Bob Gwizdz

Big fish eat little fish. It’s the way the world works, but I sometimes think anglers lose sight of it.

What brings this to mind is a float I made on Michigan’s Pere Marquette River with Frank Willetts, the proprietor of Pere Marquette River Lodge.
Our original plan was to head out in the evening, hope for a hatch – it was prime time for the gray drake hatch, but that particular bug has been in decline here in recent years – and then throw mice after dark. But two days before our trip, it rained, hard, for about 10 hours, raising the water level and coloring it up.
I, for one, was very pleased by this development.

Were fly fishing for trout a religion, we would be in the midst of the high holy days in Michigan.
It’s the Hex hatch, the time of years when the biggest bugs emerge, bringing out the biggest trout. Anglers flock to those streams with notable hatches of Hexagenia limbata, the biggest mayflies in these parts, as though they were making a pilgrimage. It is the highlight of the season for dry fly fishing, when many anglers have their best chance of catching their fish of the year. Or maybe even their lifetime.