Other times, every detail about an entire day of fishing stands out, and October 11 was one of those special days. It rained and snowed, the trout went on a wild bite, there were big carp, mystery panfish, and a Buddha in a hooded sweatshirt, who sat on one streamside rock all day, contemplating the tail of a single pool and hooking fish from it nearly every cast.

A fall trip to the Walker is special enough, and I was ready to fish hard when we arrived at the meadow below the dam before sunrise. My old friend Ward Nimmo came up from San Jose just for the day, and I had spent the last week tying extras of all our favorite fly patterns for this stream. Ward wanted to fish the flatwater meadow section, where he's done well in the past, but I had to hit the pockets and channels that climb in little stairsteps right up to the Big Hole Pool at the base of the dam.

We compromised, and started together but fished away from each other, right where the undercut meadow banks meet the fast water. Working upstream, I was the first one to call out, catching my friend's attention to show him a 15 inch brown trout, caught on a bead-chain rabbit bugger. I then lost sight of Ward, as I left the river through a tiny but well worn hole in the streamside brush, to leapfrog another fly angler directly upstream. Two boulders and two small fish later, I was in the highly sought Triple Pool with only one guy ahead of me before the monstrous, churning Big Hole Pool at the base of Bridgeport Dam. A damn pipe. This part of the river actually starts with the green water of poor Bridgeport Reservoir, agricultural slave, gushing at high force from a concrete storm drain pipe at the base of the dam, with flows regulated to meet the needs of garlic farmers and cattle ranchers in Nevada.

The frost on the pungent sage was so heavy and white it looked like snow, but the moist banks and brown, muddy water of the river told me that it had rained overnight, so I was using bright attractor flies to draw attention in the murk. Bead head flash buggers, bright orange and pink egg patterns, chartreuse caddis larvae- I thought I was standing out pretty well myself when I netted an 18 inch brown trout and a slightly larger lahontan cutthroat. That was before I saw The Dudes, though. These guys were standing gloveless in the gray of an overcast, sub-freezing sunrise; three of them, men in their twenties, wearing denim jackets, jeans and cotton sweatshirts, casting lures with spinning rods from the one, man-made, concrete and stone rip-rap point jutting out into the maelstrom of the Big Hole.

They took turns, each catching a trout within two or three casts, then letting his friend step out to make the next drift, and so on. As the rotation progressed, they produced a camera and began photographing each fish over three pounds.

I stood , knee-deep in my neoprene waders, watching with a mixture of envy and plain disbelief. I've always found the powerful and complex currents of the Big Hole difficult to fish effectively, but the dudes made it look easy. They were simply casting out some small lure, and drifting it downstream on a quartering swing without reeling at all.

The ringing sound of line paying out against drag on a metal-spooled spinning reel stirred me from my reverie, and I turned to look behind me, where yet another sweatshirted angler was sitting on a streamside rock at the tail-out of my pool. He was playing a good fish as well, his light rod bent over in a tight, straining hoop. He looked familiar, with the facial features of a native American, and as I watched him it hit me- I had seen this same guy on a trip here last spring, perched on the same rock, catching what appeared to be the same fish he was landing again now. I recalled how on that previous encounter, he had courteously reeled in and allowed me to "play through" when a big trout took me downstream, past his casting position.

His next fish, about 45 seconds later, gave me the opening I was looking for, and when I got his attention by calling out "Nice one!" (it was), I said "I saw you here last spring. You were on the same rock."

"I love this rock." He said as he reached down to unhook the flopping trout, which I could now see was a brown, in full spawning dress; yellow-copper-orange flanks and a fierce, elongated jaw. "I remember you. You had that big fish that took you down the river and got off."

"Fact." I replied. I asked him what he was using and he said that it was a crappie jig, with a soft plastic body. Trout teasers, he called them. More like trout sluts, I thought. We continued talking as we fished, establishing that he was with several friends- the dudes I saw in the Big Hole- and that they were all using the same thing. We also established that in the time it takes me to catch a 15 inch fish, he can hook and release three from 16 to 18 inches.

"You're cool." said the Buddha on the rock. "Most of the fly fishing dudes won't even talk to us. Hey, we use single barbless hooks, we release all our fish, I build these little ultralight rods myself, we use two pound test..."

"What?" I had the nerve to call him on his claim, wading down to his rock to check the line. "Damn." I muttered as I rubbed the gossamer thread between my fingers. I was losing fish I couldn't control on four pound fluorocarbon, with my powerful, nine foot, seven-weight fly rod, and here was this guy, with a five foot matchstick, fishing at the tail of a pool that plunged immediately into steep riffles, using two pound test! He showed me the magic lure- a 1/32 ounce jighead with a minuscule plastic tube-lure over the lead. It was a pearlescent white, with a few tiny tails that spread and waved seductively in the water. I told him about my days throwing Rapalas plugs and Panther Martin spinners on this river (on eight pound line) and tried to explain how now I found fly fishing more productive, but as he listened and commented while fighting yet another fish, I began to doubt my own assertion.

