Karas - Brook Trout

A LSO BY N ICK K ARAS

The Crow Shooters Handbook

Score Better at Trap

Score Better at Skeet

Americas Favorite Saltwater Fishing

The Guide to Fishing New Yorks Salt Water

The Striped Bass

This hook is dedicated

to the return of the native.

Copyright 1997, 2002 by Nick Karas, 2015 by Shirley Karas

All illustrations 1997 by Nick Karas unless otherwise noted

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text designed by M. A. Dub

Chapter heading illustrations by Ed Sutton

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-302-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0087-1

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

I T WAS THICK OF FOG AND RAINING SIDEWAYS ON THE seaplane dock in Goose Bay, Labrador. Vintage Beavers and Otters rocked against the floats. Vintage anglers shuffled around in their waders and cursed the weather. Teenaged bush pilots huddled up, debating whether to risk the Mealy Mountains or retreat to the Trappers Cabin Bar & Grill to ogle off-duty girls from the NATO airbase.

Only one of the waiting anglers seemed unruffled: a red-faced man with a neat white beard and a boxers compact build, leaning quietly against a fuel drum and watching flocks of seagulls dodge a pair of Luftwaffe Phantoms blasting into the fog.

Somehow he looked familiar, and finally I ambled over and with some hesitation said, You wouldnt be Nick Karas, would you?

His face froze into that wary, hunted look common to outdoors writers being outed in the wild.

Maybe. Who wants to know?

Jim Babb. Im editing your brook trout book with Lyons & Burford.

Small world, the fish-lit business. Weather permitting, Nick was headed to a brook trout lodge on the lower Eagle River, and I was headed to a brook trout lodge on the upper Eagle River. Id been writing the angling column for Grays Sporting Journal for just over a year, and Nick had written the outdoors column for New York Newsday for close to thirty. More to the point, hed spent the past half-dozen years writing what would become the definitive book on his favorite fishand mineand Id just been assigned to edit it.

I dont know how well this coincidence worked out for Nick, but it certainly worked out for me. Id been editing books for nine years and fishing for brook trout since I was old enough to hoist a fly rod, and I thought I knew a thing or two about both. But over the months that Nick and I worked together on Brook Trout , I learned more about the nuts and bolts of writingand the biology, angling history, and ecological importance of brook troutthan Id even known existed.

Nick majored in biology at St. Lawrence and Johns Hopkins, and got his masters in journalism from Syracuse. He began his career at True magazine, and later was outdoors editor for Argosy . Before landing at Newsday he freelanced for all the big outdoors magazines. A few years later, when I moved from editing books to editing Grays , he wrote for me, including the account of a canoe trip to Hudson Bay down the Sutton River, a geologically freakish limestone spring creek cutting through northern Canadas sour peaty wetlands. The worlds best brook trout river, Nick called it.

And he would know. He spent much of his life traveling the north, fishing for and writing about brook trout. Always he was the consummate professionalfactual, thorough, penetrating straight to the point with precisely chosen details of people and fish, weather and terrain. And always, always, he was interesting.

For American anglers, few topics are more interesting than brook trout, our original fish. Long before we discovered the cutthroat of the Rocky Mountains or the rainbows of the West Coast, we were catching brook trout from New Jerseys Manasquan River into far northern Labrador and everywhere in between: on Cape Cod, in downtown Boston, in Haarlem Creek, rising near Amsterdam Ave and 125th; the Ishpetenga, gushing from springs near 20th and Fifth Avenue; in the Gramercy, its waters buried now beneath its eponymous park.

And these werent merely the brightly colored sardines todays anglers know. These puppies were big. In 1823, Senator Daniel Webster caught a fourteen-and-a-half-pounder from Carmans River in Brookhaven, Long Island, an unofficial record that stood until 1915, when Doctor John Cook caught a monster on Manitobas Nipigon River that weighed fourteen and a half pounds a week after it was caught; alive, it might have gone twenty pounds.

What happened to all these magnificent brook trout? In a word: us. These bright fluviatile flowers, as Henry David Thoreau described them on his 1846 trip to the Maine Woods, are true canary-in-the-coal-mine indicators of environmental degradation.

As we cut the trees that cooled the rivers, and dammed the rivers to run the mills that sawed the boards that built the nation, brook trout became collateral damage, their cold waters warming, their spawning beds choking beneath blankets of sawdust. Like Lizzie Borden filleting her father with an ax, when we saw what we had done we gave the brook trout another one in the person of hyper-competitive and warm-water-acclimated brown trout imported from Europe and rainbows from the Pacific Northwest. The result: Over most of the brookies original range they became a fugitive of the highlands. Brook Trout recounts this story, warts and all, and explores restoration efforts and widespread areas of the continent still fortunate enough to host healthy populations of the most beautiful fish that swims.

I first met Nick Karas twenty years ago. Over the years, Brook Trout has been an invaluable reference for me, and for many other anglers. Its still on my most-used bookshelf alongside Schullerys American Fly Fishing and Bigelow and Schroeders Fishes of the Gulf of Maine its spine broken, its dust jacket in tatters, its margins forested with Post-It notes.

Ten or so years ago I told Nick I was headed for the Wood River in Central Labrador, and a few days later an enormous Mickey Finn arrived in my mailbox. It looks big enough for tuna, I said.

Trust me, he said. Its just what you want.

He was right, of course. Sometimes I wish Id saved that monstrous bucktail, and speared it into the spine of Brook Trout to remind me of Nick, who died in 2012. Instead, a monster Wood River brookie boiled on it like a Montauk bluefish, and snapped my ten-pound leader like a cobweb. Which seems a far nobler fate.