TR: Verdigris Creek, Nebraska

"They just don't understand." Those words were repeated in my mind
many times this last weekend. I'll explain.
Midweek, I went to the monthly meeting of the Cornhusker Fly Fishers.
At the meeting, I found that they were going to Verdigris Creek
outside of Royal, Nebraska (population 82. Salute !!!) for a weekend
of fishing and camping. Guess I should have read my newsletter.
Okay, I'll bite, so Friday after work I drive the 175 miles to Royal
for a weekend of fun and frolic.
I meet the club members at the Grove Lake Wildlife Management Area and
start setting up. This is when I remember that little green bag
that's still sitting beside my front door. It has my tent stakes.
Oops, well, I dig around and find some sand spikes that will do. I've
only got four of them, but the tent holds up.
The campground is considered "primitive." Truly not so primitive, as
it has a functional outhouse, a pump with wonderful well water and is
nestled in a grove of burr oak, cottonwood and weeping willow. Our
tenting area is right at point where Verdigris Creek flows into Grove
Lake.
I'm tired from the trip so I sit back and crack open a Yuengling.
This is when I remember what else is in the little green bag. The bug
repellent. I'm now ground zero.
Well, time for dinner. Just going to grab a couple of peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches. I start to get out the fixin's and am told to
put that away. Dinner will be ready in half an hour. Okay, let's see
what it is.
Hmm, grill smells good. We're having grilled wild salmon, roasted
baby red potatoes and a wonderful squash medley. For desert, its
gooseberry, mulberry, rhubarb pie all complimented by a wonderful
steam ale home brew. The chef/brewer had even grown his own hops.
"They just don't understand" thinks I. This is supposed to be
primitive camping.
Saturday a.m., its time to fish. We go two miles upstream to the
hatchery where most of the folks head for the upstream pools with the
stockies. I'm pointed downstream to the "difficult" fish. Yeh,
right. I'm looking for the cameras in the trees.
The area I head into has no trail and I'm wading through 6-foot-tall
prairie grass based in flooded bank side. I.e. standing water and
tall grasses equal starving skeeters. I walk out a quarter mile
downstream about a quart low.
The fish in this stream were extremely wary. You peered through the
grass at the creek and then attempted to cast to them, holding your
rod high over the grass and through the one foot wide hole in the
streamside brush.
Problem was the little guys (10 inch long footballs, 99% of which are
hatchery escapee rainbows) are at the head of the drift and they'll
take your fly, scattering the 2-3 bigger guys at the end of the
pool.
I had great success on the little guys, including a couple of small
browns. These are naturally reproducing fish, the rainbows are the
stockies. Hold on a second, "they just don't understand." This is
Nebraska. I'm not supposed to be catching this quality and quantity
of trout in Nebraska on a 90 degree (or any other) day. I end up with
just over 15 fish in about two hours. Honestly, most of that time was
trying to figure out how to cast to them or untangling my line from
some grass.
The one serious quality fish came from a 2 foot wide, 2 foot deep
sluice between a couple of weed mats. I was standing in the water,
casting upstream with a swimming nymph when I see a large tail sweep
out as my nymph goes by. I continued to cast, and on the fourth time
through, a large brown stuck his head out and sucked down my fly. I
was able to keep him out of the deadfall upstream and the weed mats to
find that I'd landed a brown close to 17" long (okay, 16 ¼', but he
was over 16). Great fish (and yes, there was a witness). The color
was a lot lighter than I'm used to, but the sandy bottom of the stream
may have something to do with this.
In the afternoon, we hit the lake in the kickboats/canoes/kayaks... I
got about a 3 lb bass on a copper wooly bugger (Snohomish Sunrise) and
then got into a bunch of crappie.
After that, it was a nice paella and the discussions on whether
Spanish, Italian or Turkish saffron was best. One of the members
started making a boo rod, splitting and planing the tonkin cane. So
the discussion turned to pre/post China trade embargoed tonkin cane
and the mythology of the differences.
Hmm, these are not your average group of fly fishers. "They just
don't understand."
Frank Reid

