Everything after that is a bonus | Hatch Magazine

At dinner last night, Bob DeMott told me we’d fish on Hebgen Lake this morning, followed by a more traditional trip down the Madison River in the afternoon. I said that sounded good, and I meant it. But I’ve mainly fished on rivers for the last few decades, and I was most excited about the Madison. Moving water sings to me, both figuratively and literally. I love how a river pushes me around—even shoves me—when I wade. Or how it delivers me downstream like royalty in a rickshaw when I float. Rivers are alive, and when I pay attention, I hear them breathe. But despite all my admiration of waters that move, I first learned to love fishing on a lake.

I did most of my childhood fishing on foot, roaming around a pair of soggy-banked pay-to-fish lakes with my mom close to our home. But when the company my stepfather worked for hired Biebel Brothers Roofing, we got permission to fish on the Biebel family lake in nearby Freeburg, Illinois. Some guys in gray flannel suits ordered their second Bombay Sapphire martini, signed a contract, and, just like that, my mom and I were mariners. The Biebels had a hundred-acre farm for cows, chickens, and crops, and in its middle, they dug a twenty-acre amoeba-shaped pond and stocked it with sunfish, bass, and channel catfish. We could fish from one of their aluminum johnboats any time we wanted, provided we closed the gates behind us and returned any boat we borrowed to its original upside-down position on the bank.

At first, we rowed for short distances with oars that came with the boats. After my mom bought a used Minn Kota electric motor, we powered into all the amoeba coves like Bill Dance or Roland Martin. We used the same fishing methods that worked from the bank: a worm impaled on a bait hook, a split shot squeezed onto the line above that, and a plastic or balsa bobber to float the rig and signal the strikes. These were harvesting trips, and we filled our cheap Styrofoam cooler—distinguished by its duct-tape reinforced corners—with some of the fattest redear sunfish my mom had ever seen. “Bigger than shit,” she’d say, assessing both the size of our fish and the scale of our accomplishment. We cast toward the commotion when the fish were on their spawning beds in the spring. Most of the time, though, we threw our bait at promising spots in the shade or around logs. “Look at us, sitting on our asses catching fish,” she’d say while using the fading butt of her Winston to fire up another.

Our guide Patrick says the forecast calls for an overcast sky with little wind, and if the breeze stays mild, we might want to stay on the lake in the afternoon. The lake is a twelve-thousand-acre reservoir held back by an eighty-five-foot-high dam. Its sixty-five miles of shoreline outline the irregular shape of an asymmetric inkblot with a body and three extended arms. The Madison and Grayling arms project to the east—the pathway to the dam spreads to the northwest. Montana Power Company built the dam in 1914, but not to generate hydroelectric power. Instead, the dam’s job is to store water and regulate the river’s flow to the power plants and other reservoirs farther downstream. One of those is the smaller lake caused by the earthquake in 1959, just a couple of river miles below the dam.

Patrick grew up on the Salmon River in Connecticut, where he found a job in the fly-fishing department of an outdoor specialty store, learned to tie flies, and caught the unique virus that causes young men and women from all social and economic backgrounds to shun traditional careers in favor of long hours and financial uncertainty. Fifteen years ago, he migrated west to Montana, running—as many young people do—away from an old way of life and toward a new one. In his words, he was spinning in circles like a compass with a broken needle and going nowhere fast.

He found his first job in Montana at a fly shop in Twin Bridges. Later, when he applied for a position with Blue Ribbon Flies in West Yellowstone, Craig Mathews didn’t ask him to submit a résumé. Instead, he asked him to write a short essay explaining why he wanted the job. Traditional résumés tell employers what a prospective employee has done and where they’ve done it. Craig didn’t want to know those things. Instead of where Patrick worked, Craig wanted to know why Patrick worked. Rather than how many clients he had guided, Craig wanted to know how Patrick felt when he guided them. Craig Mathews wanted to know who—not what—Patrick Daigle was.

“Was there a particular thing you wrote in that essay that caught Craig’s attention?” I ask.

