By M.R. Montgomery, Globe Staff
WOODSTOCK, VT. -- Two kinds of things become intensely colorful here in
central Vermont at the end of September -- tree leaves and trout.
If fall foliage season is a time of apparent dying, with just the hope of
renewal in spring, it is the season of new life in the brooks and rivers that
come down from the Green Mountains. Fall marks the beginning of spawning
behavior for native brook trout and the feral brown trout of the Ottauquechee
and White River drainages and the west-flowing rivers that run to Lake
Champlain.
The trout are always colorful, both the purple-spotted brown trout and the
red-spotted brook trout. They become almost incandescent as they approach the
act of procreation. The intenser colors make them more attractive to each
other on the spawning grounds and more beautiful to catch-and-release anglers
who can hold one for a moment and admire it. They still have funny faces, but
they are gorgeous in fall.
Vermont's trout fishing, on the right day and in the right place, can equal
most places in North America that I have fished. The difference between
Vermont's angling and what you will find in the West is pretty simple: It's
more consistent out West, particularly in the slow spring creeks and the
tailwater rivers below the big dams where water temperature and flow are
constant.
Here in Vermont, the old philosopher Heraclitus is right: ''You could not
step twice into the same rivers.'' Flows change with every local summer
thunderstorm or drenching fall rain, days of heat or cold move fish into the
spring-fed sections where the water temperature is more desirable. In fall,
most aquatic insects stop hatching, defeating the unprepared artificial-fly
angler. The grasshoppers sit tight, the flying ants aren't airborne. But
something is always all right, somewhere. What you need is local knowledge
and real-time information. This makes it more of a challenge, and more fun,
more quirkily exciting than going to a Montana spring creek where the fish are
all big and the same fly species hatch day after day.
Frankly, I dismissed Vermont from my angler's calendar years ago when I
typed for the Sports Department of this newspaper and wrote about such things
for a living. I was running with the crowd, so to speak, and the crowd was
always better at talking about trout than showing me one. In the last few
years, I've started fishing with Jack Sapia, who runs a couple of tackle shops
and a guide service, Woodstock Outfitters, and that has made all the
difference in my attitude.
From now until mid-October -- even to the very end of the Vermont trout
season on the last Sunday in October if the weather is decent -- two very
interesting things start to happen for the angler, one on the big rivers like
the White, another on the branches and small creeks. I knew nothing of this,
until Sapia taught me. And this is a particularly good fall to explore
Vermont's rivers. A wet, cool summer has kept even the smallest streams
running cold, and the big rivers that usually get too warm are in excellent
shape.
On the bigger water, the Ottauqueeche and the White near Woodstock, a
consistent daily hatch of aquatic insects begins later this month, a
gentlemanly hatch from around 9 a.m. to 3 or 4 p.m. The only problem is the
hatching mayfly is the very small Little Blue-winged Olive, not much bigger
than this capital ''O,'' and the imitation has to be equally tiny.
In the smaller headwaters, things get completely out of hand. Creeks that
hold mostly 6- to 10-inch resident brook trout are suddenly hosts to 16- to
24-inch brown trout looking for a place to set up light housekeeping in early
November. It takes nerves of graphite fiber to not strike too fast and too
hard when one of the big trout rises after an hour of fishing to tiddlers.
And while hatches of flies are slowing down and frosts have stilled most of
the grasshoppers and crickets (which can be imitated with large flies, easily
visible to the fish and the angler), both brook and brown trout get aggressive
and territorial and will hit large streamer flies fished deep near the
spawning beds. You simply cannot tell what is going to happen next, and that
is the fun of it.
Vermont does have a reputation for having lots of virtually uncatchable
fish, largely due to the popularity of the Battenkill River near Manchester,
Vt. The Battenkill fish, living near the Orvis Factory Store, have seen more
pairs of waders in their lives than any trout east of, say, Nelson Spring
Creek by Livingston, Mont., and they are warier than nature intended them to
be.
There is considerable fishing pressure on the White and the 'Quechee, but
never the amount that the Battenkill fish endure. And the small-stream brook
trout of centralVermont have a remarkable character that endears them to
anglers -- they have no memory and, like a domestic duck, wake up to a
brand-new world every morning and fearlessly take the same artificial fly that
they took the day before.
And they are in the unlikeliest places. The small brook that runs south
along Vermont Route 12 from above Barnard to the 'Quechee River below
Woodstock has the larger-than-reality name of Gulf Stream. But stop at the
first bridge and look down, and you'll see the white-edged fins of brook
trout, not all of them minnows. That is also one of the prettier black-top
roads in Vermont for fall foliage, if you insist on looking up instead of
down.
Sapia and I have fished perhaps 10 small rivers (or large brooks) within a
half-hour drive of either of his two stores -- Woodstock Outfitters on Main
Street in Woodstock, Vermont Bound on Route 4 just downhill toward Rutland
from the Pico ski area entrance. Some are pure brook trout water, a few have
all three wild trout found in Vermont's running water: rainbows, brookies and
browns. And I never catch the big brown. When it comes up and smashes at a
fly, I react with abandon and break it off at the end of the leader. And
Sapia is enough of a gentleman to say, ''I would have liked to have seen that
fish up close,'' and leave it at that.
Guiding anglers, from beginners to experts, is a trying and difficult
buisness some days, but Sapiahas collected a small group of native Vermonters
who guide us tourists with the kind of rural goodhumor and patience that makes
it bearable for everyone on a bad day and excellent fun the rest of the time.
''The trick to this buisness,'' he said last month when I was up for the
day, ''is flexibility and personal attention. We won't fish more than two
anglers to a guide. If it's a party of three, we put on a second guide. You
can't take five or six people with one guide to one of these little rivers
where the fish are lying in a few special spots and expect anything good to
happen.''
He has one repeat customer (about 80 percent of his business is repeat)
who can only fish for a couple of hours, early in the morning, before the wife
is up and around in the motel and ready to go shopping. ''So, I find out where
the fishing is good at first light from my guides or customers, and off we go
for two hours.''
Most people who are taking up fly-fishing, and there are a multitude of
them, begin in summer. There is at least one good argument for starting in
fall, especially with a guide service that can supply you with waders and
everything else you need to find out if you actually like the sport: No Biting
Bugs. There may be a few black flies around this week, but they are not as
surly as when they hatch in the spring. Mosquitoes are a rarity after a good
frost. If leaf-peeping coincided with black fly season, there wouldn't be a
tourism buisness in New England.
Published 09/15/96 in the Boston Suday Globe's Travel Section.
