Tough fishing calls for perspective
Coming around the corner out of the Crowley Lake Marina can be brutal on opening morning, but I don't ever remember having to stop and stuff my hands under my jacket and clamp down on them under my armpits just to avoid frostbite. After only running a couple hundred yards, too! But that's what 10 knots of northeast breeze can do when the temperature hovers somewhere around the teens.

My poor brother Tom quickly found out that even a down snowboard jacket and longjohns were no match for the windchill factor. Worse, the trout were not eager to make things any better. We finally got a couple bumps near Sandy Point, but luckily kept going. Luckily, since that brought us to an area full of life between Alligator Point and Leighton Springs. The Coleman-strain rainbows planted last summer were chasing chironomid emergers up the water column and the competition had the fish fired up enough to slam the Owner Cultiva MiraShad and Rip'N Minnows we towed behind the boat.

An attempt to set up and fish bait in hopes of even more hookups turned out to be a waste of time -- as in we could have probably scored more fish on the troll and ended up with only one bait biter.

A daylong, relentless attempt to get in a full-scale Crowley bite on big fish only served to make my brother cranky and resentful. He started talking about Basque food and casinos about noontime. I noted there was nothing wrong that a few biting fish wouldn't fix, but the fish didn't step up to the plate. I realized the tables had turned -- I was the guy running the boat who wouldn't go in even though the fishing sucked. How often have I grumbled about "beating a dead horse" on doomed trips out on the salt when some skipper was determined to salvage the day (and story)? Too many times.

So the next day we slept in and Tom got to feeling better by hitting a local June Loop stream, where he caught and released a brown trout. Then we filled the cooler with beverages, found a beach on Grant Lake (hard to do with the lake full to the brim), put some lines in the water and played bocci ball and enjoyed the sunshine. We even caught a couple nice Kamloops that were dark with spawning colors. "Now this is fishing," was Tom's response.

Sometimes fishing is easy as pie, sometimes fishing is brutal work with nothing to show for it, and sometimes there are great rewards for equally intense efforts. At times you need to step it up a notch to match the intensity and other times you have to back off and just go looking for a good time.

Crowley seemed like it was already in its transition mode, with the midge hatches well underway and a lot of the fish up in the streams spawning. A full lake didn't make it any easier to find the fish that stayed behind (Coleman's are fall spawners) and as usual leadcore trollers had the biggest fish, a pair of cutthroats over 5 pounds. The 11-4 brown caught on a Rapala that won opening day honors was so ugly and washed out it looked like it had been in a freezer for six months, but the guys who caught it said that was because they caught it early and pulled it around for 11 hours and they did have some beautiful smaller browns to go with it.

Meanwhile sometime in the next few weeks the water is going to stabilize (it was dropping going into the opener) on Crowley, the fish are going to get back in the lake, rejuvenate and concentrate in the usual hot spots and the fly, bait and troll bites will enjoy some magical moments. It's all a matter of time. And timing.