California Creekin’
As seen in California Fly Fisher,
June 2005
© 2005 Jim Zech
I used to share a very smelly office with a fishing buddy and on the wall behind his desk was a large poster of Northern California. I don’t know where he got this very cool map, but on it was marked every single waterway that flowed in and through the north end of the state. The map looked like it was entirely covered with a dense mat of blue spider-web. I’ve heard it said that there are more miles of trout water in California than there are in Montana and after seeing this map I believe it. (Intentionally, I haven’t seen the Montana version of the map, so as not to painfully disabuse myself of my belief in the liquid supremacy of my home state with any actual evidence indicating the contrary.) Most of this aquatic mileage has to be in the form of small creeks, which is fortunate because some of the most pleasant trout water to fish is also in the form of small creeks.
Most California fly fishers know the names of California’s bigger waters: the
Truckee, the Pit, McCloud, Hat Creek, the Yuba, Stanislaus, Owens, Walker, Kern,
and lots more, but the reason they know these names is because these waters are
popular! There is a reason that these rivers are popular and that is because
they are very good fisheries. They can also withstand a lot of fishing
pressure. Many of the small creeks that I fish are only known by a handful of
people, however, and some of them show no signs of being fished at all. And
that’s fortunate for several reasons, foremost being that they cannot stand a
ton of fishing pressure, (which makes me wonder why I would write this
article!) What I meant to say was that there are very few creeks in California
and they are all devoid of trout anyway! Believe me, there is no good small
water to fish in California. Go to the popular places, they’re proven and are very good places to wet a (fly) line.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way and you probably believed me and have no desire to look for your own small creeks to fish, let me just, for the sake of argument, say that if there were some small creeks in California, and if they actually did hold fish, then, in theory at least, it would be a lot of fun to fish them, hypothetically speaking, that is.
Half the fun of creekin’ is finding a good secret creek on your own, keeping it in
your mind as your own private fishery, and only letting your most deserving buddies in on
the secret--your mute buddies of course. I’ve noticed that most anglers that have a fondness
for the small waters don’t name them either; I won’t break the tradition. Find your own, buddy.
Therefore, what I intend to do with this article is to describe some California small creek
experiences detailing the angling pleasures that they can provide without divulging any names,
to protect the innocent (creeks) of course.
Most small creeks hold small fish, but some small creeks hold some surprisingly large fish.
Those creeks are the real finds. And once found, best kept secret. There is a little west slope
middle Sierra Nevada creek that I spotted on a map and thought that it looked a likely candidate for my
attention. It was roughly at the same elevation and a tributary in the same major river system as
another favorite small–water–small–fish–creek that I regularly fish, and those are the reasons that
I thought that it looked a likely suspect. My other nearby creek holds native rainbows, beautiful
but small. I figured that this new creek would provide the same entertainments, only it was easier
to get to by about 15 minutes, so I went to investigate.
The first few fish I caught in this new creek were small rainbows as I had suspected that they would be.
It was a very small creek, about 3 CFS, the “C” here meaning cubic–centimeter. It was quite tiny. Little.
But then I caught a brown trout, a small one, but a brown nonetheless and I thought to myself,
“If there are small browns in here there is a chance that there might be bigger browns too.”
So I started paying a little more attention as I continued fishing. I spotted one of those pools
so typical of the west slope water courses: small waterfall of river sluicing between a narrowed
constriction in the granite riverbed, slow, dead–still deepish pool below, then an abrupt tail–out
where the water rapidly speeds up and drops into the next pool.
I peered over some mighty granite boulders into this pool I’ve mentioned, and I waited. Then I saw him. Brown trout, about 15 inches long. Maybe that’s not a huge trout for most spots, but all things are relative and a trout of this size in a creek of that size makes this 15 incher a relative titan in that shipyard. This trout seemed to have materialized out of nowhere and was making a circuit of the pool. I quickly tied on something that I thought that this fish might find more palatable than the perfectly good fly I already had on, and as I was tying on my new choice I glanced up at the pool to relocate Mr. Brownie, and holy shit! a 23 inch fish had apparently eaten the 15 inch fish I was gunning for and was now slowly swimming a lap in the place of the first fish! (I didn’t see the second fish eat the first, so the cannibalism is just a wild and fantastical speculation on my part, of course, but it must have happened.) Now a 15 incher is a big fish in this small water, but a 23 incher is an absolute leviathan for a creek like this!
