"I dreamed the dream of the other dreamers..." Walt Whitman

This is the first of a number of posts about a "dream" trip to Hudson's Bay.



Walt Whitman emerges from American literature as the 1st urban poet. His poetry, a rich mixture of detailed imagery and a kaleidoscope of experiences, is effused with vignettes of 19th century urban life, and, at times, transcends experience into the metaphysical. In other words, he can get a little freaky. "I dreamed the dream of the other dreamers...." I'll get to the picture of the bear eventually which is other worldly in its own right. In his poem "The Sleepers," Whitman walks about his world experiencing the lives and dreams of a whole host of people.

I have long dreamed of fishing in the usual exotic locals: Alaska, Patagonia, Iceland, New Zealand.... Besides the occasional trip to some of the famed waters of the lower forty-eight, I haven't taken a trip to exclusively fly fish for an extended period of time. When it comes to trout fishing dream trips, I have for the most part "dreamed the dreams of the other dreamers."

The Sutton River got added to my dream trip list twenty years ago when I read about it in a magazine. Big brook trout in a remote river that flows into Hudson Bay, all of the things that dreams are made of. The Little North of Canada, the region between Lake Winnipeg, Hudson Bay and Lake Superior has been a destination for me on other trips to paddle some wild rivers. However, I had never made it to the Bay by traveling through the unique region of tundra below the artic circle that rings the Bay, known as the Hudson Bay Lowlands. Its stark beauty and unusual wildlife, polar bears and seals and whales, makes it a fairly exotic place to travel only 500 miles north of where I live in Wisconsin.

Charlie d'Autremont, a good friend of mine, and I have talked of doing a remote river trip for a few years. Finding the time and the right river seemed to be the only things standing in our way. We started looking into the logistics of the trip about a year ago. Being a fly-in/fly-out trip presented some cost challenges. Coupled with the idea that we were to travel 90 miles by ourselves in one canoe in a remote part of Canada gave us additional challenges as well.

Berger and Terry's description from the web site ottertooth.com was a great help in trip planning as was their book Canoe Atlas of the Little North.

There are few air services interested in flying into the Sutton River. Hearst Air of Hearst, Ontario, specializes in flying into the Sutton from july to August and has canoes stored on the river. They work closely with Albert Chookomolin, a Cree Guide, who runs a remote fishing camp on Hawley Lake (Albert's Fish Camp). He has rustic accommodations for fisher and hunters that want to home base out of Hawley Lake or to stay in his outpost lodgings on the river. Albert was born on the Sutton River and is a great resource for trip planning.

Once know as the Trout River, the Sutton is known for its big brook trout, its stark beauty, its clear running wadable water and its ability to inspire a soulfulness that I will never forget. It's gradiant drop is evenly spread out through its run to the bay which makes it a fairly easy river to run. The Sutton runs through Polar Bear Provincal Park. The likelihood of encountering one of North America's ultimate predators is very real. Besides resident brook trout, the Sutton also takes a run of sea-run brook trout starting in July.

For thirteen days Charlie and I paddled and fished down the Sutton and never encountered another human soul. The only man made sounds were our own and the occasional distant sound of an air craft. Evidence of other travelers along the river was minimal. I have traveled in remote parts of North America numerous times. Never in all of my other trips have I encountered a more enriching experience in such unexpected ways.

Sun set on the lower Sutton.


More about the trip and the encounter with a polar bear at twenty paces in my next few posts. See next post about our trip to Hudson Bay.

Keep a tight line,

Steve Therrien

The Delivered Fly

When the water pools on the ice that has had the river locked up since it froze over about mid-January and in places the river opens, its lacy currents playing in the bright March sun, I mentality wander around pondering piscatorial pursue that we are on the cusp of…

My wife scoffs at the idea that fly-fishing is sport. She views it more like an illness that comes on in late winter and leaves around mid-November with various relapses throughout. She is a wise woman and is probably “more right” about her observation than she knows. Though she fly-fishes, she’s not as “bit with the bug” as I.
The phone calls about the coming season start coming from clients, friends, and the one phone call I always expect from by friend and guiding partner: “Are we taking our usual trip out on the opener?” This is the beginning of a “slight fever.” The calls are only a few of the harbingers of the coming on of that sweet sickness that I willingly surrender to. The urge to spend time at the tying bench, the dreams of fishing, I even believe I hear the rush of water as it flows round my legs—though I probably have a touch of tinnitus—it all tells me, much like a sore throat and a headache tells me, I am about to get a full blown case of it.

The internet has done a lot to cool the fever that starts to rise in me even before “the fit is upon me”: surfing around, reading old fishing reports, reading fly-fishing message boards, looking up fly patterns. Though I really do miss the days when I’d start thinking about fishing, which usually sent me to the literature on the “sport.” I did a lot of reading, research and contemplative repose back then. I still do. Some might call it waiting, quietly on your own. Back when I was younger I had more time and I would take trips down to the river, locked up for winter and see if there was anything going on. On warm days when the thaw was going good, I would even go so far as to donning the waders and walking around in the cold current. Occasionally, I’d spook a few holdover steelhead.

