The weekend was a combination of fishing and partying, as it was the big Au Sable Canoe Marathon weekend. Visitors from all across North America come to Grayling for this weekend to watch the race, making it the busiest time of year for both Grayling and the Au Sable River. Because of this, it’s not exactly the ideal time to be fishing the area – at least not the main branch. However, quality fishing can still be had on the Manistee, the North and South branches of the Au Sable and (to my surprise) even on the main branch the very morning after the race.

If you’ve read some of my past trip logs, you’d realize that my trips don’t usually go quite as planned – this trip was no exception. I missed out on fishing the first two mornings and evenings of my trip: a late start Friday morning, helping my buddy pack up camp Saturday morning and parties Friday and Saturday night. Most of this was not unexpected though and thankfully, there’s more to life than fishing. Evenings were spent enjoying excellent food, drink and company with a large group of friends who have started a tradition of throwing a party each year during canoe weekend. In honesty, I was the youngest person there and most of them are friends of my parents, who also attended. Some of them helped get me started fly fishing many years ago and I’ve gotten to know others over the years. Their friendliness and appreciation for the outdoors, fishing and the simpler things in life means there’s always an interesting story to hear or conversation to have.

Due to the above, the first two days were restricted to afternoon fishing, which isn’t usually the most productive at this time of year. Both days were spent on the North Branch of the Au Sable, on sections of the river I have never fished before. Friday was warm, sunny and windy, with no visible bugs on the surface – ideal conditions for terrestrials. However, other than one nice overzealous trout that leaped a foot into the air for my friend’s hopper (and missed), the only fish caught that day were by him, on smaller olives and patriots. Saturday afternoon was spent fishing a different stretch of the North Branch that I learned about the night before. I left with a couple small brookies, a missed larger fish and a bunch of nice trout that I spooked by almost stepping on some hidden structure that I didn’t see.

Something I’ve come to realize over the years is that familiarity builds confidence, which is about the most important thing you can bring to a river. In my opinion, confidence is more important even than fly selection or presentation. We’ve all experienced that feeling of knowing that if you drift a fly perfectly through a certain piece of water, you’re going to hook up with a fish. Not matter how experienced you are, there’s something very humbling about fishing an unfamiliar river where you don’t really know what you’re getting into.

Sunday was time to go home, but I wasn’t going to leave without one good morning of fishing. I drove out to a more familiar stretch of river on the Holy Waters section of the Au Sable and was in the water by 6:15 am. This is the same water the canoe racers tore through the night before and a local fly shop warned me that the fishing might still be a little slow due to this. What I planned to be a quick few hours of fishing turned into nearly 8 hours on the water. I suppose the other fishermen were turned off by the fact that the race just ended the night before, because I didn’t see another angler all day.

Morning on the Au Sable Holy Waters

It was a beautiful morning with mist rising from the water surface, not another person to be seen and the promise of Trico and Blue Winged Olive hatches to come. My thoughts on fishing familiar waters and confidence proved partially correct as I hooked into over a dozen trout. I fished comfortably through a few heavy downpours later in the day, enjoying my recently purchased Simms rain jacket. No huge fish were caught, but plenty of average sized browns with nice vivid colouring, along with some smaller rainbow and brook trout. Not surprisingly, my nicest fish came from a hole directly in front of the house my wife and I commonly rent.

One of many nice looking Au Sable Brown Trout caught during a BWO hatch.

Another fine looking trout. I never get tired of catching these.

One of many small Rainbows caught rising to Tricos in some riffle water.

Brown Trout resting by my foot after being released.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but perhaps my favourite part of fishing the Holy Waters is the fact that you’re likely to catch Brown, Rainbow and Brook Trout on the same piece of water – in addition to the possibility of fooling one of the wise trophy Browns that inhabit this area.

