This story, “Midnight Monsters,” appeared in the April 1960 issue of Outdoor Life.
Dusk was closing in as I waded gingerly into the Hemlock Pool and began to cast. Upstream, I saw Dick Fowler’s flashlight wink on and off as he clambered around a ledge of the run above me. I had on a big White Wulff and I could just make out its faint outline as it floated on the still current.
It was the time of evening when usually we’d reel in and go home, but this time we’d just arrived to carry out a long-planned experiment — night fishing for big brown trout. We’d heard about this kind of fishing on Michigan and New York streams, and some years ago we’d read a piece on the subject by George B. Gordon in OUTDOOR LIFE (see “Mark the Spot,” July, 1953).
“We ought to try that,” Dick had suggested at the time.
“It sounds promising,” I’d agreed.
Night is my favorite time for bass fishing, and I was anxious to give this deal a whirl. There’s only time for so much fishing, however, and what with one thing and another we’d never got around to it. Now, with another season hurrying to a close, we’d finally set a definite date. So here I stood, up to my hips in a deep, dark pool of the Farmington River in western Massachusetts, tossing a fly into the shadowy dusk. I’d cast maybe a dozen times when, all at once, I heard rather than saw a slight commotion in the vicinity of the floating fly. Instinctively, I struck and felt the hook bite into something solid. Simultaneously my rod arched into a bow, and splashing sounds came out of the darkness.
The fish felt pretty good, good enough to set my pulses thudding. It charged up and down the pool three times and slapped the water to foam as I slid the net under it. When I put the tape to it, I saw in the beam of my flashlight that it measured 13 inches. That’s a fairly good brownie for the stream we were fishing, and if I’d caught it any other time I’d have been completely happy. But tonight I was disappointed. Tonight we were out for bigger game, and now I began to have doubts about our experiment.
At night, according to the experts, you’re supposed to be able to catch really big brown trout if there are any around, and we knew this water held some heavyweights. We knew it because every spring a few fish in the three to six-pound bracket are caught by anglers — usually youngsters — dunking gobs of night crawlers in roily, high-water pools. From about the end of April on, though, these fish become conspicuous by their absence.
This particular stream is heavily stocked each year, and it’s also heavily pounded. A hard road runs beside it, and every day from the third Saturday in April — when the season opens — until sometime in September, you can count upwards of 50 cars along the 12-mile stretch. Families tent and picnic along its banks and swim in its deep pools. Everyone fishes it until, by late summer, it appears to be pretty well cleaned out.
Now it was early September and there weren’t so many fishermen around, but what about the fish? Had they gone downstream during the summer? Were there any left? These were some of the things we wanted to find out, and this first brownie wasn’t quite the answer we were looking for. I released it and went up to discuss the situation with Dick.
“I’ve caught bigger fish than that here in the daytime,” I said when I’d told him about my trout.
“At least you got one,” he pointed out. “I haven’t had a touch. Maybe the big boys haven’t started feeding yet.”
That was a possibility. Big bass, I’ve found, sometimes don’t move into the shallows until nearly midnight. I wandered back to the Hemlock Pool, and now it was really dark. I was glad I knew the spot thoroughly. You can get in trouble wading around in strange waters at night.
I knew the pool had a gently sloping gravel bottom that went into a steep drop-off. The current swirled into the pool between two boulders to flow dark and brimming beneath the tall hemlocks that gave it its name. The main current washed the far bank about 30 feet away, and the only difficulty I had was knowing when I had out 25 feet of line. It’s harder than you might think. If you don’t believe it, try shutting your eyes and casting sometime. When you think you’ve got out 25 feet of line, open your eyes and check. The chances are you’ll be short of the mark.
To guard against this possibility, I kept lengthening line, and the first thing I knew I was hung up in a tree across the stream. The hook had a good bite in a branch, and repeated tugs only produced swishing sounds in the darkness. Finally, I made a fatal error. I turned on my flashlight to look the situation over. I didn’t know it then, but I’ve learned since, that a flashlight beam on the water will ruin a pool for the next hour or so.
