLYGAL.CA

Though this book has many helpful hints on catching trout, what really shines through is the way inventive, freethinking fishermen like Mo Bradley repeatedly challenge conventional wisdom in order to move our sport forward.

SIR ROBERT SALISBURY, AUTHOR OF DAYS WITH DOG AND GUN

Contents

Foreword by Claire Hume

Introduction: Radio Silence

1 Out from the Mines

2 Onto the Lake

3 Flies

4 Preparation

5 The Retrieve and the Strike

6 Shifting Seasons

7 Ice Off

8 Spring to Summer

9 Summer to Fall

10 Ice On

11 The Essential Mo

APPENDICES

Appendix A: Thirteen Primary Flies

Bloodworm

Chironomid

Mayfly nymph

Damselfly nymph (halfback)

Dragonfly nymph (fullback)

John Dexheimer Sedge

Caddis fly (sedge) larva

Caddis fly (sedge) pupa

Terrestrial caddis fly (sedge)

Leech

Shrimp

Doc Spratley

Chaoborus larva (glassworm)

Appendix B: Insect Life Cycles

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Authors and Illustrator

Illustrations

Foreword

My sister, Emma, and I grew up fly fishing with our dad and his wonderful cast of angling friends. Mo Bradley, a sage character within an already impressive group, would call our house regularly, always answering with a cheery Hello, love! when I picked up the phone. After a quick chat I’d pass him over to my dad so he could collect Mo’s latest fishing report. The ice is on. The ice is off. The lake has turned over. The damselflies are hatching. And every once in a while, when the conditions were just right, a boisterous Get up here! would bellow from the other end of the line.

After one such call my dad and I packed the truck (or rather, he did, masterfully slotting our gear in like Tetris, the way only dads can) and we drove to Kamloops. Mo and his wife, Evelyn, then shared a lovely home by the North Thompson River.

The next day, before the sun had fully risen, I woke to a gentle knocking at the guest bedroom door and Mo came in to leave a cup of tea on my bedside table. Breakfast was waffles and Cool Whip. It’ll stick to your ribs, Mo said of the meal that would keep us full and fueled for a big day of fishing. Intentionally adding a layer of whipped cream to my midsection was not something my teenage brain took lightly, but I did as the fishing expert said and ate up. Soon we were on our way to one of Mo’s special fishing spots. I can’t remember where it was, so his secret is safe with me, but I do remember the day well.

We drove up to a lake flanked by rolling grasslands on one side and a grove of shimmering poplar trees on the other. It was fall, and the sunnier it got, the more the yellow poplar leaves seemed to glow. A big brown house stood on a nearby hill, and we borrowed their driveway to get to the water.

Friends of mine, Mo assured us. I visited with their horse as my dad and Mo unloaded boats and rearranged their gear. Mo looked over the lakeshore and back to his giant box of flies. He had tied every fly and organized them in rows, arranging them by species, size, and season. Individually they were works of art; together they were an army. He chose a black chironomid to start and I followed suit.

Mo and my dad caught scores of rainbow trout; I caught a few as well. We let most swim free but took one home for supper. After returning to Mo’s house that evening, we carried our catch down to his workshop in the basement. Beside the murky tanks of lake bugs, Mo gutted the trout. He used the back of his thumb to squeeze out the contents of its bulging stomach and spread it over the cutting board. Leaning in close, we sorted through the green mush and Mo revealed what that trout had been eating: chironomids, as predicted.

Mo and my dad are incredibly generous teachers: keen to set me up with the right gear, in the right location, with the right fly and the right tips to help me land a big one on my own.

My sister, Emma, inherited our dad’s striking cast. One that curves gracefully above her in an expansive arc, shoots forward with incredible power, and then lands, ever so gently, on the water. It catches her a lot of fish. My cast gets me just short of where I need to be. But from my dad and Mo I have learned to watch the birds and bugs, the run of the river, the curve of the lakeshore, and the clouds in the sky. That knowledge, I’ve found, can carry me the rest of the way.

Every time I hooked a fish so heavy I feared it would pull me straight through my backing and into the water, I wailed for my dad to come help me, but he never did. Laughing, he would take a few steps back and say, You can do it. Keep your rod tip up. Sometimes I could, and my shaky arms managed to land the fish. Other times I couldn’t, and it would pull free. With both outcomes, my dad was thrilled. I’d either caught the most wonderful fish in the lake or learned something new. And both, he taught me, made for a successful day on the water.

This book captures the spirit of fishing with these two old friends, shares the secrets of their hard-earned expertise, and reads like a day on the water with them.

