More years ago than I particularly care to contemplate, I was a catcher of bait as well as of fish. The two naturally went together. You had to have one to catch the other.
Possessed of a metal flashlight and the lightning reflexes of youth, I prowled well-watered lawns of the old neighborhood after dark, shining the light onto the grass and pouncing on night crawlers before they could dart back into the ground. I routinely filled coffee cans with night crawlers for my father and sometimes a couple of his bait-fishing friends, and, of course, I used them.
I’ve been told I became pretty good at the fish-catching aspects, but catching crawlers brought other rewards, as well. Neighborhood girls might shriek and run at the sight of a crawler, and money from regularly selling them to a neighbor helped amass a pretty decent collection of baseball cards.
Grasshoppers were another story. Fishing meant fishing with worms, but I eventually began hearing rumors that grasshoppers also were deadly as a bait. More and more, it seemed, when someone talked about an especially good day of catching fish, grasshoppers had been the bait.
I had to try it.
Catching grasshoppers was easy enough, and you could do it in the daylight. Keeping them alive and well for any length of time wasn’t so simple. You couldn’t keep them in an open can; putting a lid on the can might suffocate them. Catching grasshoppers along the stream, as you needed them, was one solution, but it was unreliable and took too much time away from the actual fishing. Then there was the nasty liquid — some called it tobacco juice — a captured hopper might leave in your hand, not to mention the hassles of impaling a grasshopper, with a harder body than a night crawler, onto a bait hook.
No, keep your grasshoppers. I’d stick to worms.
I eventually drifted away from bait fishing altogether, and gave grasshoppers no further thought. I moved into fly fishing, where dry flies, nymphs, assorted wet flies and streamers became the fish catchers of choice. In a time of pestilence I might even have reverted to a San Juan worm, if rather reluctantly, but hopper patterns still held little appeal for me.
Oh, I’d heard all about fishing with hopper patterns and other terrestrials. Certainly it was logical. Fish would feed on whatever was available and grasshoppers truly presented a mouthful. Maybe I just hadn’t seen a hopper pattern that I really liked.
That began to change with all the recent advances in the fly-tying art. The new hoppers looked utterly lifelike, they’d float, their legs moved. They looked ready to hop away . . . for all I know, they might even have emitted tobacco juice.
Seems everyone was fishing a hopper/dropper rig and singing its praises far and wide. Both the hopper and the dropper would take the fish, and sometimes a hopper pattern by itself was best of all.
I’ve tried them, of course, and though I don’t fish them regularly, I’m convinced hopper patterns will work.
For further proof, the Year of the Grasshopper is under way. Early projections called for a bumper crop of grasshoppers throughout the West this year, and after a slow start, a number of fishermen have reported the expected hopper boom to be in full swing.
Now is the time to head to the Colorado, the Eagle, the White, the Yampa, the North Platte — to any river that courses through meadowlands. A hoppin’ good time might be at hand, and with a good selection in the fly box, fishermen won’t need to chase those nasty grasshoppers while they should be fishing.