The light didn’t do any good, anyway. The hook was firmly lodged and I had to break off the leader. I replaced it with a stouter one tapering to lX, figuring the trout wouldn’t be too gut shy at night. And borrowing from my bass-fishing experience, I substituted a heavy-bodied, black fly for the White Wulff. I’ve found that dark surface lures are tops at night because the fish can see them better against the sky.
The main thing is to have the fly bushy and bulky. This one was both, for Dick had tied it especially for this night’s trip. Dick is in the accounting division of the New York Central and. like myself, lives in Westfield, Mass. He is also, however, a professional fly tyer, specializing in custom-made trout and salmon flies.
This time I stripped about eight yards of line from the reel and coiled it in my left hand, releasing it in a series of false casts overhead. That took care of the distance problem, and now I began to relax: and enjoy my surroundings. They were familiar and yet strange. Instead of bright sunlight dappling the leaves, there were silvery moonbeams sifting down through the hemlocks to lose themselves in the shadows below. Instead of the call of streamside birds. the insect chorus shrilled, and even the chattering water had changed its daytime voice to a subdued and drowsy murmur. I seemed to be in a silent, shadowy world where anything could happen. But nothing did. For the next half an hour I cast steadily and vainly, and then Dick appeared, maneuvering cautiously over the slippery rocks.
“Any more action?” he inquired. I shook my head.
“Then we’re even,” he said. “I caught a monster all of nine inches long.”
“I guess the big trout have moved out,” I said glumly.
“Looks like,” he agreed. “I can’t say I blame them after the parade of fishermen up and down this stream all season. We might as well give it the old college try, though. I’m going down to give the Bend Pool a whirl.”
He moved on downstream, using his flashlight to find his way over the ledges, and I went back to my casting. I wasn’t ready to give up on Hemlock Pool yet. Its dark depths formed an ideal lurking place for a big fish if there were any left in the stream. Besides, you don’t catch big brownies the way you do perch or bluegills.
You don’t catch them at all on bright days with anglers splashing up and down the stream. That’s one trouble with stocking brown trout in put-and-take waters — they’re a poor investment in returns to the fishermen. A recent survey conducted in Maine showed a ratio of five brook trout to one brown trout caught throughout the season in waters which contained one or the other species.
The smash of that strike flung spray a foot in the air, and in the middle of it a huge, dark form arched upward and fell back in a foaming splash. It sounded as though someone had tossed a dog into the stream.
One thing that protects the browns. aside from their built-in wariness, is their nocturnal feeding habits. While anglers are whipping the stream to froth, the big browns that have lived to put on real poundage are snoozing under rocks and banks and only come out to feed at night. They’re cannibals, too, gobbling up their children and grandchildren half as long as themselves. But they also like flies, not the tiny May flies that satisfy their lesser kin, but big, fat moths and things they can really get their teeth into — flies like Dick’s Black Bivisible tied on a No. 6 hook.
I had just made another cast — perhaps the lOOth — when I heard a sudden splash in the darkness as though a muskrat had dived from the bank. The sound came from the pool below, and a moment later I heard it again. Even then I didn’t pay much attention, and it wasn’t until a third splash broke the silence that I had a sudden flash which turned my knees rubbery. It could have been a muskrat, but it could also have been a feeding trout — the sort of trout I was looking for.
My fingers were shaking a bit as I reeled in and waded from the water. Groping in the darkness, I made my way downstream, and as I climbed over a blowdown I heard the splash again. I could even see faint, silvery rings spreading across the surface of the water. Then I really began to jitter. I knew this pool, too. It was smaller than Hemlock and shallower, with a sweep of current past the face of a perpendicular granite ledge on the other side of the stream. Any trout feeding in the pool would be lying below this smooth-faced ledge. Cautiously I worked my way just downstream of it. Stripping line from the spool, I swished the fly back and forth a few times and then cast it right against the rocks. It hit, bounced, dropped to the water, and WHAM!
The smash of that strike flung spray a foot in the air, and in the middle of it a huge, dark form arched upward and fell back in a foaming splash. It didn’t sound like a muskrat now. It sounded as though someone had tossed a dog into the stream. My rod bowed sharply as line ripped from the reel. With my heart bouncing, I clung to the bucking rod and knew that I was fast to the biggest trout I’d ever hooked in my life.
