If you want to get a trout fisherman’s attention, whisper the words “hex hatch.” When Hexagenia limbata hatches in early summer, the event draws swarms of fishermen to the ponds that host it. The hex is the largest mayfly, and its annual hatch is an opportunity to catch big trout, which abandon their customary caution and chase these flies all over the pond.
Now that my friend Leighton is retired, he knows exactly when and where the hex is hatching. A dedicated pond fisherman and meticulous record-keeper, he tracks the major hatches on ponds and lakes throughout central and northern Vermont. He’d been telling me about his favorite hatch on his favorite pond for quite some time, explaining in the thick accent of a transplanted Mainer that this particular mayfly was not in truth a Hexagenia, though it has been called that for years. This one is Litobrancha recurvata, and it’s just as big as the hex, but much darker, almost black. Very conveniently, it hatches in the afternoon instead of in the last seconds of daylight, when the true Hexagenia brings trout splashing to the surface, unnerving anglers who have to fish by sound rather than by sight.
In mid-May, he told me he’d alert me when it began, and a couple of weeks later, this email arrived: “Have been down twice. Fishing much improved the second time. I expect to go again today, as I think that THE HATCH of all hatches is on the verge of starting.” Leighton always refers to it as THE HATCH, and as we emailed back and forth making the arrangements to fish together, I could think of little else.
I kept reminding myself that fishing is entirely a speculative pursuit. After all, that’s why we have an expression that someone is fishing for something – it means he’s wandering around aimlessly hoping to stumble across that which he seeks. There are no guarantees in fishing, because it takes place in the infinite variability of the natural world. You can know what fly worked yesterday and have dozens of them but still get skunked due to any number of reasons: the wind came from the wrong direction, the water was too warm, or the barometer was rising instead of falling. Each of us has developed a menu of ingenious excuses to explain our inexplicable failures.
We met at noon, loaded our gear into the boat, and while Leighton rowed us out to his hotspot in the damp chill of an unseasonably cold day, I strung my rod. There was no sign of any hatch, no fish rising, but Leighton wasn’t at all worried, confident that the insects would do what they were supposed to do and the trout would likewise follow the script.
Leighton cast muddler minnows with a sinking line, and before long, he was on to a brook trout, and then another. I followed his cue, added some split shot to my leader and hooked a fish, my first trout of the year. By now the mist had turned to drizzle, and we watched the only other two boats on the lake heading back to the boat landing.
Then Leighton pointed out a large black insect floating on the surface. “It’s starting,” he said. He switched to his floating line, and I got rid of my split shot. He handed me a fly that he ties especially for this hatch. It’s no insult to say this is not a pretty fly. It’s an inch-and-a-half-long emerger tied on a #6 hook with gray dubbing and hair from a squirrel tail fore and aft. It’s not one that you would see in a flyshop and say, “I’ve got to have that fly.”
That doesn’t matter, because the trout could not resist it. Over the course of three or four hours fishing, we caught 50 or more trout between the two of us, most of them on Leighton’s emerger. Three of them ended up in the frying pan that evening.
Recurvata is indeed a huge fly, and though they present such an inviting target for the trout, they weren’t in any particular hurry to cast off from the surface, instead drifting for what seemed to be minutes, as if stillborn. Interestingly enough, there were never more than a few insects on the surface at any one time. This was the blissful period before the hatch truly exploded, and the trout were every bit as expectant as we had been. Leighton reported that a couple of days later, with hundreds of insects on the surface and their silhouette etched into the trout consciousness, it became more difficult to fool them with a bunch of squirrel tail. But this day, this cold, wet, early summer day, we had what they wanted, thanks to Leighton.
If I had been there on my own, with no trout rising, and the raw day feeling more like April than June, I could easily have missed all the excitement. I could have pulled up anchor and pointed the boat toward home, oblivious to the upcoming glory of THE HATCH.