Lynn Henning: Outdoors

Father, son enjoy trip for trout down Au Sable

Grayling, Mich. -- Trout were rising, splashing, slurping, and sipping on bugs that were hatching and spinning to the water on a lovely July evening in northern Michigan.

In the cold, rushing water of the Au Sable River, brook trout were even slamming that green Grasshopper fly, tipped in red, which was wafting their way courtesy of my lime-green fly line.

One hang-up, hardly new to those who fly-fish: Too often the brookies or brown trout were hitting -- but not hooking. Then, having spat out a "grasshopper" that tasted more like yarn, they slipped back into the 4-foot current or beneath a rug of fluttering river grass.

"Don't give that fly too much slack," said Sam Surre, an Au Sable guide from Frederic, Mich., who was piloting our cedar canoe. "You don't need to have that fly in a dead-weight drift."

We were slipping our way downstream, over beds of gravel colored bronze and steel-gray, past sweeps and the swirls from fallen shoreline trees.

Early evening temperatures were crowding 80 degrees. A bright sun was still lighting up an ice-blue sky as we slipped our 18-foot boat into the water, eight miles east of Grayling, near the top of the so-called "Holy Water" of Au Sable's main stream.

It's a supernal nine-mile stretch of cold, flowing water that moves northwest to southeast, ultimately pouring into Lake Huron with the rest of the Au Sable's flow. On the Holy Water tract, only flies can be fished, and all fish are released.

Surre was guiding us on a short trip more like a consolation prize. My son, Griffin, a 21-year-old student at Diablo Valley College in Walnut Creek, Calif., was to have joined me a month earlier for a nine-day Canadian wilderness fishing trek to Nueltin Lake, 800 miles north of Winnipeg.

But on June 19, two days before we were to have flown out, came a phone call, not unexpected: A chilly spring had been very chilly in northern Manitoba. The lakes were still frozen over. I had been in the same subtundra region in earlier years when ice early in June might have shut down a lake or two for a few days. But the spring of 2009 had been unprecedented. It was going to be closer to July before the ice vanished, and that wasn't allowing us any options for 2009.

We're on for 2010. But we were still itching to fish somewhere exotic. The Au Sable was an easy choice. It's one of the top 20 trout streams in the U.S. And it doesn't hurt that you can be on the water from your Metro Detroit doorstep inside of three hours.

We were already in the thick of northern Michigan, anyway, playing golf at the woods-and-water Garland Resort near Lewiston ahead of a wrapup round at the best golf course in northern Michigan: Forest Dunes Golf Club, near Roscommon.

This tee-to-stream access is nifty stuff. It's nicer yet when you're fishing with a guide who has 30 years of Au Sable experience, which came by way of a guided, half-day trip booked through The Old Au Sable Fly Shop (I paid $250, plus a guide gratuity).

Fountain of knowledge

Surre knows the water and is expert on insect hatches. He ties his own flies, 1,000 dozen a year that he sells to northern Michigan shops. And he does a slick job piloting an Au Sable riverboat, a craft that 130 years ago hauled food and supplies into lumber camps before people saw they were ideal for navigating the Au Sable's trout water.

We were in heavy trout water as soon as the boat left shore. The Holy Water stretch has fish galore, probably two brook trout for every brown trout that hides out in depths chock-full of pools and eddies. The Au Sable in this locale probably averages 3 feet deep but has holes that can reach 10 or 12.

The water is pure and clear and flows at roughly 4 mph over gravel and sand, past green shoreline slopes anchored by jackpine and oak trees. In some stretches, emerald rivergrass stands tall, like rice in a paddy, between the shoreline and midstream depths.

The river in some places bends and twists amid areas of shade from the Au Sable's tree canopies. It's stirring terrain, as any Au Sable canoeist knows.

And it's water filled with trout. We could hear them splashing a dozen or more yards ahead of our boat as they rolled to the surface to inhale various species of savory bugs. We saw the ringlets from their rises, heard the "sips" from their deft sucking of insects flitting about in the fading sunlight and popping into the cool, clear water.

"We'll get some fish," Surre said. "Not sure how big."

Brook trout seldom get much bigger than 11 or 12 inches in the Au Sable. Brown trout run bigger, up to 20 inches and more, although they're toughies to catch. They tend to be more nocturnal, and, of course, they're the Ph.Ds of all trout, masters of intellect and memory, ultrapicky when it comes to what flies they'll hit.

I was doing better at first with my Grasshopper pattern (size No. 10) than Griffin was with his Blue-Winged Olive (No. 18). There had been plenty of strikes but only a couple of small brook trout had been hooked before they were released and splashed back into the Au Sable. Griff finally got together with another small brookie and, like dad, missed on too many other strikes, some of which were the work of heftier brook trout.

Paying attention

Surre, meanwhile, was doing his homework. He had been watching the evening hatch and the shore plants that correspond to them. A plant that resembles a milkweed but reaches 5-6 feet, the Spotted Joe-Pie weed, had been showing its reddish-pink buds, a sure sign that the pseudocloeon was on the water and sliding down the trout's gullets.

The pseudocloeon is a genus of the mayfly and a dead ringer for the Blue-Winged Olives that Surre was having us toss into the 63-degree water. Along the way, none of the Au Sable's residents seemed to have any problem with us. At one point a muskrat plied the shoreline waters, green stalks in its mouth, as a V-shaped wake spilled from its path.

A dark-brown mink that seemed to consider us more amusement than bother hopped along the bank. A blue heron flapped its 747-length wings and headed downstream. Mallard ducks splashed to a landing on the river surface as the sun slipped steeply behind the Au Sable's treeline.

We had been seeing more trout that we had been catching on a night so expressive of Michigan's summer magic they could have made one of those "Pure Michigan" advertisements from it -- with no need of ever making another.

It was getting deeper into dusk and the temperatures were dipping. We wrapped up a four-hour, four-mile trip at the Stephan Bridge landing, pulled out our Au Sable boat, and headed back to Grayling for a beer and some late-night supper.

And if any father and son had a better few hours this summer, here's to you.

You can contact the Old AuSable Fly Shop at (989) 348-3330 or by e-mailing info@oldausable.com

lynn.henning@detnews.com