Another fly fisher had moved into the head of my pool by this time, and the dudes were still fishing off the point in the mother of all holes, still catching fish, so I hiked down to see how my friend Ward was faring in the meadow. I found him intently watching his strike indicator as he drifted a gentle riffle at the head of a flatwater pool. Stepping down off the grassy cut-bank, I waded a short way out and flicked my own flies and strike indicator out into the subtle current seam mid-pool. I whistled to my friend when my line tightened and I leaned back, flexing my rod on a decent fish. By the time I had the 16 inch brown in the net, Ward was at my side, saying "Damn, Weez, that's a good fish."

"I only caught two little ones, a brown and a rainbow, but check this out, in this pool up there..." he said, pointing upstream. He hesitated, then grabbed the sleeve of my coat and pulled me with him, at a trot, until we stood at the biggest pool in the meadow. My fishing buddy knelt down and feverishly stripped the strike indicator off his leader then bit off his flies, spitting them into a box from which he pulled out and quickly tied on a team of woolly buggers, white and chartreuse.

Just as I was muttering "Okay, what? What's the big deal?", he threw a few false casts to get his line out, then plopped his flies across the river, into a large, foam covered eddy with very little current. His four weight rod surged forward immediately, throbbing with the rhythm of a hooked fish. Stripping it in, he laughed the whole time, shouting-

"Panfish, just like when I was a boy!" Sure enough, he had an actual 'double'; two small sunfish of some sort, twisting, thrashing, dangling, each from a woolly bugger fly, as he held them up for me to admire. I squinted and leaned forward, trying to identify these fish, which I had never seen before. They had the shape of a bluegill or redear sunfish, but with a scale pattern somewhat like the black and white checkerboard of a crappie, only larger. "I think they're Sacramento perch." he said, reading my mind. "I heard they're in Bridgeport Reservoir, so there you go. I've never seen these before, though..."

"No kidding," I cut in. "How bizarre. You taking them on the swing?"

"Yeah, you just have to hit the back of that foam eddy. Some of them are big enough for a fish fry. I just saw them hitting on the surface. There's trout hitting out in the current, too, but I couldn't freaking catch any. Got sick of watching my indicator, too, so I took it off and started casting further, then started hooking these guys." He was still hooking them, on every cast.

"How many have you caught?" I asked.

"Like, thirty. Try it, dude!" So I did, changing flies and shooting them out into the foam. Okay, so it was fun. They weren't trout, but they hit with abandon, and some were over eight inches and approaching half a pound. As we caught the mystery fish, I told Ward about what I had done and seen upstream, below the dam.

"So, go ahead and warm up here," I told him, " Your fishing muscles are all flabby from the Silicon Valley life, anyway. When you get it together, we're going upstream for some serious trout." Then I hooked another fish, a little closer to the moving water, and by its size and fight, I said "Or maybe we'll just hook trout right here." My mistake, it was a decent whitefish. That broke the magic panfish spell, though, and we returned to my car for a midmorning snack and hot coffee from Ward's thermos.

The sky was black in places with seeming thunderclouds, like in summer, but the temperature was dropping as it does right before a big sierra snowfall. We walked toward the dam, dropping into the triple pool below the Big Hole right where I had left. There was still one Dude on the point below the dam, catching as many fish as at sunrise, and the guy on the streamside rock downstream was still there, only he had one of the other Dudes with him as well, fishing from the next rock down. Both of them were hooking trout, browns and cutthroat. I started talking again to the original Dude, the Buddha on the rock, when he pulled in an honest, twenty inch brown from the same three foot deep section at the tail of the pool that he had been fishing since sunrise.

He and his friends were from southern California but came up to trout country whenever they could. He told me of visits to top area trout waters, including Kirman Lake, known for big brookies and cutthroat, and my local wild trout river, the East Carson. The way he described catching large, healthy holdover hatchery fish just outside Markleeville, I knew he was telling the truth. I caught another brown trout, about a foot long, and then one a few inches bigger, on my beadhead woolly bugger, out of the same slot that I had fished at sunrise. Ward had a fish on just upstream from me at the same time, and then I looked and saw that the Dudes all had bent rods as well, then it started to rain. Sleet, actually, but everyone on the river was hooked to a trout! How insane! How many fish could there possibly be? Don't they care whether we're spinning or fly fishing? The rain was turning to snow, and for the first time since sunrise the Dude left the Big Hole. Ward immediately went to the point he vacated and began fishing. I continued drifting the channel below, just myself and the Buddha, still on his rock, now with a light dusting of snow, unhooking a flopping cutthroat.