Frank Reid wrote:
"They just don't understand." Those words were repeated in my mind
many times this last weekend. I'll explain.
Midweek, I went to the monthly meeting of the Cornhusker Fly Fishers.
At the meeting, I found that they were going to Verdigris Creek
outside of Royal, Nebraska (population 82. Salute !!!) for a weekend
of fishing and camping. Guess I should have read my newsletter.
Okay, I'll bite, so Friday after work I drive the 175 miles to Royal
for a weekend of fun and frolic.
I meet the club members at the Grove Lake Wildlife Management Area and
start setting up. This is when I remember that little green bag
that's still sitting beside my front door. It has my tent stakes.
Oops, well, I dig around and find some sand spikes that will do. I've
only got four of them, but the tent holds up.
The campground is considered "primitive." Truly not so primitive, as
it has a functional outhouse, a pump with wonderful well water and is
nestled in a grove of burr oak, cottonwood and weeping willow. Our
tenting area is right at point where Verdigris Creek flows into Grove
Lake.
I'm tired from the trip so I sit back and crack open a Yuengling.
This is when I remember what else is in the little green bag. The bug
repellent. I'm now ground zero.
Well, time for dinner. Just going to grab a couple of peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches. I start to get out the fixin's and am told to
put that away. Dinner will be ready in half an hour. Okay, let's see
what it is.
Hmm, grill smells good. We're having grilled wild salmon, roasted
baby red potatoes and a wonderful squash medley. For desert, its
gooseberry, mulberry, rhubarb pie all complimented by a wonderful
steam ale home brew. The chef/brewer had even grown his own hops.
"They just don't understand" thinks I. This is supposed to be
primitive camping.
Saturday a.m., its time to fish. We go two miles upstream to the
hatchery where most of the folks head for the upstream pools with the
stockies. I'm pointed downstream to the "difficult" fish. Yeh,
right. I'm looking for the cameras in the trees.
The area I head into has no trail and I'm wading through 6-foot-tall
prairie grass based in flooded bank side. I.e. standing water and
tall grasses equal starving skeeters. I walk out a quarter mile
downstream about a quart low.
The fish in this stream were extremely wary. You peered through the
grass at the creek and then attempted to cast to them, holding your
rod high over the grass and through the one foot wide hole in the
streamside brush.
Problem was the little guys (10 inch long footballs, 99% of which are
hatchery escapee rainbows) are at the head of the drift and they'll
take your fly, scattering the 2-3 bigger guys at the end of the
pool.
I had great success on the little guys, including a couple of small
browns. These are naturally reproducing fish, the rainbows are the
stockies. Hold on a second, "they just don't understand." This is
Nebraska. I'm not supposed to be catching this quality and quantity
of trout in Nebraska on a 90 degree (or any other) day. I end up with
just over 15 fish in about two hours. Honestly, most of that time was
trying to figure out how to cast to them or untangling my line from
some grass.
The one serious quality fish came from a 2 foot wide, 2 foot deep
sluice between a couple of weed mats. I was standing in the water,
casting upstream with a swimming nymph when I see a large tail sweep
out as my nymph goes by. I continued to cast, and on the fourth time
through, a large brown stuck his head out and sucked down my fly. I
was able to keep him out of the deadfall upstream and the weed mats to
find that I'd landed a brown close to 17" long (okay, 16 ¼', but he
was over 16). Great fish (and yes, there was a witness). The color
was a lot lighter than I'm used to, but the sandy bottom of the stream
may have something to do with this.
In the afternoon, we hit the lake in the kickboats/canoes/kayaks... I
got about a 3 lb bass on a copper wooly bugger (Snohomish Sunrise) and
then got into a bunch of crappie.
After that, it was a nice paella and the discussions on whether
Spanish, Italian or Turkish saffron was best. One of the members
started making a boo rod, splitting and planing the tonkin cane. So
the discussion turned to pre/post China trade embargoed tonkin cane
and the mythology of the differences.
Hmm, these are not your average group of fly fishers. "They just
don't understand."
Frank Reid


well...um...it is nebraska, after all. any of them wear red hats? g

sounds like a fine time, and i've never thought there was a state line
that defined such things...uh, perhaps kansas...maybe...

the paella alone makes plain they understand well enough for me. thanks
for another well writ visitation. hope you are keeping your stories...
might be able to parlay them into a collection in a few years.."travels
with cornhuskers"... g

nice stuff frank. keep at it.

jeff

On Mon, 25 Jun 2007 14:05:55 -0700, Frank Reid
wrote:

"They just don't understand." Those words were repeated in my mind
many times this last weekend. I'll explain.

And they don't have bears to rumble into your tent and suck all the
meds out of your cooler, either.

Sounds as if you had a great weekend.
--

r.bc: vixen
Minnow goddess, Speaker to squirrels, willow watcher.
Almost entirely harmless. Really.

