Traverse City Record-Eagle

Dave Richey

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August 2, 2008

Dave Richey: Creating our own insect hatch

BY DAVE RICHEY

Catching grasshoppers for bait was a hoot as well as a necessity when twin brother and I were teenagers. We'd walk or run through a dusty late-summer field, and up the hoppers would flutter, flying in all directions including back over our heads or into our face.

Half the time we wound up slapping each other with our hats as we both closed in on the same bug. That would lead to a few cuffs from each of us before, as if by an unspoken treaty, we'd stop committing mayhem on each other and return to gathering bait.

We both carried a Prince Albert pipe tobacco can, and would stuff our grasshopper catch into the empty tobacco tins and carry them in our shirt pocket. Some folks thought we might be puffing on a pipe or rolling our own smokes, but we just collected empty tobacco tins from a pipe smoker.

We mostly used our old and bedraggled floppy fishing hats as a tool to stun the insects, but it pushed such a wave of air ahead of it that the hoppers easily avoided the oncoming hat. We needed something different, and then tried fly swatters but they didn't work as well as we had hoped.

We soon stumbled onto an old badminton racquet with some broken strings but it served our bait-gathering purposes. We weren't playing badminton with it; we were using it to collect trout fishing bait. We just couldn't be overly exuberant and take our best home run swings otherwise we'd strain the grasshopper through the mesh, and our bait was literally turned inside out, which made it very difficult to put on a hook.

"He won't have the guts to do that again," said our father, who would sit in the car and watch his two sons collect fish bait with this rather bizarre and unorthodox method. No one we saw in those days ever had hoppers for sale, and even if they had, we didn't have the money to buy any.

The trick was to rap the hopper just hard enough with the racquet to stun them, pick 'em up and stick the bait in our Prince Albert cans. The can was of an ideal size, and depending on the day and the appetite of the local trout, one tin often lasted most of a fishing day.

If not, we'd repeat our bait-gathering operation again. It could be a very hot and dirty job during summer's Dog Days, and the sight of one or two tow-headed boys carrying fishing rods and a badminton racquet on a trout stream made for a rather odd sight.

Back in the late 1950s, Ernie Schwiebert wrote a definitive book called "Matching The Hatch." We not only matched the grasshopper hatch in those days, but our innovative fishing method actually created the hatch. It was so simple one wondered why others never tried it.

Too much work, I suspect. Chasing hoppers in the hot sun was a job best suited to young kids, not older people.

We were predatory young squirts back in 1952, and were always looking for an edge and were not above fishing with bait if necessary. My late brother George and I loved fly fishing, but there were times on the mainstream Sturgeon River in Cheboygan County, when very few fish were caught on flies.

What we knew about hatches could be stuck in our ear and there would be plenty of room left for a little finger. Our fly rod, a battered old creaky eight-foot fiberglass rod, was missing one lower guide. It was all we had. We knew enough to dry our fly line at night, but that was about the extent of our fly-fishing knowledge.

Our flies were gaudy Red Ibis', Jock Scott, Mickey Finn and other such patterns from Japan. We didn't own a fly big enough to imitate a grasshopper.

But we had a quick cure for that problem. We'd locate a spot near a grassy river bank where the occasional grasshopper would fall off a stem of grass or weed, and tumble into the water. If it was a hotspot, the hapless 'hopper would be greeted immediately by the gaping maw of a nice brown trout looking for a quick lunch.

Many of these trout were in the 12- to 15-inch class, and a great catch for young teenagers. A few fish would measure 16 to 20 inches, and on occasion we'd hook a 24-incher, and it would promptly destroy the 4X tippet at the end of our leader and dash any dreams we may have had about taking a lunker brown trout.

This was a two-man program, and we were the two young men of 13 or 14 who could and did pull it off. We would create a hopper hatch the likes of which few brown trout had ever seen. None seemed able to completely ignore our man-made hatch.

We quickly learned that invention often comes about as a result of a specific need. We needed hoppers for bait, and it was up to us to gather and use them as efficiently as possible. Thus a plan was born.

One of us would be the fisherman and one was the hatch maker. The latter job usually fell to me while George handled the casting part because he was much more accurate at casting than me.

We knew most of the key locations for good trout, and I'd wade across the river upstream from his casting position, climb the bank and slowly and very softly, make my way downstream to a hotspot. George, in the meantime, had waded into position below and slightly to one side of where we knew a good brown trout lived.

I'd kneel in the tall grass and weeds along the bank and give the fish time to settle down from my stealthy approach and from that of my brother. We'd remain motionless for 15 minutes, not wading or changing positions on the ground, and then the hatch would begin.

I'd ease a grasshopper from the Prince Albert can, close my hand around it, shake it back and forth to daze the insect, and softly toss the addled hopper onto the river 10-15 feet above the suspected trout holding area. Ten seconds later would come the second dazed grasshopper of our hatch, and it might drift on downstream or be sucked under by a nice brown trout during a classic head-to-tail rise.

Another woozy hopper would hit the water 10 seconds later, and the fish would suck it off the surface with a slurp. I'd pitch out another, and the fish would inhale it. It usually didn't take too long in those days to get the attention of a good brown trout.

Once four or five meaty 'hoppers were sipped off the water came the unspoken signal for George to softly lob-cast a hooked grasshopper into the right location. The hopper would land with a tiny splash, drift a few feet, and the trout would rise and take it off the surface.

George would salute the fish softly to set the hook, and the pool or run would come alive with splashing water. He would delicately ease the fish out into open water, and fight a light-handed battle with the hooked fish. Sometimes it would break off, but often he would land a nice trout.

And then we would switch positions at another key location upstream or down from our starting point. I'd try to emulate his soft casts, and together the Richey twins cut a small swath through the local brown trout population. Many good trout were landed and released, and a few were chosen to serve as our evening meal when cooked over an open fire with some pork & beans and fried spuds.

Sitting on our heels, outside of our tent camp in the woods overlooking the river and cooking our own meals, seemed to be the greatest upbringing a kid could have. We were responsible only to ourselves, and we had to maintain a clean camp, make our own beds, air out our sleeping bags, do dishes and everything else.

You see, we were on our own. Our parents allowed us to camp all summer unsupervised on the Sturgeon River, and although George wasn't there during much of the summer months because he was playing baseball back home, whenever he came up to join me during the late summer, we'd again create our own hopper hatch.

I came to know Ernie Schwiebert many years later and long before his death, but I hardly think he would have appreciated our matching the hatch method as we had practiced it years before his best-selling book was printed. So now, for those of you who have read his book, the above is the rest of an untold story about two teenagers and how they fished.

We didn't match the hatch. We created it.

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