Combining turkey hunting and trout fishing is a May ritual for many hunting anglers, or angling hunters ready to seize every opportunity offered by the month when gobblers are strutting and trout are rising.
I've never been able to pull off that daily double – turkey hunting in the morning and trout fishing in the afternoon or evening – because I've always looked at turkey hunting as a round-the-clock sort of thing. Hunting, planning the next day's hunt, scouting, roosting birds, strategizing and then starting all over again the next morning, which is actually the middle of the night for most folks.
For the record, I've tried. But my attempts at focusing on trout during spring gobbler season always deteriorated into turkey-scouting missions, fishing quiet pools so I could hear any potential gobble, and paying little serious attention to what's happening streamside.
Too, I'm still haunted my the memory of a late-morning strutter on the one day – the first and last – when I left the Mossberg home in favor of an Orvis 4-weight. Walking down a logging trail to a remote section of one of my favorite Lake Placid Region streams, the kind you'll never see me type, there he was as I rounded a bend. Strutting, facing away from me, his full fan essentially shooting me a moon as he displayed radiantly in the warming sun. The big boy – I can still see his beard swinging as he ran off – spotted me immediately after breaking out of strut and scooted away. I walked to his strut marks in the dirt, cursed my decision to fish, and then fished anyway.
It always seems to happen that way. Even when I'm fishing before the regular-season opens for spring gobblers, my highlight is often hearing a distant gobble over the sound of the gurgling brook, or maybe bumping a lone hen and wondering whether a tom is nearby.
To be honest, I'm not sure how these turkey-and-trout folks do it. I mean, after three or four straight days of turkey hunting I have to step back and evaluate whether I'm still employed, married or recognizable to our Labrador retrievers. Even then, I only have time for basic hygiene, am capable of falling asleep while pumping gas and once lost a favorite slate call only to find it two months later in the freezer.
I've had some successful trout outings during turkey season, but that was long ago, always in the afternoon after legal shooting hours had ended. And good fishing aside, it usually left me with nothing in the tank to roost birds that evening. Instead, I would often just tip back the seat and nap in the warm pickup, arms folded across my chest, mouth agape, undoubtedly snoring like something out of a Three Stooges episode. I'd awaken a couple hours later, drooling so badly flash flood warnings were issued to the truck cab.
So right now, I'd prefer not to hear about Hendrickson hatches, big backcountry brook trout or the nice holdover browns being taken already from the West Branch of the Ausable River. And don't tell me the lakers are still up high in the water column and hitting like crazy on Lake Champlain.
I'll probably shut down my spring gobbler season a little early, as is customary. It's pretty rare that I get out on the final weekend, unless a bird is screaming and begging to die. When you consider my early rises began in late March on scouting missions just to hear birds, continue through April on a more defined recognizance level, and peak with the actual season itself, it's a long haul.
And it's just about time to turn my attention to the evening hatch instead of great gobbling mornings.