A big fish in the daytime is a handful. but the same fish in the black of night is two handfuls doubled. You play it entirely by ear, and you play by the fish’s rules. This one knew the game thoroughly. He went to the end of the pool and cartwheeled out in a ponderous leap that set my teeth on edge. Then he went to the opposite end and did it again.
I didn’t dare move out of my tracks for fear I’d fall on my face and lose him. All I could do was bang on, giving up line when he wanted to go and pumping in when I could. Every few seconds another of those crashing leaps would echo from the darkness. That trout leaped like a salmon, and he rolled and shook like one, too. But he was well hooked, and after another 15 or 20 minutes I began to think about the net. Then the battle ended as suddenly as it had begun.
The fish flurried hard at the surface, shook, and lunged for the bottom. I’d forgotten the roots that twisted under the lower bank, but the trout hadn’t, and he laced the leader through them. A second later I felt a savage tug, my rod snapped erect, and line hung limply from the tip.
I don’t know how big that trout was. I glimpsed him just once, and in the light of later events I’m guessing eight pounds.
Anyway, he was so big that I didn’t even feel too badly about losing him. I was disappointed, of course, but my dejection was tempered by the excitement of the discovery I’d made. I knew now that there were still some huge brown trout in this heavily fished stream and that they would take a lure at night, just as they did in the New York and Michigan stream.s. A whole new vista of trout fishing had opened up to me, and I felt like a pioneer.
It’s only been during the past three years that night fishing has become legal in Massachusetts. Before that, fishing began an hour before sunrise and ended two hours after sunset. We are all creatures of habit, and now, even though all-night fishing is allowed, no one of my acquaintance has ever taken advantage of it. Local anglers still reel in and go home when it gets too dark to see a lure. But I knew one fisherman who was going to change that timetable — two, in fact, for Dick was as excited as I.
“This could be terrific,” he said. “Just think of the hundreds of people who have fished that pool all summer I and never knew this trout was in it. Even if we don’t have another strike. it’s been worth it.”
“Now that we know there are big trout here it’s just a matter of keeping at it,” I said with a new confidence.
“We’re bound to tie into another sooner or later.”
It happened sooner than I thought. We had a slug of coffee to toast our I new discovery, and then I wandered up to what we call the Dam Pool. Once, there had been a small pond backed up behind a log dam and sawmill in this part of the river. The dam went out in a flood some years ago but there’s still a nice pool below the ruins. This time I changed to a strand of six-pound-test nylon. I wasn’t taking any more chances with tapered leaders.
I’d hardly waded in and stripped lineI shout downstream. I thought at first that Dick had fallen in and was drowning, but he kept on yelling so I knew he was still above water. I sloshed out ‘ of the pool in a hurry and scrambled downstream over the rocks. It took me a while, and by the time I neared the scene of the action Dick’s shouts had taken on the keen edge of urgency.
“Light!” he was yelling. “Bring your light.”
I slithered around a boulder and shot my flashlight beam into the stream to reveal Dick braced in mid-pool, bent backward and gripping his bowed rod in both hands.
“Shine it on the fish,” he hollered, and added hoarsely, “he’s a whale.”
The beam followed Dick’s taut line down to the surface just in time to pick out a vast, dark bulk rolling in a patch of foam. I almost dropped the light, and then I saw that was exactly what Dick had done with his. It still glowed feebly a foot under water on the sandbar.
I rescued it and turned my light and attention again upon the fish. It was lunging and thrashing now in a welter of spray as Dick pumped it slowly upstream against the current. Now he had the net out, but the trout wasn’t ready. It turned and surged away in a ponderous rush to the end of the pool, but it was tiring. Slowly it. came in again. slapping the surface to froth with its wide tail. Twice it dived under the net and sheered away, but the third time Dick leaned far out and scooped it into the mesh. He made it to shore and then sat down abruptly on the sand.
“How big is it?” he asked huskily.
I guessed six pounds, but I was wrong. The fish weighed 6 3/4 pounds on our kitchen scales back home. If anyone had told me there was a trout that size in this stream I wouldn’t have believed it. Dick’s fish was 25 inches long, and when he dressed it he found a nine-inch brook trout in its stomach — which also contained a handful of brown beetles.
“The odd thing was that the fish hit while the fly was dragging in the current,” Dick reported when he’d returned somewhat to normal.
