Opening Day
by: JimH
Dateline: 8/7/00
The last Saturday in April has huge significance in Northern Michigan. That of course is the "Trout Opener" and thousands of fishermen dream about that day all winter long. Winters last until almost April in Northern Michigan too! Back in 1964 when I was 10 years old the weeks prior to the opener were full of anticipation. We would sit at the kitchen table in the evening cleaning reels, repairing rod guides, sharpening hooks, and reliving stories about the previous year. The opener was also an excursion for us.
Our home was in Dimondale Michigan, which is near Lansing. Lansing is in the middle of the southern portion of the Lower Peninsula of the state, not too far from Detroit. Our cottage was near Gaylord Michigan and very close to the headwaters of the Manistee River. It was in the Lake Arrowhead development, which was way off the beaten path near the headwaters of one of Michigan’s more famous trout streams, the Manistee River.
Back in the 60’s most people did not know about this area so it was still fairly pristine. However several years before there were some men that had made their presence there fairly obvious. The lumberjacks, with Paul Bunyon’s help, went through and cut down all of the native White Pines that grew there. Of course I thought the Yellow Poplars and White Birch were very beautiful too. That whole area seemed to be a magical and wondrous place to me. When I walked through the stump infested meadows I would find old fire pits, rusted out coffee cups, broken ax handles, and old half rotten leather boots. I could just see the lumberjacks standing around a campfire in the morning telling tall tales. There was WasherWoman Lake, which got its name from the woman who camped on the lake and washed the clothes of the lumberjacks. I stumbled across a partially rusted and half buried wash board there once when I was a kid. It never occurred to me to pick it up and keep it. It would have seemed wrong, like vandalism, to remove things that were there. Those things belonged to that area and to another time.
WasherWoman Lake has a very small creek that comes out of it that is one part of the head waters of the Manistee River. There also is a fairly good sized cedar swamp that lays just to the west of Washer Woman lake that has a small stream flowing out of it. These two small tributaries come together just north of Mancelona road, which back then was just a narrow gravel road. That stream is the beginning of the North Branch of the Manistee River. This is where we used to spend opening day of trout season when I was a kid. If I close my eyes now I can still smell the cedar trees, hear the leaves of the poplars rustling in the breeze, and the sound of the river going through the culvert that went under Mancelona road. That river made a sound that was both eerie and wondrously beautiful at the same time.
Now my dad was always an easy going kind of fisherman who enjoyed a good nights sleep. Opening day was not going to cause him to loose any sleep. There was plenty of time to fish once he woke up and had a good breakfast. For my brother-in-law and I opening day was like a religion and we would lay awake most of the night watching the alarm clock and wishing we could make time fly! My brother-in-law, Dave was the antithesis of my father. He liked to do everything fast and he wanted to do it right now. I thought he was about the coolest person in the world. Kids aren’t big on waiting either.
Usually he was shaking me unnecessarily around 4:00 am on opening morning. "Throw your clothes on and let’s go!" he would say.
"Are we going to eat breakfast?" I would ask.
"BREAKFAST? The fish are biting and time is wasting!" he would whisper loudly. "Now hurry up and don’t wake your father." "He will bring us something to eat when he comes."
Now the "road" from our cottage to Mancelona road was only a two track that fishermen and hunters used. It was narrow, curvy, full of mud holes, big rocks, and it was impossible to drive over 10 or 15 miles per hour on it. Dave would drive 25 to 30 miles an hour on it all the time. If you have never flown, at 25 miles per hour, at four in the morning, in the dark, down a two track, dodging deer, grouse, mud holes and rocks you have not lived. I thought that was the way everyone got to the river. Seemed natural to me. It was after all "Opening Day"!
Where Mancelona road crossed the river there was a slightly widened place before and after the culvert to pull a car off the road. The few fishermen who knew about this place had created these "parking areas" over the years by forcing their car off the road as much as they could. You had to be careful though because the ground around there had lots of peat and silt "pockets" or deposits left by the lakes, swamps, and rivers that had covered the area after the glaciers had melted. If you accidentally got your car into one of these muddy peat bog areas you just might loose it! There were silt "holes" in the river too that you could lose a fisherman in. My brother-in-law would scare me into being careful with the story of the fisherman who stepped into one of those silt holes and all that was ever found of him was his hat circling slowly in a small eddy along the side of the river. I never put my weight down when crossing these with out testing the firmness first! But the wet, rich, peat black soil was also a godsend for fishermen. Those pockets were full of worms! We never worried about buying worms before we went fishing. A couple of turns with a spade in one of those pockets and you had all the worms you needed for a morning’s worth of fishing. My brother-in-law always carried a small folding army surplus spade in the back of his car. Didn’t everyone?
