First Spring Fishing Trip

My first (early) spring fishing trip to northeast Iowa looked promising. The forecast was for sun and upper 50s on Wednesday, then clouds and lower 60s Thursday, then down to upper 40s Friday morning. Most of the snow in the valleys has melted but not so much as to flood the streams. Last year’s vegetation has been tamped down by winter’s snow and early flooding a couple of weeks ago, making for easy footing along the banks. And there never is much pressure this early in the season.

My first stop was Ensign Hollow, north of Strawberry Point, a small, winding catch-and-release, artificial-only stream. For half a mile up the stream, stopping at maybe a dozen small runs and riffles, I didn’t see or feel a fish. But it’s typical this time of the year, in high water, for the fish to spend much of the day hunkered under bank hides, not feeding, so I didn’t get frustrated, just enjoyed being outside in the warmth, the quiet, the only sound of birds and running stream. And in the next-to-the-last run on the upper part of the stream, a run where I’ve had luck in the past, I did hook into a 10-inch brown trout (good sized for this stream) that I maneuvered to the lower end of the run where I would have had to slip down the bank into the water to release it if it wouldn’t have thankfully flipped the fly out of its lip before I had to.

But Ensign Hollow – and one fish – would wind up being the highlight of the trip.

I drove on up to Decorah, where I was spending the night, and since it was still mid-afternoon, decided to drive to South Pine, a tiny stream that holds the only population of native brook trout in Iowa. I’ve fished South Pine probably half a dozen times, and I don’t think I’ve once been able to find the parking area without getting lost in the maze of dirt roads in the area. This time I was lost for nearly an hour before finally recognizing where I was and where I needed to go. To get to the stream from the parking area, you need to hike down beside a corn field, then further down through a narrow valley, without a path of any kind, through trees, vines, brush, and, this time of year, snow. I remembered the trek being about half a mile, but as I cut my way through the thicket, I realized it was closer to a mile. And when I finally got to the stream, I was reminded why so few make the effort to get there.

South Pine is no more than two or three feet wide in most places, widening out to ten to twelve next to the bluffs, but too shallow and slow there to hold fish. As I walked upstream, I quickly saw that there wasn’t much fishing on the stream – the water was low, there were several bank hides that had collapsed into the water, and there were no fish visible in the clear water. I walked the quarter mile up from the fence at the east end of the stream, but was only able to put my fly into two small runs, with no fish apparent. A frustrating trek. But not as frustrating as the trek back to the car. I didn’t get lost, but I did get fouled in the snow and brush. At a certain point, I looked up the hill, along a deer run, and thought it might be best to hike up the hill, which I assumed would lead me to the cornfield that would lead to the car. But that hike would be circuitous, losing the deer run, through deep snow at times, thickets of vine, some with thorns. By the time I reached the corn field out of the woods, I was sweating and looking out over a landscape of rubble and snow and mud that I only thought led back to the car. Fortunately, it did, finally. And I drove back to Decorah, checked into the motel, and had a nice dinner in town that night, not fish.

The next morning I drove up through Waukon, north to one of my favorite streams, Waterloo, to fish the take-and-release section south of the Highway 76 bridge, near the Minnesota border. I was surprised to see a truck in the parking area, but figured the stream was long enough for two of us. I’d heard on the news in the morning that flooding was expected in the next few days, and was worried the water might already be high and muddy. It was a bit higher than usual, not too bad. But the fish didn’t seem to be anywhere in the stream. I fished from the parking area up to the bridge, not able to get down the bank to about half of the runs or pools because of my bad knee, but didn’t get even a bump, let alone a strike or see a sign of a fish. As I was fishing one of the last pools back near the parking lot, the other fisher from the truck came over and asked how I was doing. “Nothing,” I said. “That makes me feel better,” he said. “Nothing for me either.” And that made me feel somewhat better as well. It wasn’t something I was or wasn’t doing. Or at least I was or wasn’t doing the same wrong thing as this other sorry angler.

But as I waded through the stream back to the parking lot, and across the still melting snow, I stopped and just stood still, looking down the valley, at the bare gray trees etched against the snow on the hills, the soft whisper of the wind. And that seemed enough, worth it. As the old saw goes, it's called “fishing,” not “catching.”