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 When most people hear the words “Special Regulations” they find themselves facing something that is going to limit them in some way, be more restrictive, harder to qualify for, etc. Of course, we flyfishers being sort of different from most people, find ourselves saying “good, this should be fun”! In most circumstances special regulations on sections of rivers and streams with trout in them mean that bait fishermen, spin fishermen, etc. can’t fish there, or if they are allowed to fish there, must use only a single barbless hook, and release all fish caught, etc. These special regulations areas have become a cherished thing in the fly fishing community because they mean that there is a chance that the fish there might grow beyond juvenile size and may indeed become quite large. Of course this has produced a few undesirable side effects as well.
On a recent week-long trip to attend a gathering of fly fishermen in the Eastern part of the country my buddy Curly and I had a chance to fish one of these places. This section of water happened to carry “delayed harvest” regulations which banned the keeping of any fish until mid-June. We were also limited to flies only, and barbless hooks. Curly and I sort of thought it might be pretty much fun to fish a place that doesn’t get hammered day-in and day-out by the worm dunkers and hardware slingers. Well, it turned out to be fun, as flyfishing nearly always does. But, we were also in for a bit of an education.
Now most of us have fished special regulation areas before. Most popular fly fishing destinations have several areas designated to be free of one or another impedance to the growth and reproduction of trout or other species. Most of the areas I have encountered before have been on fairly large rivers, like the White and Norfork rivers in Arkansas, the AuSable in Michigan, and the Chattahoochee in Georgia. Well, this water was not so big. In fact, in most places you could throw a ping-pong ball across it. The special regulations section of this water was only a couple of miles long, and it was within a half hour drive of a fairly large city. Those two things add up to the fact that this water gets hammered by fly fishermen every weekend and sees a fair number through the week as well. In other words it had become sort of a Trout University, where the fish could go to see the widest variety of fly patterns in the shortest amount of time and learn from the fish who had been there a while. Picky is a word we heard used to describe the fish in this area. It turned out to be a bit of an understatement.
On our first foray out to the stream we were absolutely amazed at the number of fish we could see holding in the gin-clear water. That’s another term that is used a lot in trout fishing to describe water that is not stained with run-off. In this case, it might have been a bit of an understatement too. Watching the fish in this water was like watching them through a pane of optical quality glass that had been washed and buffed so not even a fiber of lint could be seen. Each pool held numbers of fish from 7 or 8 inches long up to some fish in the 14-16 inch range. Some were holding near the bottom and seemed to be napping, while some held just under the surface and occasionally slid up to sip something off the top.
 When I say these fish were sipping “something” off the top, I’m just speculating there. Curly and I both tried to discern what sort of insect or terrestrial thing they were eating, but no matter how far down toward the bottom of my bifocals I tilted my head, I couldn’t see anything that they might get nutrition from. I even put on my fancy big sunglasses that fit over my bifocals and have the little oval magnifier lenses at the bottom under the dark lenses. Still nothing! Curly and I are both rather of the opinion that if you have to resort to carrying one of the little seine nets to skim floating bugs out of the water and see if you can find anything in your fly box that looks like that, then we’d rather be back at home sitting on the deck have a cool drink. But, I think we both would have used one of them by the second or third day on this water just out of pure frustration. Curly even asked me in a real quiet tone, after making sure nobody was within a couple of hundred yards, “you don’t have one of those sucky-bulb thingies we can stick down their craw and suck out their stomach do you”? We did come to our senses though, after all, if we couldn’t see anything big enough to pick it out with magnifying lenses on and our faces 3 inches from the surface, then neither one of us was ever in a million years going to be able to A: tie the pattern in the first place, or B: be able to tie it to a tippet anyway.
So what can a guy do when faced with so many fish in such a small area that are eating something, but haven’t given us humans a copy of the menu? You do the obvious thing, begin tying on and casting every stinking pattern in every stinking size in you fly boxes, that’s what.
As you remember, we had been told that these fish were a little picky. Someone even told us that the trusty old Adams dry fly was a good sort of searching pattern to try out. So on our first morning there I tied on a #12 Adams and began drifting it through a seam that was holding a couple of fish. On the first decent drift through the seam a nice 13 inch Brown came up and sucked the fly down like he was famished. I landed and released it and felt pretty sure of myself. I may have even had phrases running through my head like, “heck I thought these fish were supposed to be educated and picky”. So I dried the fly off and returned to what amounted to one of the most frustrating days of fishing I’ve ever had.
I think in the end I caught 5 trout that first day, and was happy as I could be to have done that. I caught fish on a couple of different dries, and a couple of different nymphs. Each time I’d pick up a fish I’d think “AHA! I’ve finally got it figured out,” only to founder on with that sentence ringing in my ears as fly after fly was refused. When I say refused, I mean that the fish would sometimes rise to a dry fly as it drifted by, only to turn away after it didn’t meet some sort of unknown criteria. If you persisted in presenting the same fly to the same fish, subsequent refusals were met with the fish turning away from your fly with one of it’s pectoral fins sticking out of the water in the Trout equivalent the finger. I even had one fish move toward my fly and actually use its tail to swat my fly out of the way so it could get to whatever microscopic delight it was feasting on.
Our second day on the water was one of the best and also one of the worst days I’ve spent Trout fishing. Worst because it was more of the same. Refusal after refusal, pattern after pattern. obscene gesture. The best because even though I held my chances of success at something like 3 or 4 % I cast to a nice big fish holding at the end of a blown down pine tree sticking out into the stream. I had tied on a fly that I didn’t know the name of, if it was even a “real” pattern that someone before me had invented and named. It has a body of one strand of Peacock hurl with a white hackle collar and white hackle tip wings. The fish refused it the first time, and the second time, and the third time and the fourth time. Each of those drifts were as good as I am capable of. This was well after noon and I had had lots of practice mending and getting the fly drifting just right. Each of these refusals were also accompanied, I’d like to think anyway, by increasingly urgent demands from the fish the “get that #$^!@ out of my living room!!
 And then I cast the fly a fifth time. I cast it as near the pine branches as I could and threw a mend in the line so there was absolutely no drag. The fly drifted about 3 inches to the fish’s left and to my utter amazement he moved to it and swallowed it. He didn’t actually swallow it, he actually sucked it in with a pretty loud smacking noise. I am amazed I was able to react in time to lift the rod tip and set the hook. After several minutes I landed my biggest fish so far on a dry fly, a very healthy happy 16 inch Brown Trout. Curly happened to be only 30 or 40 yds downstream from me at the time and I made sure to make enough noise that he knew I had a fish on. Heck, people in the next county knew I had that fish on. After the fish was measured and photographed I released it and just sort of sat back. I could hardly summon up the energy to make another cast. All the tension of a frustrating day of being told to @#$% off by so many fish just seemed to drain away. I really didn’t care if I caught another fish that day, or for the whole trip for that matter. As it turned out we did fish the next day, and we did get completely skunked. Which made that fish all the more satisfying.
So in the end, special regulations can mean a lot of different things. Sometimes it means that there are a lot of fish in this particular part of the river because they are released unharmed. Sometimes it means that this area of the river gets fished less than other parts because a lot of people fish for the table and don’t want to release what they catch. It might even mean that the fish are a little dumber because they only see a limited variety of flies thrown at them by fishermen. Then again, it might mean that the fish in this part of the stream or river are just a little smarter than those in other areas because the flyfishers concentrate on this part of the river a lot more than elsewhere and the fish get a bit more educated than their kin from other parts. Any way you slice it the result is the same. Fun!
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