Every year at Kalkaska Michigan they had their annual Trout Festival. This was a big deal including a parade, dancing, eating, a queen, and all the other usual festival activities that took place. But of course the most important thing was the Trout Fishing Contest. Each Year the person with the biggest trout of each species would win a prize and the person with the biggest trout of all would win a boat, motor, trailer and a $10,000.00 check. In 1964 that was a lot of money. To a ten-year-old that was a fortune! Each year my brother-in-law would say, "Now Jim you make sure you concentrate on your fishing because you might win the contest!" I never really had any ambition to win the contest. I was happy just to be fishing on opening day with my Dad and my brother-in-law. (But I remember that in 1964 a 20 inch 4 pound brown trout won the whole thing.)
My brother-in-law was a very good fisherman and that was no accident either. He held a bunch of degrees and one of them was in biology. He knew where and how the trout lived so to speak. I remember watching him reach down into the river and pull a little stick house off of a rock. He would open the house and pull out a small worm like thing.
"Mayfly larvae" he would tell me. "Trout love them!" "If you ever find one of these fish with it."
Obviously we weren’t purists in those days. It would have been real hard to use a fly rod on that small brush choked stream anyway.
When I was ten years old hip boots swallowed me whole and were out of the question. So rather than wade up and down the stream like my brother-in-law did I could usually be found sitting on the edge of the culvert and letting a worm drift down into the big hole that the river made as it came gushing out of the culvert. Most opening mornings I could catch a half a dozen trout that way which was super fine with me. Some times I would out catch my Dad and my brother-in-law this way! In years to come though I did get the hip boots and discover all sorts of new wonders up and down the river.
Now this is a very small river that we are talking about and most of the trout that we caught in those days were from 5 to 10 inches in length. We had a mixture of native brook trout and stocked brown trout that lived in this stretch of the river. Once in awhile one of us would catch a decent brown in the 12 to 14 inch range. Those were big bragging fish and if we got one of those it would make it a "good" year! My brother-in-law said the native brookies were the best to eat.
"Those stocked brown trout taste like the damn liver pellets they feed them." he would complain.
On opening morning 1964, I started as usual on my culvert and Dave headed up stream. The swamp was up there and he liked the trout fishing amongst the cedar trees. Although Dave was also an avid bird watcher and well known wildlife artist. If the truth were known I think he liked the pair of Piliated Woodpeckers that nested up there as much as the fishing.
I always used a simple rig of a small dark bronze hook, (gold hooks spook the trout my brother-in-law said), and a split shot or two pinched on the line about a foot above the hook. I had to experiment with the number of split shot to get the weight just right. Too much weight and the rig would go right down to the bottom and not bounce down into the hole and the undercut bank. Too little weight and the rig would wash too fast right past the "sweet spot".
The sweet spot was a few old pointed logs that laid out into the river toward the middle of the whirlpool caused by the water coming out of the culvert. The water dug a deep hole under those logs. If you could get your worm to wash down into the hole without hooking one of those logs and you were lucky you would get a bite and catch a trout! Of course after you caught it you had to get it back out past the logs and keep it away from the other bushes that hung out over the river. No small feat for a man let alone a kid. But after a couple of years I got pretty good at it. When I was ten I was a pro! Or at least so I thought.