“I can’t remember what I wrote, but I remember being honest and convincing. I had to be convincing. I don’t like being told no when it comes to applying for a job.”

We put Patrick’s boat in the lake at a public ramp that looks and feels like private property. No signs mark the place, so I suspect locals do most of the launches here. It isn’t exactly a secret spot, but visitors would have had trouble finding it in the days before satellite maps. To be clear, we put Patrick’s boat in the lake is another way to say Bob and I relieved ourselves in the bushes and pretended to do something useful while Patrick launched his boat. Both Bob and I are experienced clients. We’re good at staying out of the way without looking like our only job is to stay out of the way.

Patrick rows away from the ramp and lays out the plan. For trout, a river is much like a full-service restaurant with an attentive staff. The fish find a nice seat, and the current brings all the food straight to their table. A lake is more like a buffet, with a sideboard drifting around the room. When the trout wants another crumpet, they have to chase it down themselves. At first, most of the action is out of sight, but when a fish takes its next bite at or just below the surface, we see a familiar rise form. But, unlike in a river, the next time the fish eats a bug, it’s in a different spot.

Patrick says to look carefully at the ring when we see a rise. If the dorsal fin and tail breach the surface, the direction the fish is swimming should be obvious. As long as the flies don’t have hooks in them, the trout rarely go tail over teakettle when they eat one. He tells us that even when we don’t see fins, we should be able to see a leading and trailing edge to the ring. In his essay “Re-Reading the Rise,” John Juracek stresses, “The high side of the rise always indicates the direction the fish was facing at the time he rose.”

Patrick quizzes us when we see our first.

“That one’s going to our left,” Bob says.

Patrick asks what I think.

“Yeah, uh, what Bob said.”

A ceiling of white clouds with gray splotches covers the sky as far as we can see. A floor as calm as a worn-out puppy spreads around us. Outside of the occasional rise forms, another drift boat with two anglers is the only disturbance on the lake. “These are perfect conditions,” Patrick says. We’re in a classic drift boat, complete with braces to stabilize our legs if we stand. But Patrick tells us we’ll do much better if we can stay seated when we cast.

“I have no problem with that,” Bob says.

“How about you, Tim? Will that work?” Patrick asks.

“Yeah, uh, what Bob said.”

The next item on the docket is a discussion about terminal tackle. Bob and I both hope to catch some fish on the surface, but Patrick says our best chance in the morning will be below it. We’ll have a much better chance to take them up top later in the day when we see some steady risers. This is our court, though, so he tells us he’ll defer to our judgment.

“Let’s start below the surface now, and move to dry flies later,” Bob says.

“How about you, Tim? Will that work?” Patrick asks.

“Yeah, uh, what Bob said.”

Even though it might sound that way, I’m not parroting Bob. Perhaps regarding the direction of that riser, but I’m agnostic about how we cast and fish. As a kid, my experience with lake fishing involved aluminum johnboats, tin cans filled with worms, and duct-taped Styrofoam coolers. We’re in a fiberglass drift boat with plastic boxes full of tiny flies and a pressure-injected polyurethane cooler strong enough to withstand an attack by a bear. We aren’t in my district. Jimmy Buffett says clichés are a good way to say what we mean and mean what we say. In that spirit, I’m a fish out of water and happy to give Bob full power of attorney.

Patrick sets us up with two flies and a bobber, or an “indicator” as he calls it. He makes the indicators himself out of foam with an adhesive backing. Below the float, we have two flies: a nymph and an emerger. After Patrick rigs our rods, a fish shows itself about one hundred feet to the port-bow side of the boat. Patrick sculls into position, then tells Bob to cast. Bob puts the cast exactly where it needs to be, and when the tiny indicator trembles like a flickering flame, he sets the hook, and Patrick yells, “Hell yes!” It’s a gorgeous fish—about a foot and a half long with an explosive peach rouge on its cheek. We’ve been on the lake for twenty minutes.

