Ghost Fish (Part 4 of a Story for My Son)

Sunset where Grindstone Creek flows into
Lake Ontario at Selkirk Shores State Park,
about 5 miles south of my family's old
NY farm. If you are going to waste
countless hours hopelessly casting a fly
to a wraith of a fish, the epic
sunsets are at least a wonderful reward.

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Back home in Virginia, after that first trip to Upstate New York, despondent over all I was missing by not being raised there, life was a slow burn. If we had a foot of snow, local people cowered; Upstate, my uncle called that “a skiff of snow, a dusting.” That was the life, I thought, especially in summer, when our front porch thermometer soared toward 95 degrees, and my uncle would confirm by letter that it was only 75 there.
    My dad and I agreed on almost nothing, but he did fish, and he would take me fishing: that was our common ground. But even at that, we differed greatly. He loved to fish plastic baits, fake worms and lizards and such, from the bank, throwing them out, letting them sink, crawling them back one agonizingly slow turn of the reel handle after another—feeling the details of the lake bottom as if he was trying to draw a map of it. I liked fishing topwater, watching the splash of a big bass taking a deer hair bug, or the tiny dimple of a trout sipping a microscopic #22 midge; I happily traded catching quantities of fish for that one magical moment when I could entice just one to the surface. Most of all I loved the constant movement of fly casting, the complete focus it took to keep back casts out of the trees then cast the artificial fly to a target the size of a quarter.
    In the angling world, fly-fishers are often dubbed purists. As I tend to do with many things in life, I took being a purist to a whole new level. Catching fish on a fly wasn’t pure enough, they had to be taken on a dry fly. Anything less was just fishing.
    As the years flew by, my fly tying greatly improved, to the point I started creating my own patterns instead of just copying traditional favorites. My casting distance never recovered from being self-taught, but my accuracy and presentation became literally pinpoint.
    Spare time was too often scarce, but college travels, and a job that enabled travel, allowed me to catch just about every fish willing to take a fly. The bluegill, bass and trout I grew up with gave way to bluefish and striped bass in the surf, to northern pike and muskellunge in Canada, to bonefish, permit and tarpon in the Florida salt flats and points further south. I even managed to catch a walleye, a shark, and a hefty channel catfish on high-floating dry flies of my own design—a trifecta many fellow fly-fishers deemed nearly impossible.
    Through the haze of years and travels, adventures and misadventures, there was one dream I kept having, and one fish I kept chasing.
    I learned there were only two places where Atlantic salmon reliably rose to dry flies: Eastern Canada, and Russia. The latter was out of my reach, and my budget, but the eastern coastal rivers of Canada became regular getaways for me. The weather hardly ever cooperated, and the fish never cooperated, but at least the experiences and the scenery were wonderful. By the time I turned 50, the famed ‘fish of a thousand casts’ was my fish of hundreds of thousands of casts, and tens of thousands of dollars.
    Despite the impossible odds, on any trip I made Upstate I would be somewhere casting a dry-fly at dusk—and hoping, and remembering, and reliving. On my favorite outings I would go to Selkirk Shores State Park for a long run on trails I would cross-country ski or snowmobile come winter, then I would cast and hope, cast and hope, into Grindstone Creek, where it emptied into Lake Ontario just a few hundred yards west of the Salmon River—less than a mile from where the ghost fish had caught me all those decades ago.
    On rare occasion I did catch a salmon, but it was the wrong kind. Of course. Not that catching a 15-pound fish on a flyrod designed for 15-inch fish wasn’t enjoyable, but it wasn’t that enjoyable, because it was an alien invader that shouldn’t have been there, instead of the native fish that belonged. Due to an over-abundance of forage fish, New York State was part of a movement to bring back salmon in Lake Ontario, and they established a hatchery on the Salmon River. Unfortunately, that effort introduced king and coho and other “Pacific salmon” instead of the Atlantic salmon, and the difference—to me, anyway—was as bad as a hatchery-raised trout compared to wild, native trout.
    The Pacific salmon re-established a fishery, but it was nothing I wanted any part of. In the early years, “snagging” or foul-hooking these salmon by rapidly reeling weighted hooks through the water was not only legal, it was encouraged. There was nothing purist about that, obviously.

Me, kayaking with humpback whales
off Point Gustavus, Alaska. No, I
was not fly fishing for them.

    After doing their part to assure survival of their species, a hefty percentage of Atlantic salmon return to deep water—the ocean usually, or, in this case, the lake. Pacific salmon die after spawning, so the logic was to catch them any way possible. As the fishery evolved, snagging with heavy gear was phased out and fly fishing caught on, but it was mainly about drifting nymph and fake egg patterns and I still wanted no part of it. For most people, however, catching a 20 or 30 or even a 40-pound salmon was catching a very big salmon: who cares about aesthetics?
    The popularity and abundance and ease of catching Pacific salmon sealed the fate of the Atlantic salmon. And yet, there I would be, night after night, as dusk fell, casting and hoping, casting and hoping.
    Fly fishing is the most delicate of “blood” sports – most of the time you are literally casting feathers – but to me it always had emotional heft to it. Fly fishing didn’t start in Scotland, but the modern form of the sport was arguably perfected there. My Scottish ancestors lived on the shore of salmon-rich Loch Lomond – the largest freshwater lake in Scotland – and my Viking forbears before them no doubt had considerable interaction with salmon as they enjoyed summers under the midnight sun, in Iceland. When I cast a fly, I feel centuries of connection to those roots, and to those who introduced me to fly fishing when I was young. All the people who first took me afield have been dead for years, but when I cast a fly it is as if I still feel them there, much as I can envision a thick mist rising off a Scottish loch I’ve never seen.
    I grew up hunting and fishing, and helping work on a farm – doing everything from driving a tractor to shooting a cow or a pig between the eyes before we processed it into various cuts of meat. By the time I started college, however, I was on the way to becoming the only vegetarian I knew, and by my 30s I had become an animal rights activist who looked back on my involvement in hunting, fishing, and farming as a sort of psychotic phase of my early life.

A friend wading the salt flats,
fly-fishing for bonefish,
somewhere south of Miami

    And yet, fly fishing remained a part of my life, not because I had any interest in terrorizing fish, but because it provided a palatable way for me to spend time outdoors with the few very special people I would compromise my personal ethics for. When an old friend who had taken refuge in Cuba revealed he had a terminal illness, I dug out a stout 9-weight saltwater outfit and waded the flats one last time with him. By the time my uncle Carl turned 90, most of his old hunting and fishing cronies were long since dead, so I once again threaded lines through the guides of our wispy 4-weight rods and took him on what turned out to be our last trip to Tug Hill to fish for native brook trout. I spent many hours prowling the banks of Virginia’s famed Mossy Creek, seeking the trophy brown trout that put the tiny meadow stream on the angling map, with a much older but very close friend, a retired architect named Ollie. None of them knew what a moral dilemma it was for me to be stalking fish with them, and I’m not sure any of them would understand why I felt such conflict within me. Nor do I think they would understand that if I go fly fishing again someday, it will be for the bond I will always feel with them, and my ancestors, not for any interest I have in fishing.
    And so it was with the quest to recapture the magic of the night of Ghost Fish. I was fishing for a wraith, but every cast was also targeting something real and deep within me; my back cast didn’t just unfurl between the trees behind me, it reached back through the eons to people and places I had never seen, yet felt as if I had always known.

Copyright © 2020 by Paul Clark