Angling for fun

Author: By M.R. Montgomery, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, September 15, 1996

Page: M1

Section: Travel

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.

Accommodations in the height of foliage tourism, especially Columbus Day weekend, cannot be had without reservations. (Peak foliage itself begins on the mountaintops today and progresses from north to south and top to bottom until around Columbus Day in southern Vermont.) The Woodstock Chamber of Commerce (telephone 802 457-1042) can advise on accommodations, and in the peak season has some 400 rooms in private homes to fall back on.

If you want to try fly-fishing for trout, Woodstock Outfitters (802-457-2007) will take a reservation, and if winter comes early, will pro-actively reschedule or cancel. Fees are $245 for one angler/student, $285 for two, everything included. Half-days can be arranged; Jack Sapia is a flexible person.

If angling doesn't improve your appetite, it's not for you. Our favorite, when the piggy bank is full, is the Simon Pearce Restaurant at the river's falls in Quechee (802-295-1470). Bentley's Restaurant in downtown Woodstock is reasonable, excellent, with simple cooking and a host of microbrewery beers (802-457-3232). If you're in town on a Sunday, and want to see how the other half lives, the Woodstock Inn & Resort (a Rockefeller Resort) right on the town common has a moderately priced, excellent buffet brunch (802-457-1100). If you are the other half, stay there.