After a total of eight hours of fishing with lots of wading involved, I was faced with a daunting 6 hour drive (turned into 8 with traffic and stops). Needless to say, it was not an easy drive and it probably was not wise to spend so much time on the water before having to make such a long drive alone. I hit some nasty traffic on I-75 and ended up having to pull over and rest for 45 minutes to avoid getting too sleepy. After crossing the Blue Water Bridge into Sarnia, I was greeted with one of the nicer rainbows I have seen (the kind in the sky, not the kind you catch). Actually, it was a double rainbow, though the second is barely visible in the picture below.

Nice looking rainbow after a break in rain on the way home.

It could be argued that this was both one of my least and most eventful Au Sable trips to date, if that makes any sense. I’m sure one of these days, I’m going to have a boring trip that goes exactly as planned where I catch more fish than I can handle.

The post Annual Au Sable River Trip appeared first on Caffeinated Fly Fisher.

Grayling is a fly fishing paradise.  I won’t go into detail on why this is such a great fly fishing town, but suffice it to say that it’s surrounded by several blue ribbon trout rivers, it’s host to river stretches with nicknames like the “Holy Water”, it’s got more fly shops than most towns have gas stations and it’s the birthplace of Trout Unlimited… you get the idea.

I made an effort not to spend too much time on the water this trip, since my wife doesn’t fish and we had other things planned for the week.  Most of the time I didn’t stray too far from the place we were staying.  Located on the Holy Water, one of (if not the) best stretches of trout water on the entire Au Sable, it’s just too convenient.

The main hatches for the week included Tricos in the mornings, terrestrials (mostly ants) in the afternoons and some sporadic BWO hatches in the evenings.  No overly large trout were had during this trip, but a nice assortment of brown, rainbow and brook trout were caught.  That’s one of the things I love about the Au Sable in this stretch… all three trout species are very plentiful and on any given day it’s entirely possible to hook up with trophy sizes in all of these fish.

Au Sable Brown Trout

Au Sable Brook Trout

Au Sable Rainbow Trout

And then there’s the night fishing…

This is somewhat of a craze in the area.  So much so that Gates Au Sable Lodge, a local lodge and fly shop in the area, hosted a midnight derby this year.  It just so happened that this was prime night fishing time on the Au Sable. I’d done a bit of night fishing in the past on this river, with one unforgettable night where I was stalked by an angry Bobcat on shore for about 30 minutes.  This year though, I wanted to target BIG browns… something I hadn’t previously focused on while night fishing.  A bit of poking around revealed a couple flies that have landed numerous trophy browns after dark on this river:  Gartside Gurglers and Mice.  Unfortunately, I didn’t bring exactly the materials needed to tie these, but I did manage to tie a couple make-shift versions:

A quick and dirty Gurgler tie for some night fishing.

A simple variation on a foam mouse that I was quite happy with.

I spent two nights tossing big flies like this blindly in the dark.  Both of the above patterns worked quite well, but sadly I didn’t land the monster I was after.  I had several vicious hits on the gurgler, but missed all of them.  As for the mouse pattern above, I tied this only for the second night, which I fished for a total of about 10 minutes before hooking up with a big brown which somehow managed to snap it off with 4x tippet!  That was a sad time indeed as I felt I might have caught my new record brown trout.  I must say though, from the few minutes I fished this, I absolutely loved it.  It pushes water amazingly… which is good for getting the attention of those big predatory browns at night.  It’s very simple to tie as well, so I might just post some tying instructions for it later.

I also spent a few hours at Wakeley Lake, a non-motorized, catch-and-release only lake that is only accessible via a 1/4 mile hike.  Because of the restrictions and the fact that it’s not easily accessible to more casual anglers, it’s a super lake to fly fish from either a float tube, pontoon boat or canoe.  I brought my float tube and in the few hours I spent there, I hooked up with a bunch of decent pike and bass.

Wakeley Lake Bass

Wakeley Lake Northern Pike

Another Wakeley Lake Pike

Oh and lastly (and perhaps least importantly), they have lots of big ugly spiders in Grayling.  Maybe only slightly more than I’m used to in the GTA, but for some reason they tend to sneak up on me more up there.  This one crawled out of my waders onto my arm when I put them on one morning, after leaving them outside to dry overnight.

This spider surprised me by crawling out of my waders onto my arm one morning…

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