Dennis Anderson: Channel surfing in state trout opener

IN SOUTHEAST MINNESOTA — Desperate for spring, Minnesotans nevertheless remained indoors in droves on Saturday, if the lack of anglers here was any indication.

Blame the weather on the first day of the state's 2008 stream trout season: The temperature barely crested 30 degrees in this part of Minnesota. Skies were gloomy. Snow fell.

But for those who showed up -- bait fishermen in particular -- not all was lost. Leonard Krue of Wabasha, Minn., was among those who found a hole in Beaver Creek, on the edge of Whitewater State Park.

From it he fooled a limit of five brown trout, nightcrawlers dangling from the shank of his hook.

"It's been pretty good,'' Krue said, straddling a stream bank Saturday morning, fishing alongside a friend, Charles Behrens of St. Charles, Minn.

Down the road, the Middle Branch of the Whitewater River presented itself for the new season as an almost entirely changed waterway.

The massive flood last August that rumbled through the steep valley bracketing the Whitewater performed geologic wonders that on Saturday lay in plain view.

The river itself, in many places, no longer bends and courses where it formerly did. In some places, the flood burrowed an entirely new bed for the Whitewater, shifting it in one direction or another as much as 100 yards.

Fifteen of 17 trail bridges in the park were wiped out in the process. Trees by the hundreds -- thousands -- were uprooted. Boulders the sizes of small cars were flung downstream.

Particularly telling of the flood's power is the bridge that straddled the Middle Branch of the Whitewater in the state park campground nearest the DNR's headquarters.

Campsites on both sides of the river were connected by the bridge. But the bridge is no more. It washed away. And the river at that juncture shifted wildly, such that where the bridge once stood, there now is no river to cross.

The river is in a new location, where an entirely new bridge will have to be built.

"We have big projects to complete to restore the park to the condition it was,'' said assistant park manager Roger Heimgartner said.

One such project will entail removing 200 dump-truck loads of sediment from the park's swimming area.

"But before we can do that we have to replace the bridge leading to the swimming area, and build a new road to it,'' he said.

Yet on opening day of trout season here, not all appeared different.

Canada geese had returned to the floodplains that buffer the cold-water rivers that drain this hilly country. Eagles -- ever-present among these river bottoms in spring -- soared overhead. Turkeys gobbled in the hills. And finches, cardinals and even bluebirds flitted among the park's countless leafless limbs. Noticing, perhaps, that many of the trees were bent over and dead, the birds nevertheless seemed undisturbed by this change from a year ago.

It wasn't until after lunch that I pulled on my waders, strung a fly rod and eased myself alongside the Whitewater's Middle Branch.

Surely there must have been other fly fishermen somewhere in this part of the state Saturday. Given the low temperatures and particularly the muddy coloring of the rivers here because of recent rains and snowfalls, such anglers -- if they were hereabouts -- were nymph fishing.

But I saw no such sporting types. Hardware chuckers, yes. And bait folks. But no others using flies.

Tying on a size 14 Pass Lake, a favorite fly of a friend of mine, Dick Hanousek, I fished it like a streamer. It was a reasonable presentation, I figured, on a day when odds were clearly stacked in the trout's favor.

I made a few casts, and a few more. The river was impossibly chocolate-colored. Still, the rod felt good in my hand, my fly line laying over neatly as I cast upstream into a riffle tail that wound and spilled into a pool I eyed with dark intent.

My eldest son, the 14-year-old, had a basketball game Saturday and couldn't fish with me. The 12-year-old was ill. Because they no longer think I can catch fish without them, they ushered me out the door early Saturday morning as if I were going to my own funeral.

"Call if you need any advice at all; anything,'' they said. "Do your best.''

I wondered now what they would think of me opting for a size 12 green wooley bugger, the atomic bomb of fly angling.

Casting the big fly, I watched my strike indicator drift downstream. Then I raised the rod and roll-cast farther still upriver.

On this drift my line tightened, bowing my 4-weight rod. A brown trout had impaled itself on my offering, and the fish struggled mightily into the deep fast current.

Changed river or not, this new season featured the same old thrills.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com