Fishing The Aluminum Hatch

by Garry McMichael

I hadn’t floated 100 yards beyond the Highway 8 bridge when I sensed I was embarking on float-fishing disaster beyond anything I had ever experienced before. It was 10:00 AM on a near perfect July Saturday morning and I was on a float-fishing trip down the lower Huzzah River with 1,500 other people in 500+ canoes, rafts, kayaks, and inner tubes. I had never experienced floating a river with this kind of crowd. Already, they were loud, noisy, and sometimes a little vulgar, lining every gravel bar and causing traffic jams in every riffle.

It was too late to change plans now. Maybe I could practice precision casting techniques or hone my solo paddling skills as I played dodg’em in this motley flotilla. Earlier I had run into Joe Dmuchovsky and his son Alex at the Huzzah Valley Campground and he told me of experiencing outstanding fishing the day before using Chompers on weedless jigs. I made a mental note of his tip, but I couldn’t see any way I’d catch fish in this crowd.

The first place I stopped to fish was among rootwads and downed tree limbs with gravel bars above and below me. At any given moment there was at least 50 people in sight and a constant parade of canoes and rafts floating within five feet of me. Throwing a brown chomper among the downed tree limbs I had solid strike and reeled in a nice 10" smallie. The floaters around me broke into cheers and yells as they popped their paddles on the water. One rafter even offered me a beer. Catching and releasing another smallie and a fat longear sunfish, I got to thinking I could get to liking this kind of attention. Joe, seeing my success pitched a chomper into the tree limbs below me and caught another smallmouth.

A little farther downstream the river divided around a gravel bar with most of the water and the floaters going to the left. The remaining water slipped under a large rootwad into a narrow riffle guarded by densely shaded undergrowth. Not twenty yards from this little riffle there were about forty people engrossed in a noisy game of water football. But that rootwad and little riffle looked too fishy to let pass by. I beached the canoe, grabbed a fly rod with a olive woolly booger and waded to close casting range. WHAM - I had four solid strikes in just as many minutes catching and releasing 11 and 9 inch smallies and a large bluegill. The noisy water football going on just behind me was beginning to sound like fishing music to my ears.

My best fishing came after three in the afternoon in a fast moving narrow stretch of river. I floated past a pair of large rootwads with a fifteen-foot eddy circling clockwise between them. Grounding my canoe on a tree limb, I waded back to the eddy and started casting a pumpkinseed chomper close to the bank as canoes and rafts floated by. Some of the less experienced floaters would start flailing their paddles and yelling at me to move in fear of running into me. It seems everyone asked, "Catchun’ anythang?" or "How can you catch fish with so many people on the river?" My first cast into the eddy produced a fighting twelveinch smallie. Then I had a second fierce strike that threw the lure. On my third cast a fourteen incher gave me a heck of a fight as I struggled to keep him out of the tree limbs. Not only was I rewarded with a nice smallmouth but the cheers and applause from the passing raft made me feel pretty good about my fishing skills. All the attention gave me an insight into why the matador keeps going back into the ring with the bull. Before quitting this little eddy, I would pull out two more smallies and lose a lure to another strong fighter in the trees.

At one point I passed two elderly women sitting in lawn chairs in the water under large umbrellas watching the floaters pass by. I thought it must be like watching a small community on parade; you get a pretty good glimpse of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Like the skillful father-son duo, each with their own solo canoe, paddling circles around the rest of the crowd. When someone turned over they were quick to help collect the gear floating downstream.

There was the man with a heavy-duty water blaster soaking anyone passing by who wanted to be cooled off. But he always asked first; it felt damn good.

Everywhere I looked, fleshy scenery in two piece bathing suits distracted me from my fishing. At one point two young women exposed their ample breasts to a raft of hooting and chanting young men. Then one of the women noticed me floating by on the other side and suddenly became embarrassed. My gray-haired fatherly image seems to have a sobering effect on the women.

At one point I found myself fishing in a pool with a large group of floaters ahead of me and another large group behind me. One group would yell and scream as loud as they could then the other group would yell and scream attempting to out do the first group. Caught in the middle felt like I was in the center of a football field at a critical moment in the game.

I came across a man and his teenager son having an angry screaming contest literally threatening to kill each other. The father was upset because his son either couldn’t or wouldn’t follow his paddling instructions.

Later I passed a woman complaining about swimming in the water after watching a wading cow urinate. I couldn’t resist asking her where she thought all these beer-guzzling people were relieving themselves. Her expression and stony silence told me it was something she did not want to consider.

Most of the floaters start the trip picking up their empty beer cans and trash. But the more beer they consumed the less they cared about the empties. Eventually many of them would turn over and the trash would end up in the river anyway. Floating trash became progres-sively worse towards the end of the float. I wished the canoe rental services could station someone near the halfway point to take the empties off their hands and minimize this problem.

At one point I pulled my canoe over to a shady gravel bar to eat some lunch. As I amused myself watching about every tenth canoe turn over under a big cottonwood tree twenty yards down river, I couldn’t help but ponder why the fishing was so good with this wave of humanity on the river?

The fish certainly didn’t seem to be hiding. Although most of the fish I caught were under rootwads and tree limbs, several were caught in the open. I caught two in a row in a fast riffle in between rafts and canoes. Joe told me of catching a sixteen-inch smallmouth under a raft.

Perhaps the fish are used to periodic flotillas of beer guzzling crazies and don’t recognize any danger in the situation. In fact, it may seem like a feeding opportunity to the fish. I noticed the river became progressively dirty as the day wore on. I suspect it was from the hundreds of people wading, horesplaying, and swimming in the river. With literally thousands of feet kicking up the river bottom, dislodging small insects and nutrients in every pool and riffle, the fish may actually be triggered into feeding.

Perhaps the fish have come to recognize there are few fishermen among the thousands of floaters and danger from serious fishermen is relatively low. Even though I came to recognize that fishing the aluminum hatch was not quite the disaster I originally envisioned, I still wouldn’t go out of my way to repeat the experience.

If you find yourself on such a river when the aluminum hatch is on, there are a couple of points you might want to consider.

As the float progresses a small percentage of the floaters allow the beer and hot sun to effect their reasoning. This group is generally pretty easy to recognize because of their bright red skin, often resembling freshly boiled crawdads, and their excessive use of vulgar language. They often leave a trail of floating beer cans in their wake. Keep in mind they came to the river, just like you, to have some fun. Don’t allow their behavior and bad language ruin your day or make you angry. Whenever you have a chance, pick up the empty beer cans and feel good about yourself for helping clean the river.

Be careful where you throw those big treble hooked lures. A drunk with a Chug Bug hooked in his scalp is not likely to be a very reasonable person to deal with. It’s like my daddy once told me, "Never wrestle with pigs, you’re both going to end up muddy, and the pig likes it."

©1998 Garry McMichael

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