This year turned out to be pretty special. It had just started to get light and I let my first fresh worm go drifting back into the hole. Within a few seconds I felt a pretty good tug and so I set the hook and started reeling. Right off the bat I knew something was very different about this fish. It almost pulled me off the culvert and right into the river! I reeled as hard as I could and she came out of the logs before she realized what was going on. Then she decided it was time to fight! She came blasting straight up out of the water at least three feet, did a complete summersault and went back into the water nose first. You would have thought she was the 7:00 am entertainment at sea world! This was the biggest fish I had ever seen in my life! I yelled as loud as I could hoping Dave would hear me. I didn’t know exactly what he could do, but even moral support would be great at this point. This fish went down and rubbed the bottom of the river trying to break the line and then headed to the side where there was a bush. I would like to say that I was playing the fish expertly and keeping it out of danger with shrewd maneuvering of the rod. But all I was doing was hanging on and saying "oh god, oh god, oh god" over and over again. But miracles do happen! Some how this fish did not break my 6-LB line and did not wrap itself around any of the roots, branches, logs, and other things that were in the river. It finally wore itself out and came slowly over to the bank where I cradled it in my hands and lifted it out of the river.
At first I just stood there looking at this fish in amazement. It was the biggest most beautiful fish I had every seen in my life. A bigger more beautiful fish could not exist anywhere in the world. What to do with it? I did have an old hand me down wicker creel that I always put my trout in. I would usually pull some river grass to lay in the bottom of the creel. The trout would keep nicely lying on a bed of wet grass on a cool spring Michigan morning. But my creel was only about 14 inches wide and this fish was a lot longer than that! My creel had a 14 inch ruler built onto the top of it and this fishes head and tail both hung over the ends of the ruler! That had never happened before! Well I decided to just lay this fish down near by since it would not go into the creel. About that time the fish started flopping and almost got back to the river before I dove and grabbed it. Not such a good idea I decided. Dave was still no where in sight.
"Hey Jim, why aren’t you fishing, they bite best in the early morn… My god what the hell is that?" "Jim did you just catch that fish?" "That is the biggest brown trout I have ever seen any where and you caught that right here!" "Boy am I proud of you, just wait till your father gets here and sees that fish" "He’s not going to believe it and I’m still not sure I do!" "You sit right there and hang onto that fish." "Here let me measure it." "Wow this thing is 22 inches long and I bet it weighs at least 5 maybe 51/2 pounds!" "Probably a female that has not spawned yet." "Good thing you caught it this year, it was probably going to die after it spawned." "That is one old brown trout, probably one of the very first browns stocked in here and it went all these years with out being caught." "And now you’ve caught it Jimmy!" "Your father will be here soon and is going to be flabbergasted, and I ‘m willing to bet not able to fish this morning." "We will have to take this over to Kalkaska as soon he gets here." "We don’t want to wait too long, because a fish can loose weight the longer it is out of the water."
"Well I’m going to go over here and fish a bit more - you come and get me when your father gets here." "Man what a fish, I don’t believe it!"
So, he walks away and just leaves me there hanging onto this fish. I still don’t know what to do with it. I remembered a mud hole along the path that I always had a hard time getting around without sinking up over my knees into it. It would be a good cool wet place to keep the fish. I took it over there, laid it down, and went back to fishing. Shortly after I started fishing again a car came along the road but it was not my dad, so I just kept on fishing. A rather distinguished looking gentleman smoking a pipe and wearing a fancy fishing hat with flies in it walked up.
"How’s fishing?" he said.
"Pretty good!" I say. "I’ve caught one really big one so far today." As I try to act calm and cool, like I catch really big trout all the time.
"Really?" "That’s great, can I see it?"
"Oh, I laid it in a cool wet spot over there so it wouldn’t loose too much weight." I said, as if I was experienced at keeping big fish from loosing too much weight.
"Oh, OK." He said. "I am going to fish downstream, good luck to you."
"You may see my brother-in-law down there." I said. "Good luck to you too."
After a few minutes I heard a car door slam and saw the man’s car drive off kind of fast. I thought it was strange that he would leave so soon without fishing for very long. After all it was opening day and opening day was a special day.
Nothing can spoil opening day when you are 10 years old and have caught the biggest fish of your life.. I am forty-five years old now and still remember it like it was yesterday. I haven’t caught many fish bigger than that one. The nice thing about memories is that no one can steal them from you.
Fishtales One Year Ago: - 7/26/99 - Montie Walters on Lake Sinclair - Montie placed second in the Red Man All American this year, and he showed me some tournament winning patterns on his home lake.
Fishtales Two Years Ago: 08/03/98 - Growing Old - David Bass uses some words of wit to tell how growing old affects the fisherman.
