Fishing always has a new surprise in store

• Published March 09, 2007

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A SOUTH SOUND BEACH - I caught my first fish before I got a firm grip on the multiplication tables.

I've learned a lot about fishing - not so much about math - since 1969.

The one, always-true thing I've learned in those 38 years is that we anglers don't know that much about fish - and fish will always surprise us.

We anglers just stand there and go "Hmm..." We also try to look like we expected weirdness to happen.

Anyway, I made a big mistake and tied on a Muddler Minnow streamer fly before I walked down to a favorite South Sound beach earlier this week.

That foolish move is how I got to thinking about those "Hmm ...." moments.

It's always bad mojo for me to tie on a fly before I actually see the water. But I tempted fate, as the Muddler Minnow has been the hot fly for the past couple of weeks on this beach.

I got down to the water without slipping and falling on the muddy trail. Cutthroat trout boiled and swirled as I made my first cast. Thirty casts later, the cutts were still feeding like hungry dogs, but none of them whacked my Muddler.

Hmm. I poked around in my fly box and tied on a size 10 olive wooly bugger, which is a great fly for sea-runs.

While I tied on the fly, I started thinking how fish can make our brains melt out of our ears.

Fish will do as they please, despite hundreds of books and thousands of magazine articles - and maybe a few newspaper columns - that all tell us exactly what the fish will do.

Strange steelhead

In 1988, I waded into Oregon's Deschutes River and started casting for summer steelhead. Millions - OK, a few hundred - fishless casts later, I climbed up the bank to sit under a tree and take a break from a drizzly rain.

I watched the water. It was a cloudy October day, and some trout were rising to a hatch of blue-wing olive mayflies. A doggone summer steelhead was rising near the trout.

Now, I had read about 1,000 books - OK, maybe 15 - on fishing for steelhead, and every writer had said that steelhead don't eat when they enter fresh water.

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