— CLAIRE HUME

Winner of the Art Downs Memorial Award for environmental journalism excellence

INTRODUCTION

Radio Silence

Somewhere far across the lake, Mo Bradley has made an important discovery. I can hear his muffled voice barking in one of the twenty-seven pockets on my fishing vest. By the time I find the little handheld radio—not in the breast compartment where it started the day with the tippet material, and not in the side pouch where it sat with the dry fly box, but inside on the front left, where the dragonfly case used to be—his voice has faded to almost nothing. There is a hiss, then silence. I hold the radio to my ear, but can’t make out a thing. It is as if his words have been swept away by the dry wind swirling over the grasslands of the Stump Lake Ranch, on a plateau southwest of Kamloops, British Columbia. Here, amid meadows of bunch grass scented with sage and sheltered by forests of stately ponderosa pines and hardscrabble Douglas firs, are some of the world’s best rainbow trout fishing lakes.

I can see Mo’s boat, a small white-and-blue flat-bottomed Rebel punt, anchored fore and aft precisely where he’s been all morning, close against the shore in a little scallop of a bay. His arms are up, and although his rod is too thin to see from this distance, I know it is bent in a deep arc. Again. That’s three for him in twenty minutes, and I know they have all been big fish.

Kamloops trout, a strain of rainbow known for their great beauty and fierce fighting power, often feed by cruising the lake margins. They don’t typically hold on station, like a bass will along a favored weed bed. They keep moving, relentlessly prowling. Sometimes they will stay in an area to browse, perhaps on a localized hatch of chironomids or mayflies. When that happens, it is possible to figure out the pattern of their movement by tracking the rise forms in the water and casting into their path. But sooner or later the trout start to hunt over a wider area again and move out of casting range. The challenge to a fly fisher, then, is to find a place where they can be intercepted. I might anchor off a point, at the entrance to a shallow bay, at a creek mouth, or over a weed bed that drops off into a deep trench. On this morning, I have tried all those places, while Mo has set anchor and stayed in one spot, waiting for the fish to come to him. Now, apparently, they have—just as the batteries on his radio faded.

Kamloops Trout

The Kamloops trout is so distinct in its appearance and behavior it was once considered a separate species, Salmo kamloops. Fisheries scientists later came to reclassify it as a local variant of the rainbow trout family, Oncorhynchus mykiss. But it has always remained a very special creature in the hearts of anglers, who have been coming to the region since the 1800s in pursuit of what U.S. author Steve Raymond describes as one of the great game fish of the world. This view was also expressed in The Angler’s Book of Canadian Fishes, published in 1959, in which F. H. Wooding wrote that the best game fish in western Canada are steelhead, brown trout, cutthroat, and rainbow, but with the honors probably going to the Kamloops.

I’ll have to shout from now on, he yells across the water, holding up the dead radio.

Dragging up my anchor, which comes draped in a tangle of rich aquatic weeds, I spin the little boat and start the long row across the lake to get the whole story. The spring wind, rushing into the rain shadow of the Coast Range, keeps trying to push me east. I draw a sight line onto shore over the stern, lining up a gray hump of rock on the hillside with a small pump house where a swirl of swallows is nesting. A coyote comes over the ridge and hunts in tussocks of blue-bunch wheatgrass. Nose down, ears up, just like me.

It is hard rowing against the wind, but I can’t pause on the oars, because every time I do I start to skitter sideways. I pull alongside Mo, an elfin figure bundled in a parka much too big for him, just as he is playing his fourth fish. It skips and jumps around the boat, trailing a spray of water, a silver-bright rainbow weighing about four pounds.

Well, my friend! Mo beams. You better get in here. The bay is full of trout. Full!

I drift away from him a hundred feet, set the two small anchors in the springy weeds on the bottom, and start to cast. I switch from a rod with a dry line, excessively long leader, and a tiny black chironomid to one with an intermediate sinking line and a mayfly nymph, which we had tied the night before, dreaming of a moment just like this.

Cast in right to shore and bring it out s-l-o-w-l-y, says Mo, and I follow his instructions.

Move in, tighter to shore, he says.

I do.

Put that cast right to the bank.

I do.

I don’t catch anything, but he gets another strike. And another, landing a splashy fish, which he releases.

There’s loads of trout in here, he shouts, wiping his hands on the towel he wears around his neck like a scarf for just such moments. Loads!

I move closer to his boat, match his every move. But here’s the thing: On a Kamloops trout lake, there is sometimes a sweet spot. I might nose up close to a guy catching fish. I might match his fly and mimic his retrieve. But he catches and I don’t, because he is casting in front of feeding fish and I am behind them, or off the side, or too far ahead.

After Mo gets