It’s different now. People seem to be more connected. We reach out to each other: E-mail, IMs, Tweets, Message Boards, and Facebook. In that regard I find what’s happening just as interesting. The solitary contemplative repose I would have drifted into years ago has commingled with the digital world of the Internet. I find my random thoughts leading off into a discovery of the joyfully unexpected.

I was reading my guiding partner’s fly of the month column on our service’s website (yes, a shameless plug). So I got to thinking about that fly pattern: The Pass Lake.



After looking at my guiding partner’s version of the Pass Lake I got to thinking of why such a wide difference in materials—if you compare both of our versions you’d think they were two different patterns. Not to mention a third found on the internet. I know that patterns evolve this way. One tier takes the pattern and puts their own twist on it. Regional differences on popular patterns often will change a pattern in this way. That’s what makes the “sport.”





Fly patterns account for a good portion of the word count of all that is written about our “sport.” Hook and materials fashioned into the perfect dupe. It is always surprising what trout will take. Back when I cleaned the catch for my clients, I would always check the stomach contents. (You wouldn’t believe how many cigarette butts I have found besides the real trout food that ends up in the guts of a fish.) I once had a client have a eight inch brook trout take a small Pass Lake, only to have the brook trout disappear in the maw of a monster brown as long as my arm. The poor eight inch brookie didn’t survive the encounter neither did the client’s leader when the big brown realized there was something just not quite right about the brook trout firmly held in its kype. The leader parted when the trout decided to shoot out of the hole as quickly as it appeared, shocking the client into a “death grip” on the line and rod, leaving the molested trout to float to the surface. We retrieved the fish with the Pass Lake still firmed planted into the corner of the significantly smaller fish’s jaw.

The Pass Lake has been a part of my fishing arsenal for a long time starting as a wet fly pattern in sizes #12 and #14. Working as a guide for Cedar Island Estates introduced me to the fly as a real go to streamer pattern in larger sizes. Years later, I learned that it fished well as a dry fly pattern. When, on mid-morning in late June (1985), a client hooked and landed a brown of about 25 inches on a Pass Lake dry fly, I came to believe that the legend of the pattern deserved the attention it was getting in all of its variations, a real midwestern legend that has stood up to the test of time.

Out of curiosity I searched for the Pass Lake on the Internet and found a discovery of the joyfully unexpected. On the Wisconsin Fishing Forum “Duke” Welter held court on the history of none other than the Pass Lake by relaying the words of the late Larry Meicher, “The Pass Lake Kid.” At the time Larry evidently didn’t have a “hook up” to the “Net.” (You can read it here.)

It has amazed me how interconnected we are. You talk to someone coming off river from a day of delivering a fly like the Pass Lake and start a conversation and end up making all sorts of connections. Places, patterns, people; they all commingle waiting for a discovery of the joyfully unexpected. Larry Meicher fished the Brule with me nearly 30 years ago and introduced me to the Pass Lake.

Things do run full circle.

Keep a tight line,

Steve Therrien

a water sign

a water sign

we are sent by water
into this world of air
only to be
drawn back to its
feathery tangles
whirling eddies
current and tide
wave train that crashes folds into
a whorling pool foam granished
after a long race over cold stones.

each encounter is a reminder of
liquid life that speaks in a language
of living motion and primal buoyancy
where water was mouthed first
before air, before sound only
the measured meter of the heart
the arbitrary noises of human plumbing.

our random beginnings
a discharge
in the transparent flow
of the ancient element
to live then is
to give drink of the essential knot
to water something
down, to submerge it
in the flood taken
from a colorless source

or
a bottle of it bought off a duck’s back
poured carelessly down the drain
to eventually run under the bridge
or over the dam.



Sorry to have been hibernating.

Keep a tight line,

Steve Therrien

Transparent Mysteries

Pleading our lives
like the woven intricacies
of two streams mixing
through rock and sand and wood

we reach out
ruminating on the iridescence of trout

can’t help but wonder at the mystery
as color’s shifting splash
and subtle shift in wave frequency
change in angles of light
nerve impulse stimulation
electro-chemical twinge light reception
measured in foot candles
in lumens all in
discrete packets, zillons of them
the photon, quantum of the electromagnetic field,
how then does it translate
to beauty?

Merry Christmas and a Joyous New Year

Hyvaa joulua Onnellista uutta vuotta

Keep a tight line,

Steve Therrien

Bemused

The eddy line where everything either gets swept under a low overhang of cedars or gets slammed by the whole of the main run taunted me from the moment I waded into the pool at 5:00 in the morning. I had cast into that magic suspension of currents, using at least three different strategies, for at least a half hour. Before you start accusing me of buggy whipping the hole, I'll say that at 5:00 in the morning its dark enough to cover most of my miscues (if any), and I gave pause enough for any beast to feel secure enough to venture forth.