http://www.visi.com/~cyli

On Jun 25, 2:05 pm, Frank Reid wrote:
"They just don't understand." Those words were repeated in my mind
many times this last weekend. I'll explain.
Midweek, I went to the monthly meeting of the Cornhusker Fly Fishers.
At the meeting, I found that they were going to Verdigris Creek
outside of Royal, Nebraska (population 82. Salute !!!) for a weekend
of fishing and camping. Guess I should have read my newsletter.
Okay, I'll bite, so Friday after work I drive the 175 miles to Royal
for a weekend of fun and frolic.
I meet the club members at the Grove Lake Wildlife Management Area and
start setting up. This is when I remember that little green bag
that's still sitting beside my front door. It has my tent stakes.
Oops, well, I dig around and find some sand spikes that will do. I've
only got four of them, but the tent holds up.
The campground is considered "primitive." Truly not so primitive, as
it has a functional outhouse, a pump with wonderful well water and is
nestled in a grove of burr oak, cottonwood and weeping willow. Our
tenting area is right at point where Verdigris Creek flows into Grove
Lake.
I'm tired from the trip so I sit back and crack open a Yuengling.
This is when I remember what else is in the little green bag. The bug
repellent. I'm now ground zero.
Well, time for dinner. Just going to grab a couple of peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches. I start to get out the fixin's and am told to
put that away. Dinner will be ready in half an hour. Okay, let's see
what it is.
Hmm, grill smells good. We're having grilled wild salmon, roasted
baby red potatoes and a wonderful squash medley. For desert, its
gooseberry, mulberry, rhubarb pie all complimented by a wonderful
steam ale home brew. The chef/brewer had even grown his own hops.
"They just don't understand" thinks I. This is supposed to be
primitive camping.
Saturday a.m., its time to fish. We go two miles upstream to the
hatchery where most of the folks head for the upstream pools with the
stockies. I'm pointed downstream to the "difficult" fish. Yeh,
right. I'm looking for the cameras in the trees.
The area I head into has no trail and I'm wading through 6-foot-tall
prairie grass based in flooded bank side. I.e. standing water and
tall grasses equal starving skeeters. I walk out a quarter mile
downstream about a quart low.
The fish in this stream were extremely wary. You peered through the
grass at the creek and then attempted to cast to them, holding your
rod high over the grass and through the one foot wide hole in the
streamside brush.
Problem was the little guys (10 inch long footballs, 99% of which are
hatchery escapee rainbows) are at the head of the drift and they'll
take your fly, scattering the 2-3 bigger guys at the end of the
pool.
I had great success on the little guys, including a couple of small
browns. These are naturally reproducing fish, the rainbows are the
stockies. Hold on a second, "they just don't understand." This is
Nebraska. I'm not supposed to be catching this quality and quantity
of trout in Nebraska on a 90 degree (or any other) day. I end up with
just over 15 fish in about two hours. Honestly, most of that time was
trying to figure out how to cast to them or untangling my line from
some grass.
The one serious quality fish came from a 2 foot wide, 2 foot deep
sluice between a couple of weed mats. I was standing in the water,
casting upstream with a swimming nymph when I see a large tail sweep
out as my nymph goes by. I continued to cast, and on the fourth time
through, a large brown stuck his head out and sucked down my fly. I
was able to keep him out of the deadfall upstream and the weed mats to
find that I'd landed a brown close to 17" long (okay, 16 ¼', but he
was over 16). Great fish (and yes, there was a witness). The color
was a lot lighter than I'm used to, but the sandy bottom of the stream
may have something to do with this.
In the afternoon, we hit the lake in the kickboats/canoes/kayaks... I
got about a 3 lb bass on a copper wooly bugger (Snohomish Sunrise) and
then got into a bunch of crappie.
After that, it was a nice paella and the discussions on whether
Spanish, Italian or Turkish saffron was best. One of the members
started making a boo rod, splitting and planing the tonkin cane. So
the discussion turned to pre/post China trade embargoed tonkin cane
and the mythology of the differences.
Hmm, these are not your average group of fly fishers. "They just
don't understand."
Frank Reid

Yes keep it up.
I miss a lot about living in "the flyover zone". The people were
great and the land was beautiful.
I am waiting to read some reports on those burrow pit lakes by the big
highway.

BJ Conner wrote:

Yes keep it up.
I miss a lot about living in "the flyover zone". The people were
great and the land was beautiful.
I am waiting to read some reports on those burrow pit lakes by the big
highway.


I fished the sandpits along I80 for years when I lived in Lexington. I
taught myself to fly fish (around 1965) using my new Fenwick 6 wt. spincast/fly
fishing rod that had a green plaid "sock" that stored in an aluminum tube and a
"Medalist" reel (still have all that stuff).

The pits are full of crappie, blugill, small and large mouth bass, rock bass,
perch, various sunfish, catfish and carp. We had one pit near home that had
giant blugill and they were a blast on a fly rod. I did a lot of spin fishing
for bass using top water lures & fished a lot out of my Grumman lightweight canoe.

Frank: good write-up on Verdigris Creek. And, nope, no copper in Nebraska.
I don't think there were any rocks, period, within a 100 mile radius of where
I lived. I remember the first time we took our little girls on vacation to
Colorado. They'd never seen rocks and wanted to bring home a trunk full.

Snoop

You seem to have had a good time, Frank.

But the name of that stream makes me wonder. My dictionary defines
Verdigris as

1 a : a green or greenish blue poisonous pigment resulting from the
action of acetic acid on copper and consisting of one or more basic
copper acetates b : normal copper acetate Cu(C2H3O2)2yH2O
2 : a green or bluish deposit especially of copper carbonates formed
on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces


Did you notice anything odd about the water?

vince

On Wed, 27 Jun 2007 23:43:04 -0400, vincent norris wrote:

You seem to have had a good time, Frank.

But the name of that stream makes me wonder.

I wondered about that same thing, the name. Somehow related to
copper mining?

TC,
R

My dictionary defines
Verdigris as

1 a : a green or greenish blue poisonous pigment resulting from the
action of acetic acid on copper and consisting of one or more basic
copper acetates b : normal copper acetate Cu(C2H3O2)2yH2O
2 : a green or bluish deposit especially of copper carbonates formed
on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces


Did you notice anything odd about the water?

vince