“Bogey at nine o’clock,” Patrick announces, then quietly crab strokes the boat into a position for me to cast.

“There, now cast to the left of that ring.”

Casting over your opposite shoulder is a vital skill in fly fishing, and it’s one of the few special techniques I do well. I learned to do this for wade fishing in streams, but it pays off in a boat too. Your guide is generally delighted when your hooks hurtle over the bow or stern instead of buzzing their skull like a stable fly. Some guides even declare the region above their head a no-fly zone, especially when the hooks have numbers with single digits. I get the flies where they need to be, or at least close enough for Patrick to say, “Leave it there.” When the tiny orange dot twitches, I’m on to my first Hebgen rainbow—an energetic fish that jumps three times before Patrick gets it into the net. It’s a couple of inches shorter than the one Bob caught and noticeably thinner, but the two fish appear to use the same rouge on their cheeks. We’ve been on the lake for less than half an hour.

After Bob and I alternate through a few more fish—each apparently siblings to the first ones we caught—Patrick asks if we want to switch to dry flies and catch some fish on the surface.

“You guys are casting well. You’ll do fine with dries,” he says.

“That sounds great to me,” Bob answers.

“What do you think, Tim?”

“Yeah, uh, what Bob said.”

Patrick removes the indicators and flies, lengthens our leaders, and sets us up with a sparse poly-wing spinner he ties just for these fish. Then he asks me to swap seats so he can use the motor to propel us to a place he expects to have more surface-feeding fish.

“Don’t accidentally hit that cleat with your foot and drop the anchor while we’re motoring,” he tells me.

“Is it okay if I do it on purpose?”

A smart-ass client is right behind bananas on the list of things guides love to have in their boat. Luckily for me, it’s poor business practice for a guide to throw a sport overboard in the middle of a lake, and I’m pretty sure Patrick laughed. When we get as close to shore as we can without our wake alerting the fish, Patrick turns off the motor, and we swap spots again. I see some riffles where a small stream enters the lake and assume this is where Patrick plans to take us. I’m right about our destination but wrong about the riffles. The broken water is a pod of trout—some over two feet long—gorging on flies like they’re auditioning for the role of the shark in Spielberg’s next Jaws movie.

“There are several fish in there, but you’ll be lucky to catch two each before we put them down. Pick a particular fish, study its feeding pattern, then make your cast count.”

I feel my heart pounding in my chest, and I suspect Bob feels his too. We’ve both caught big trout on dry flies before, but there’s something special about this moment. If bright sunshine caused our line to draw sharp shadows across the surface, or a steady wind made our boat and casts hard to control, we could blame our failure on harsh conditions. But today is cloudy and calm. Every dollar we leave on the table is our failing and our failing alone. I know it, Patrick knows it, and I think Bob knows it too.

Bob picks a fish and makes a perfect cast. The rainbow takes the fly and launches into the air. After Patrick nets it, I take my turn. My cast isn’t as good as Bob’s, but it’s good enough for the fish. Like the ones we caught with nymphs, my fish is a little smaller than Bob’s. The first time, I thought this was just a coincidence, but now I wonder what’s happening. I don’t know if it’s mojo or juju, but Bob has something I don’t. After Bob and I each catch another fish, the orgy is over, just like Patrick said it would be. “We’ll head over to another spot and let these fish rest. They’ll start eating again in a bit,” he tells us.

A plane flies low overhead while we eat lunch. Besides being a ski instructor in the winter, Patrick is a volunteer firefighter, and he tells us this plane is carrying local smoke jumpers on a weekly training mission. In Spring Creek, Nick Lyons describes how heavy winds once blew a friend in a float tube across one arm of this lake, depositing him in some brush on the opposite shore from his car. Just as the fellow resolved to shuffle his way around the arm, he saw a helicopter and mistook it for firefighters on a training mission. Hoping for a leisurely ride back, his friend waved and called out, then stopped when he saw they were “depositing something from a scrotum-like net” beneath the copter. It turns out they were relocating a grizzly, so his friend hid in the bushes until the wind died down enough for him to kick his way back to the other side of the lake—another reason to be thankful for today’s calm conditions.