The previous night I had held the canoe for a client in the press of the run so that he could skate a fly through the eddy line in hopes of moving a least one good fish. This place always holds good fish. However, it hasn’t produced anything for a number of seasons—not even a “drive-by," "how-are-you," or "No-I’m-not-interested.” I have reasoned over the years that when good spots stop producing, a big fish has taken over chasing out all rivals. This theory has shown some validity when big fish are caught from these previously quiet places. Usually big lake run browns. We worked the fly for a good half hour before we strung up the rod and headed down stream and into the night. So I returned after a few hours sleep to try and reconfirm the theory.

I stood and watched the eddy slowly push the foam up to the top of the eddy and then slowly swing it down along the undercut bank and back down to the end where it met enough of the push from the main current to start it cycling through again. Bemused by the movements of the river, I may have fallen sleep on my feet or somehow had one of those strange experiences where you find yourself loosing any sense of the passage of time. Driving to work comes to mind, where you discover yourself at work, but you’re hard pressed remembering the drive. A hot shower can spend time for me. What I thought was a few minutes turns into a cold shower wake-up.

The bump of a canoe hitting a rock at the top of the run brought me out of my trance. Surprised not by the canoe that was yet to make the turn into the final part of the run before the pool, but the sunlight pouring through an opening in the cedar canopy. What had been a dark, shadow-shrouded hole was now fully illuminated by the low angle of the sun reaching the over the top of the valley. Rocks, woody tangle and the sand spout of a bottom spring shown clearly. The shadow of the cedars had moved out into the run with the edge of the shadow hovering over the sweet spot of the eddy: the current break between the main thrust of water and the cycling turn of the eddy. How had I missed the transition from the nether world of the half-light before dawn to this? The canoe bumped another rock. I glanced up the run. As my head turned, I glimpsed, out of the corner of my vision, a large silver shadow dart down the eddy line, flash brightly through the sunspot on the bottom of the eddy and slide under the undercut and dissolve into the mystery of those velvet thoughts that are marked by the revolving question: Did I really see that? Or was that what I wanted to see?

I am pretty certain I said hello to the canoeists as they slipped by and rounded the next turn. The sound of the rapids rushed through my head for the whole of the trip back to the car. The rest of the day was bemused by the movement of water.

Keep a tight line,

Steve Therrien

Waiting

Fly rodding involves a lot of waiting. Waiting for the just the right conditions: light, stillness in the air, humidity, time of day, feeding activity. I am always taken back by what appears to be. A stretch of river absolutely lacking in feeding activity can come alive in the course of a few minutes. Wait a few minutes and things can change. Where you'd think there couldn't be a fish-one appears.

I sit and drink tea while I wait. Will the wind settle down? Ponder the state of man? Did I remember the bug juice? Sip tea. Fight the urge to fish the water. Did I choose the right pattern? Sip tea. Check the sky. Not dark enough, yet. Wonder about whether I locked the car. Too bad, I'm not going back to lock it anyway. Stretch the shoulders. Think about who won the ball game. Check out the fish that rose next to the log upstream. Watch the mink as it snakes its way downstream, ducking under branches, submerging then emerging next to the moss covered rocks. It scrambles up onto the trunk of cedar that has grown curving out from the bank. Shaking its body body in a quick blur, the mink clears the water from its fur and moves on nosing its way through the ferns and sweetgale. Sip tea. The wind is calming. Mental flossing directs your attention to those occurrences that happen all about you. A mosquito flies off so heavy laden with my blood that it nearly drops into the river before it gains enough altitude to fly off--I usually feel their faint sting.

First Brown Drake spinner of the night takes its clumsy flight over head then others appear, followed by more. Its getting darker and more still. Did I mention that I drink tea while I wait?





The first fish takes a spinner as it struggles in the surface film. I watch another fly flutter an inch, writhe, then disappear in a swirling rise that looks like a miniature toilet flush. Other fish join in. Each has its own distinctive take and sound. Splashy and bold, soft with a distinctive sipping sound, gentle dimpled ring. In the course of a few minutes there are more than a dozen fish actively feeding. I've waited long enough.



I've been away from the computer fishing the June hatches and guiding. The keyboard is foreign to the touch and being indoors is starting to feel confining. I gotta get out again.

Keep a tight line,

Steve Therrien

river trails

always narrow, weedy and mud slicked
boot polished smooth and sun baked hard
twisting through willows thick,
dip and shinnied around skin barking stones
crossing hot meadows and wind corroded snow
through cedar shade cool

in blackberry tangle grab
low under the alder rain drip
over wire fence cautious straddle

woven roots in the well worn
way looking
at
the direction of the imprints
of familiar souls

the path wear
points the way to where we came and
the other to where we can go


Keep a tight line,

Steve Therrien