He had on a big, black, deer-hair what-is-it with four hackles wound around the head. It looked more like a bass bug than a trout fly, and it cast like a feather duster.
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“I could hardly get it out 20 feet,” he said, “but once it hit the water it floated like a cork. I drifted it through the pool 50 times at least, and finally I let it lie out there while I lit a cigarette.”
“We’ll have to rewrite the book,” I said. “Heavy leaders, short lines, and dragging flies.”
We had another slug of coffee against the night chill and then picked up our rods again. Mine was an eight-foot, four-ounce stick, and now I wished I’d brought a striper rod. But I had 90 feet of forward-tapering fly line and 100 yards of backing on a salmon reel. I figured I was pretty well prepared at that.
Dick went on downstream and I wandered back to the Hemlock Pool. There had to be a big trout there. I was thoroughly sold on night fishing now, and with every cast I made I expected a smashing strike. There’s nothing like a little action to give a shot in the arm to a fishing trip.
Besides the opportunities for big trout, there were other advantages to this after-dark fishing. For one thing, it was cool, and I remembered only too well the sweltering, baking summer days when I’d climbed over these same rocks, sweat-soaked and parched with thirst. For another thing, there weren’t anglers in every pool or wading up the middle of the runs I wanted to fish. Tonight, Dick and I had the entire stream to ourselves.
Not all states permit night fishing for trout, however. Anyone who wants to try it should check state and local regulations first. Time went on while the moon climbed high overhead. Faint rustlings of small animals sounded from the woods, and in the distance the lonely cry of a hunting owl drifted through the silence. I was getting tired now and a little cold. I decided to make a few more casts and call it a night. And then, in the next second, it happened.
I had my arm back to cast when the water boiled at the head of the pool where the current flowed in between the two boulders. It wasn’t a rise. but more of a swirling commotion, audible above the whispering of the river. My arm shot forward and dropped the fly in the middle of the tossing current where it danced for a second on the crest of a ripple and then vanished in a geysering cauldron of spray.
The sheer fury of the trout’s first, savage rush look my breath away. The rod tip bent into a straining arch, and for a second I thought it was going to snap. The fish charged downstream in a melee of foam-melting line from the protesting reel — and kept on going into the pool below. Holding the rod high in both hands, I followed him, stumbling over snags and slippery rocks.
I sprawled in a heap once and was sure I’d lost the fish, but he stayed on, hugging the bottom and shaking his head like an angry bull. Finally I managed to reach the pool, and just as I braced myself on firm bottom, the trout vaulted up from the depths in a somersaulting leap that took him two feet into the air.
Three more times he came out of water, throwing sheets of spray as he churned up and down the pool. I let him go because it was all I could do, but I kept him fighting the slender, killing rod tip, pumping and reeling whenever he paused to rest. Gradually his rushes lost their steam, slowing to ponderous surges. Keeping on all the pressure I could, I pumped and reeled, but I couldn’t budge him against the current. Now it was my turn to shout. The fish was so tired that I thought I could lower him to the tail of the pool and let Dick net him.
ut Dick didn’t show, and every second the fish stayed in the water the greater was the danger of losing it. So, reeling cautiously as I went, I edged my way toward the tail of the pool. The trout lay on his side. a t’l::rk hnlk sliding toward me on the current. Dick came crashing up through the brush just as I lifted the fish in the net, its head and tail hanging over the sides.
“Welcome to the club,” Dick called as I held the trout up in the beam of my flashlight. “The Midnight Monster Club.”
He laid his fish down on the sand and I placed mine beside it.
My brownie wasan inch longer and weighed just over seven pounds. That ended the night’s fishing. Anything else, after that, would have been an anticlimax. Besides, we’d found the answers to our questions. There were big fish in this stream all through the season, and they could be caught at night.
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“I hate to think of the time I’ve wasted with this sort of thing going on,” Dick murmured as we took down our tackle in the glare of the headlights.
I felt the same way, but now we now. This spring we’ll try it again, after the daytime anglers have gone home. There are several other streams we want to try as well. We think there are still larger trout to be caught, for we know now that nighttime changes hard-fished, put-and-take streams to virgin water for big, brown trout.
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