Fishing Report: Making a Break

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I had another chance to make a break for the lake.

It's a rite of Summer, going to the lake on these hot summer days. It's like diving into Summer's warm heart, immersing oneself in its essence. It has been a long time coming, but the last couple trips have allowed that experience.

Yesterday was a High Summer day.

I fished, trying a variety of flies and tactics. I got nothing to come up to a hopper, or any fly fished along the bank. The weeds are still subsurface. Soon the big cruisers will work the mats.

I also couldn't get anything to take a nymph, deep or under an indicator.

As they say, I just couldn't get a break.

The fish were there, and some would come up sporadically. I might call it random, but then life itself seems random as it unfolds like an infinite bloom in which all things have a place and a time and a purpose.

Perhaps my purpose then was to bask in the glorious day. This is the time of year when the RV fishers have gone elsewhere; I had the lake to myself. Well, along with the abundant life all around.

Welcome company, all.

I explored the latest blowdown, broken off in a windstorm last week. I was also trying to see one of the beavers I heard working away on it. They stayed out of sight, but their rhythmic gnawing was a constant accompaniment to the evening.

When I was here with Jeremiah last year he saw something I had never noticed before, that the tree had been gnawed by beavers almost all the way through. He was concerned that it might fall on us. It took a year and a windstorm, but all the random pieces finally came together to bring it down.
As evening deepened the lake seemed to heave a sigh and go to sleep. I waited for some kind of hatch, or an increase in feeding which often happens at dusk, but it didn't come. Not this time.
I trolled until dark with a black bead head leech, usually a reliable fly, but my puny efforts were not enough to overturn the turning of the living lake through its inscrutable patterns of existence.

On the drive out I came up suddenly on a pair of fawns. It was where the road climbs along the face of the ridge, so I followed them for a little ways before they found a place they could get off the road. A grown deer--like their Mom--would have leaped down or climbed up the steep hillside without a second thought.

But for awhile I herded them slowly along until they found the right place and the right time to make their break.

Some say we make our own breaks. As I came down the long winding road off the ridge to the main highway and made my break for home I was thinking, "Well, yes and no."