After lunch, we fish over a dense field of underwater vegetation. Patrick warns that if a hooked fish burrows into the foliage, we’ll have little chance of getting them out. I provide compelling proof of Patrick’s point first, then—to leave no doubt—Bob corroborates with a fish that appears to be a couple of inches longer than mine. While Patrick replaces Bob’s fly, I hook a fish about thirty feet from the boat’s port side. Not wanting to leave another of Patrick’s flies in the weeds, I violate the “no stand” rule and hold my rod high over my head to keep the fish near the surface. The trout flips, flops, and rolls, but the tippet doesn’t break. Bob puts the net in the water, I direct the commotion toward it, and we miraculously land the fish.

“Damn, Tim, you rodeoed that trout like Jimmy Houston,” Patrick says.

Patrick’s spinner works whenever Bob or I put it near an active fish for much of the afternoon. Around 2 p.m., though, the fish get picky, and we experiment with different flies. After a few failures, I ask Patrick if I can try a size 18 parachute Borcher’s Drake, a fly that shows up in the bins of very few fly shops outside of Michigan. It’s worked for me on the Big Hole and Missouri rivers, so maybe it will work here. He looks over the fly and says, “Sure, try it.” I tie it on, make two false casts out of the fish’s view, then drop the fly right where Patrick tells me to drop it. The little white tuft of hair disappears into a gulp, then snaps off when I set the hook too hard.

“Just for the record, I didn’t tie that knot,” Patrick reminds me, getting even, I suppose, for my anchor-cleat remark.

A pelican walks slowly and deliberately along the shallow water off the shore. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to move. But when I stare at it, I see its right leg lift slowly from the water, move forward, then drop back in. Then the left leg follows the same process. “Watch this,” Patrick says when the pelican stops moving. First, the bird bends its neck back so that its head sits flat on top of its body. Next, it moves its head forward as slowly as the shadow on a sundial. When everything aligns, the bird thrusts its beak into the water, flaps its wings to stabilize its body, then lifts its head with what Patrick says is the largest trout he’s ever seen a pelican catch. The bird has the fish in a T-bone position at first, but with three shakes of its head, the trout’s nose points toward the pelican’s throat, and the bird clamps its huge beak shut. The trout shakes and shudders in the pouch, much like it would in Patrick’s net. Then the pelican points its head upward, extends its neck, and we watch one of the largest fish we’ve seen today slide down the bird’s esophagus and into its stomach. It is one of the most incredible acts of nature I’ve ever seen.

“Look at us, sitting on our asses catching fish. Bigger than shit,” I imagine my mom saying. So I say it myself. A little after 5 p.m., Patrick motors us back to shore. “Astonishing to see the size and number of these fish—all the hype and stories are true about gulper fishing,” Bob will later write in his journal. Patrick says it was a great day too, but I know he’s seen many. He floats famous rivers—hikes, rides, and camps in the Yellowstone backcountry. Patrick would be it if there were such a thing as a typical Yellowstone guide. Like onions, guides often look the same from a distance. But when you peel off the layers, they are all unique. On our drive back to Cameron, I ask Patrick if he found what he was looking for in Montana after spinning out of control in Connecticut.

“I try my best to keep life in perspective. Having been fortunate to have rowed a drift boat for fifteen years now, I have been blessed with many priceless life lessons. I’ve had many people with health struggles in my boat or on my horse trips, and they’ve shared insights about life being taken out from under them like a rug. Those moments tend to leave an impression. It’s not about quantity for me anymore—it’s more about quality and being grateful for just being healthy enough to be on the water. Everything after that is a bonus.”

Editor’s note: “Everything after that is a bonus” is an excerpt from the award-winning book, A Cast Away in Montana, from longtime and frequent Hatch Magazine contributor Tim Schulz. The book is available through Amazon and wherever books are sold.