I wasn't catching anything, and as I looked upstream I saw Ward fighting a big fish from the point. I stepped out of the river and jogged up to him just as the fish pulled to the tail of the Big Hole, than thrashed on the surface and came off. Carp! Five or six pounds. "Five!" yelled Ward.

"I'll take a five pound carp!" I replied

"No, five species! Brown, rainbow, carp, cutthroat, and those crappies, or whatever. All I need is a whitefish for the East Walker slam!" He cast again, a team of weighted woolly buggers, white and black. Swinging downstream, he set the hook on another good fish. This one came in, and proved to be yet another gorgeous lahontan cutthroat- Olive, silver, purple and scarlet, with brilliant orange throat slashes. It was over twenty inches long and fat. I begged Ward for a turn on the point but he just started laughing, so I went up to the current seam at the head of the Big Hole, right where the water thunders out of the dam. Ward was fishing his buggers streamer style, but I put extra splitshot and a large styrofoam strike indicator on, then tied on a conehead marabou muddler in yellow, with a fluorescent egg-pattern fly as a trailer. I needed to get down quick in the strong current and be seen in the churning, frothy water. Sure enough, on my second drift, when my rig was sucked by the reverse flow in the eddy right to the mouth of the pipe, I hooked a fish. A crazy fish that seemed to have actually come from INSIDE the pipe. It was a fourteen inch brown, and when I made the same drift again, I hooked another trout, a sixteen inch cutthroat. Another pipe-fish! I climbed over the pipe to the other side and fished the opposite current seam, hooking a larger brown, close to eighteen inches, from a more reasonable spot, in the slower flow right next to the gushing whitewater. I looked across the pool at Ward, and I saw that he had found more of those "Sacremystery Perch" in the big eddy behind the point. He was now switching off- catching a trout in the main pool, then resting the spot by turning around and catching two or three panfish from the slackwater. Then he started laughing maniacally. "Whitefish! Whitefish!" He held it up, then kissed it (there's the romance I promised), and threw it back in the water. "Weez! I'm going to the car, I'm freezing, and I have nothing more to achieve!"

I did, though; I wanted to fish off that point. It was snowing harder as Ward trudged off to the car, but I just had to stand out there and fish the magic run. Even though I had caught plenty of fish; even though at least fifty trout had already been hooked from this spot today; never mind that it was turning back into rain and my fingers were numb, so what if I was totally ALONE. Finally, even the Buddha had retired to his campsite. I stood on the tip of the point and reveled in the solitude, looking up into the spitting sky.

"I may not be the best fisherman, but I'm the most stubborn." My rod seemed to cast itself; one, two, three drifts, each sweeter than the last, until I knew that the fourth was in fact perfect, as if blessed by God, and that nothing could stop it from connecting with a trout. I set the hook for no other reason than this, and was immediately putting maximum pressure on a big fish that barreled for the fast, shallow lower lip of the pool. I began running back in from the point, to the rocky shoreline to chase it. Each time I caught up and gained line, though, it just moved farther downstream again, finally making to the lip, where it thrashed in the shallows, showing itself to be a large brown trout, and popped off. I reeled in and saw that my flies were gone, so I immediately crouched down to open my fly box and tie on another, but found that I had lost nearly all use of my hands. They were just too cold to function, and I hadn't noticed in my excitement. I realized that I could no longer fish, and I felt that familiar pang of unfinished business, of unrequited love. I walked slowly back to the car and the further I went from the river, the colder I became; by the time I tumbled into the driver's seat with my waders on, I was shivering uncontrollably. Ward had hot coffee from the thermos ready for me, though, and we ran the heater so I could put my hands over the vent and thaw them.

"So, do you think we should come back with some of those crappie jigs and our spinning rods?" Asked Ward.

"Hell," I said, "I'm gonna try those things on my fly rod. I've seen them at the K-Mart. What are you doing next Thursday?"

The California portion of the East Walker River is open until the end of October. Flows were 104 cfs at the time of the trip described, but have dropped to an extremely low 40 cfs at press time, October 16. This will concentrate fish even more, in the deeper channels. The Big Hole pool is fishable with floating line, fly fishing techniques at these flows, and the fastwater pockets below Murphy's Pond are wadeable as well, if you're willing to bushwack. Come November, the place to go is the Nevada section, which is open all year. Rosachi Ranch allows free, public access with catch-and-release restrictions. Single, barbless hooks are required, and flows are low and clear in winter. Right now, Bridgeport Reservoir has turned over and is flushing green water into the river. Look for lots of weeds and large numbers of cutthroats and browns here. If anyone can confirm the identity of the mystery panfish, please e-mail me.

Until next time!
Mark (Never stand in a canoe) Wiza