Cross Current Outfitters guide Bill Longstreet has been sticking to a keto diet as of late. I learn this while he shares his pickled eggs form Preston’s Market with me.
We are anchored in a popular dry-fly pool on the upper Delaware’s west branch in complete darkness.
“Here,” Longstreet says.
I pause from throwing an 8-weight rod with a short 20-pound Maxima leader clinched to a mouse imitation and click on the red light of my headlamp.
“Don’t worry,” Longstreet reassures me as he hands me another egg. “I have plenty of wet wipes.”
There is an anxiety fermenting, and although I’m momentarily comforted by the reassurance Longstreet has just offered, an alternative anxiety grows out of the fact that we are chasing fish that are also on a keto diet.
“Did you hear that,” Longstreet asks.
It sounds like someone is throwing rocks into the river from high up on the bank, but the noises we are hearing are big brown trout cruising the pool and every so often leaving the water to kill their meal as hard as they possibly can. Longstreet thinks they are still feeding on a spinner fall long after dusk. That or small mammals paddling across the surface.
If typical dry fly fishing is the classical music that plays behind the long, storied montage of the upper Delaware River, then mousing at night for large, nocturnal trout is very much the punk rock. In appearance, Longstreet is at least a rod length from Beethoven or Johnny Ramone, but like a good wedding band he covers it all.
That’s not to say that there isn’t skill involved in casting at night for trout, but there is far less technicalities than presenting a dry fly to a rising fish during an evening hatch.
Chasing trout in the dark is in vogue, perhaps a tradition all to itself, and needless to say this river is full of traditions. Right on the edge of the Catskills, it is a watershed that holds immense weight for fly fishing culture in the east.
As a testament to that sentiment, there are plenty of people still soaking in the water, even at this hour. Down river from us, a head lamp flashes along the shore, someone just wrapping up their evening it seems. We drift past Mike, who is wading in the middle of the pool, waist deep, smoking a pipe. I can see the embers glowing in the bowl. The sweet scent of tobacco reminds me of my grandfather, who used to smoke Half-And-Half. We trade salutations.
“Which side do you want me on,” someone calls out from right behind where we anchor. I’m caught offguard. It’s not Mike, who has already waded on downriver and disappeared somewhere on the far shore. It’s an angler in a one-seater pontoon-style raft. She floats by as a dark apparition on the river, vague and barely legible. It is all quite mysterious and exciting—a little eerie—the fact that these mysterious people are out here under the stars on this river, my guess is probably for the same reasons.
“There’s a very real chance to catch the fish of a lifetime at night,” Longstreet says.
It’s 8:50 p.m. and I wonder if Longstreet crushing the bard on the foam mouse fly was a purely ethical move, or is it because he’s skeptical of my skills? We have fished together before, and long enough this evening to create a solid sample set of what could potentially go wrong on a muffed back cast.
“I don’t mind if you cast over me,” Longstreet says. I can hear in his voice that he is trying to be brave, probably as a matter of principal. He’s a professional, but the trust level is not quite as palpable as the pickled eggs.
Several fish that I hook into go AWOL, a term the writer John McPhee uses to describe fish that throw your hook before you can land them: Absent Without Leave. This is heartbreaking, but it also drives the negative feedback loop that I feel myself slowly falling into, as if this whole thing is some kind of gateway drug.
Tonight I am working through the nuances of the strip-set, which is, according to Longstreet, one of the keys to better hook ups while streamer fishing in the dark. Another is to keep the rod tip low to the water. “Even in the water,” Longstreet says. He patters me, “rod tip down.” This is a line management tool. This is staying in contact with the fish. Another key point is to not bury the streamer’s hook into the skull of your guide rowing the drift boat. I constantly worry about it. Afterall, you can’t see a damn thing.
“Has anyone ever buried a hook in you, Billy” I ask.
“Not yet,” Longstreet says.
More pressure.
It is odd, not being able to see anything at all except for where the dark blue night sky meets the inky outline of the rolling hills surrounding us. And the millions of stars. You can’t see your cast, or where it lands really. It is somewhere over there under the big dipper. The water is just a confusing reflection of dark silhouettes and random sources of light rippling together. But there develops this underlying notion to it all, fishing in the dark. You work mostly on muscle memory, on feel. You feel the heavy line slide through the guides and go tight against the reel as it falls onto the water. You get hints from the water of the v-shaped wake following the slow strip of the mouse, painfully slow. It is the perfect change of pace.
When these nocturnal browns take the fly at the end of your line, it does feel like a boulder on the bottom of the river for a moment, except then the boulder is vibrating, swimming away from you, diving, running, jumping and thrashing. You are fighting a fish filled with rage, and international genetics that date back to at least the nineteenth century. It is causing you to be half fearful for your life, and half fearful that you may, in fact, have the best trout of your life tight to your line. Or a ghost. You can’t see. It’s like playing a power chord. You’re going off emotion and sensation.
If it wasn’t for Longstreet, I’d probably be at home sleeping, and not ruining my life sitting in his boat on this river, drifting further down this rabbit hole of addiction. But here I am, unfortunately.
T.C. Mazar is a freelance outdoors writer and can be reached at wildlife@scrantontimes.com.