“Taxidermy man back home gonna have a heart attack when he sees what I brung him!” said Quint.
“Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen–Moby Dick–Moby Dick!” said Ahab.
“I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat,” said Police Chief Brody.
“His mouth went dry, his heart down, Nick reeled in. He had never seen so big a trout,” thought Nick Adams (aka, E. Hemingway).
I know this fish was 23 inches because that’s how big he was and I watched him make his lap around what was obviously his pool, and then he sunk to the bottom and disappeared under a ledge down there. I hypothesized that this fish probably regularly patrolled around his pool to see if anything interestingly edible had blundered into it while he was in his house, like a wayward squirrel, drunken mallard, or suicidal fawn–just kidding, he probably couldn’t even fit a fawn in his mouth. I tied on a slender black marabou leech and waited. My hypothesis was confirmed about 5 minutes later when, sure enough, Moby un-slunk from his deep lair and began his pool-circling behavior. I cast my leech to the opposite end of the pool so as not to spook him and to allow my fly to sink to a goodly depth. He rounded the bend in the pool and slowly headed toward my offering.
As a patently ridiculous literary device I could at this moment of climax skip to some childhood reminiscence about my now dead old man and how he had passed down to me his passion for fishing small creeks, but my dad actually liked to sit in a boat and troll Ford Fenders in lakes and, oh ya, he’s still alive.
This big fish was now moving toward my fly, coming closer and closer, so I gave my line one small strip.
He saw the fly. I could tell he saw it because his alertness increased. Other than that he didn’t do much.
He increased his speed, but only barely. He didn’t zip after my fly like a bat after a gnat. He was in no
way worried that this possible prey item would get away. He displayed a puissance like the spider who sees a
fly get enmeshed in his web and knows that the hapless victim cannot overcome the adhesion of his snare.
He merely took notice. So I made one more strip. The colossal trout slowly kept coming. I stripped again…then
again…then one more time. He was nearly at my fly. I stripped again. He was only a foot away. I stripped again.
He kept coming and his nose came up to within an inch of my fly. I stripped again and he merely maintained his one
inch distance exactly. I kept up my slow strips with this veritable cetacean of a trout nosing my offering until I
had no more line to strip; the leader was in my guides and the fly was nearly at the tip of my rod. At this time I
swear that the fish looked up at me, noticed me for the first time, paused, then gave me the piscatorial equivalent
of the finger and slowly without concern turned and swam away to his benthic castle.
The preceding was just a notable example of an exciting incident that happened to me on a creek, but don’t get me wrong, I don’t fish creeks because they hold the best chance for catching the largest fish, because they don’t. Small creek pleasures are more sublime than just crass trophy hunting. Sometimes during the dog-hot days of summer I’ll spend a cool afternoon under the dogwoods on the mossy bank of a Sierra creek “sleeping like a baby with the snakes and the bugs,&rdqup; to quote Tom Waits, which is a hobby of mine. And that is a very pleasurable activity, (the bank napping, not the quoting of Waits), and is also easier to accomplish than catching a giant whopper trout in a tiny rill. I’m actually very accomplished at bank napping, by the way. I might even say that I’ve perfected the activity and am an expert, if you need instruction.
I often fish small creeks by myself. From where I live in Sacramento it is only an afternoon’s
commitment to drive from town to one of many of my favorite small west slope creeks. On most of these
forays I see no other people once I walk a bit from my truck. And since I really don’t like people at all
this is a good thing. Compare this to weekend fishing at a destination such as the Truckee, where often a
Glenshire parking area will be engorged with SUVs that have disgorged hordes of SOBs into all but the most
inaccessible of runs, of which there are no longer any. For many people social fishing, like shad
fishing, is a great deal of fun. I’m not many people.
