The Plover River is about seven hours away from St. Louis. If you're driving in the dark, in the rain, with one working headlight, it's more like eight and a half hours away. The drive itself (about 99.9% interstate) is fairly easy, but one can go mad with nothing but Illinois farmland to stare at for so long. Last year, I found myself in the Colorado Rockies (where I did some fishing that I still haven't written about). Emily's dad and I were standing in the parking lot of a hotel in Boulder, Colorado listening to Cardinals baseball on KMOX AM 1120, a station whose 50,000 watt antenna is located about 900 miles east near Pontoon Beach, Illinois. In my drive up to Wisconsin, I figured I'd be well in range of KMOX, and that listening to the Redbirds would be a great way to kill a couple of hours on the road. I was passing El Paso, Illinois (about 175 miles from the antenna) when the signal began to fade and finally gave out. I was able to pick up Mr. Shannon's voice on another frequency, but I had to wait until the sun went down to pick the original signal back up. I was able to catch the end of the game all the way north to Madison, Wisconsin (about 350 miles from the antenna). Just goes to show that the Rocky Mountains can act like an hell of a satellite receiver for AM radio signals.
By the time I had passed Madison, the weather turned nasty and the last few hours of the drive truly seemed to drag. People out on the interstate that night were driving like a bunch of hooligans and weirdos, and I was out among them, so what does that say about me? Alan had left St. Louis a few hours before I did, so he was already at the cabin by the time I rolled in around 1:30 in the morning. I fell asleep on a couch staring up a stuffed black bear, not unlike the black bear Alan and his dad had captured on their trail cam this time last summer, not 200 yards from where I slept.
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F***. That. |
The stretch of Plover River we were covering that day was fascinating. As we paddled upstream, the flow and volume of water seemed to change at every pass. Straight deep channels would lead to wide shallows with hardly any current or cover, perfect for spotting rising trout and trying your luck at dry flies. We hit shallow rapids that we didn't have a chance at overpowering, and had to walk the canoe, and our cooler of beer through the Wisconsin forest for a stretch. The forest itself seemed much more ancient than anything I've encountered in Missouri. Rather than being undergrown with sticker bushes and honeysuckle, the Wisconsin forest seemed very wide open, with a floor covered in thick moss and ferns. It gave me some solace in knowing that at least I'd see a bear coming, but at the same time, the bear could just spot me that much easier with no ground cover.
The mosquitoes there were the thickest I've encountered anywhere in my life, but not quite as thick as the layer of deet I had sprayed myself in. Alan's dad claimed one summer night, the mosquitoes were thick enough to set off his car alarm. A slight rain in the morning eventually gave out to blazing sun, and finally to mild cloud cover. Eventually we came to a stretch of the river that was too overgrown with trees and large boulders to navigate with the canoe, and the forest itself had banks too steep to try to navigate on foot with the boat. We decided to shore the canoe for a while and try our luck wading the river there.
I found the brook trout eager to strike at many varieties of flies, but just as quick to spit them out. I cannot count the number of times I had a strike on a dry fly, or how many times I saw my indicator wobble and sink, but the fish had already spit the hook before I could set it. The trip was not in vain, however, and both Alan and I were able to land a few decent sized brook trout, approximately 5-7 inches in length. I've read that the Plover River does hold some good sized browns as well, but they did not make themselves known to us. The brook trout, however, were not shy. I found their coloring incredibly striking, with bright orange fins with black and white tips, and red polka dots scattered along their body. The few I finally did manage to net were caught on my tried-and-true white floss jig, a fly that has become a staple of my fly box and a regular character in all of the stories in which I actually manage to catch fish.
We floated downstream back to the car, and tried to re-fish the spots we had hit earlier that day. By that point, the sun was high in the sky and we were beginning to get uncomfortably hot. We got back to the car (and the dead snapping turtle), and took off a short way down the road to try and hit another access point on the river before the end of the day. The stretch we found was deep, fast, and narrow. It was hard fishing and we didn't stay for long. The mosquitoes here, deeper in the wetter, more bog-like woods, were too thick to tolerate, so we were soon back on the road looking for alternate access. The further upstream we went, the more narrow the river turned, until eventually it was passing under the road in culverts, impossible to fish.
Dells of the Eau Claire River |
Plover River, Wisconsin - June 2016
sasasa
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