A Feeling of Fall in the Air and Trout on the Line

They say if you live long enough you'll see everything, but who thought we'd live to see an August like this in the Washington area? Okay, so the tomatoes refuse to ripen. Who cares when you can throw open a window at night and listen to crickets chirping?

But enough with the questions. Fact is, day after day, night after night, we are washed in the glory of autumn and it's not even September yet. Dry, cool breezes, bright skies, fish and crabs biting like they know winter's coming -- it's all too good to be true, and way too early.

With the old Boston Whaler out of commission because of a bent propeller, we were forced to take the little wooden crab boat all the way across the Chesapeake last weekend to cash in on a rockfish bonanza near Bloody Point at the southern end of Kent Island. One doesn't cross the Bay in a glorified, flat-bottom rowboat without checking the weather carefully.

Somewhere in the monotone of meteorological mutterings from Robbie the Robot, the emotionless computer voice on Marine Weather, came mention of overnight lows in Western Maryland -- in the 50s, for heaven's sake. Whatever happened to global warming?

As we made the six-mile sprint across a flat-calm Bay to the Gum Thickets, where big rockfish waited hungrily on the bottom in 30 feet of water to gobble our live baits, we already were scheming our next trip out to the mountains to trick some trout.

Larry Coburn, my steady angling companion and co-author of the indispensable "Guide to Maryland Trout Fishing," reckoned plump, stocked brook trout at Big Hunting Creek ought to be ripe for plucking.

Brookies spawn in October. Their colors grow bright as autumn approaches and they feed greedily to fatten for the exhausting reproductive process. The trigger, says Coburn, is nighttime temperatures in the 50s.

So we set off at dawn on Wednesday, accompanied by the irrepressible Mike "Animal" Bailey of Germantown, a diehard Potomac bait fisherman aching to try his hand at the flyfishing art.

Up winding Route 77 near Thurmont we climbed, stopping finally at the ranger station at Camp Peniel Bridge, where a dozen or so plump trout lurk at the spillway below the road crossing. The bridge is a little more than halfway down the five-mile stretch of catch-and-release water on Big Hunting, where stocked trout survive all summer in the cold water emerging from the dam at Cunningham Falls Lake.

What a day! Cool breezes wafted in and set dry leaves clattering aloft as we donned waders. Coburn led the way a half-mile downstream along a woods trail to a deep pool where more trout lurked. It was still early; sunlight had not yet filtered down to dapple the stream and the copious insect population was not yet up and about.

We tied on sinking stuff to lure the trout out from darkened lairs -- San Juan worms, inchworms, egg patterns, honey bugs. With a pinch of weight a foot up the line to sink the flies deep and tiny float another two or three feet up to signal a strike, we were ready and Bailey felt right at home. "This is the sinker," he said, "and this is the bobber. Just like bait-fishing."

"No, no, no," howled Coburn, horrified at the crass terminology. "That's a split-shot and a strike indicator."