In the summer the most common climactic difference between the valley lowlands and the creek infested highlands is temperature; it’s hot down low and it’s cool up high. Sometimes the difference can be much more dramatic. One day last summer I took my mountain bike out for a wrist-spraining and knee-abrading run up a very technical granite-domed trail that happens to parallel one of my favorite creeks. I tucked a short multi-piece 3 weight into my Camelback, just in case I felt like fishing, which I would. It was predicted to be an oppressively hot and suppressivly air-polluted day in Sacramento, but up at the creek trail it was coolish and the air was clearish. As I rode up the trail in the early afternoon the sun began to be frequently obscured behind big-puffy white clouds. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, so I’ll just cut to the cheese: at exactly the time when I decided to dismount from my trusty overpriced titanium steed and begin a little angling, the sky opened up and out fell rain and lightning. It was awesome in both the literal and colloquial meanings–the storm both filled me with awe and was just plain bitchin’. I fished in the downpour. This particular creek is spring-creek-like in that it has lots of long slow stretches and spooky trout, although it is not a spring creek. This day the fish were anything but spooky. The surface of the creek was so obscured with raindrop splooshes that it looked like it was the most eruptive bi-carb ever to ease a hangover. The fish apparently lost their ability to see through this disturbed surface. They lost their spook. All I had to do was to whap a big dry fly of any species onto the surface with as much splat as I could muster and often as not a trout would be on it like stink on brussel spouts. On a usual day on this creek this type of presentation would send every fish in the water into deep hiding.
This particular thunderstorm wasn’t satisfied with being merely excessive. It had more to give. I was just dressed in a t-shirt and lycra biking tights–ya, don’t even say it; they are practical for biking–and was drenched to the skin. This gear wasn’t much as rain gear. I was completely wetted, but I wasn’t cold, so I didn’t care about being wet. Unfortunately this dress was even less effective as lightning protection and the lightning was becoming really very impressive. I was afraid that it was going to impress on my skull and I finally got too spooked to fish. The stuff was flashing all around me and as I looked at the nearby big red firs and cedars and I noticed that many had blackened bark. I wondered how that might have happened, as I packed my lightning rod away…I’m outta here. “Beep beep. Zip tang!” As I careened down the trail the hail smacking my arms and face became really painful. By the time that I got to my truck there were inches of hail on the ground and I tried to drive down the dirt road back to town but it was too dangerous. I kept thinking that the nickel-sized hail was going to bust my windshield anyway, so I pulled under a big fir tree, (the lightning seemed to prefer the cedars), and waited it out.
Speaking of gear, creekin’ isn’t very gear-intensive, much to the annoyance of your average gear purveyor.
My favorite outfit is a short low-performance fiberglass 3 weight rod and a Sucrets box with a dozen or so flies.
That’s about all. No waders. Wet wading only for me when I go creekin’. I do wear wading boots with neoprene socks,
but I don’t pull the socks down over the tops of the boots and clip them to the laces as the manufacturer intends.
Instead I cut the shoelace clips off so they don’t inadvertently hook my line and I pull the socks up to my knees.
That way my shins are protected from getting all scraped up on the granite and buckbrush, since I wear shorts while
creekin’. I use the slow fiberglass rod because it excels at casting bushy flies short distances. Many of the creeks
I fish hold fish that would only justify the use of a 0 weight rod or smaller, but the 3 weight lines have enough mass
to cast a hopper or big attractor fly, whereas a 0 weight flyline struggles to push a fat #12 humpy. Leaders tippet
to 4x. Indicators are unnecessary as most fishing is within a rod&rsquols length, and I mostly use dry flies creekin’
anyway. How can you not want to do this?
My friend Preacher Bob had two flies only for creekin’, a size 12 royal wulff, and a size 12 yellow humpy.
Preacher Bob is perfectly built for creek fishing, like Legolas the elf, only smaller and sprightlier.
He would dance from boulder to fallen log to boulder with a zen-like concentration—not thinking about it
but instead just doing it with an un-conveyable focus. Preacher Bob caught a lot of fish on his creeks
with those flies. He once showed me one of his favorite creeks that he named “Cave Creek,” to throw
anyone who might overhear him talking about it off the track. “Cave Creek” wasn’t the name on the map,
but it was descriptive. The creek flowed in a cave of alder branches and leaves, and you had to get down
on your knees to even make a cast. Preacher Bob is gone now. He moved to Arizona. I still fish “Cave Creek”,
in his honor, of course.
