Scenic pocket water on a southern Ontario river

Downstream of a large waterfall, the river narrows, speeds up and is dominated by large boulders. Cliffs tower over both sides of the river and up above the cliffs there are trails with the odd tourist – though you wouldn’t know it. This area is no secret and the small amount of traffic can be directly related to the previously mentioned lack of access.

Wading can be tricky in some of the faster water

Fly fishing here is technical, with lots of leg work and stealth required. The fish in this area aren’t large on average, but what they lack in size they make up for in feistiness. There’s something about them: they’re completely different than the same fish you catch a couple miles up or downstream. Perhaps it’s the higher oxygen levels in the water, or simply the fact that these fish see less flies than in other parts of the river.

This type of water is the perfect place to swing a wet fly. Of course, nymphing and (at times) dry flies also work, but my interest in tying and fishing soft hackles and classic wet flies has peaked recently. So, that’s what I did – I tied a few simple partridge soft hackles, in yellow and red and swung them behind boulders and through some of the more productive looking riffles and runs. River features are generally miniature-sized in water like this, with short drifts required. A few longer stretches of productive water like the one below allow for longer drifts and the opportunity to take several fish.

A rare stretch of productive water amidst the otherwise broken up pocket water

In the span of a few hours, I walked several kilometres and landed about 8-10 brookies and browns. As expected, none of these were very big, but each fish caught felt like an accomplishment.

A small feisty brown trout, about average for this water

Overall a great day and I think the only improvement that could have been made is with my gear. When you’re in the middle of nowhere fishing for several hours, it’s pretty important to bring some water and food. Somehow, I’ve managed to survive this long on half to full day trips with simply a pair of waders and standard fishing vest – packing food and water wherever I could stuff it. This isn’t very practical or comfortable though and I think the next time I venture out I’ll be equipped with a new Fishpond pack/vest. Perhaps overkill for every day outings, but I think it will be invaluable for those (frequent) days with long hikes and a full day of fishing.

One last creepy closing note: I ran into another giant spider on this trip, which I have yet to identify. I think it may be another Fishing Spider, similar to the one I spotted a couple years ago on the same river. You can get a sense of its size from the leaves next to it. Yummy!

Large spider, which I believe to be a fishing spider

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Fishing Spider encountered on the Credit River.

Unfortunately the picture quality is not too great as the camera I was carrying at the time was pretty bad.  It’s hard to get a sense of the size of this thing, but it was resting on a huge boulder in the middle of the river and was probably about the size of a child’s hand.  Apparently it’s called a Fishing Spider (genus Dolomedes).

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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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