Fishing is supposed to be fun, right?

Good. That settled, I'll stop feeling guilty about the extreme degree to which I enjoyed myself the last couple of times out. The fishing was all the more incredible because I had it all to myself.

The reward for the easy 10-minute walk from the road was a deserted stream. Maybe everyone else thought the water would be high and muddy after a week of rain, but it wasn't. It was up a bit, but certainly fishable and a just slightly "off color."

In a word, it was perfect for one of the most effective trout tactics ever employed.

I did use my rather pricey fly rod, but you can't really call what I enjoyed so wryly fly fishing. Prompted by the high flow, the cloudy color and the absence of aquatic insect activity, I clipped my tapered leader back to an absurdly stout diameter, tied on a No. 10 olive Woolly Bugger, pinched a splitshot onto the leader with my own incisors and proceeded to aggravate the tendonitis I've been pampering in my left elbow by catching too many trout. Catch and release, of course.

The Woolly Bugger isn't what you'd call a classic aristocratic fly. It's big, ungainly and ugly. It's also simple -- a portly chenille body, bristling with haphazard hackles and a clump of marabou for a tail. As if that weren't heretical enough, I like my buggers with a brass bead head. In the water a bugger looks like something alive -- and alien. Big trout are not deterred. They eat them.

Woolly Buggers are not the kind of fly that fly-fishers talk a lot about, but we all have them in our boxes. In groups, obedient to civil expectation, fly-fishers will flail dutifully away with Hendricksons, Blue-winged Olives and other dainty creations. But left alone on the stream, the temptation to tie on a vulgar bugger is hard to resist.

Fly Fishing and Tying Journal editor Dave Hughes recently referred irreverently to fishing Woolly Buggers as "depth-charging" trout. "It's a terrible thing to do, and I'm ashamed when it works," Hughes quipped.

An elegantly down-to-earth tenet of fly fishing is "keep your fly on/in the water." The Wooly Bugger takes that mandate one step further because it is always hard at work. I like to fish it on a short line in smallish streams, letting it sink and drift through the pools and runs. When it reaches the end of the drift, I wriggle it back to the surface like a streamer.

Sometimes trout will pick the bugger up on the drift and sometimes they will smash and eat it on the active retrieve. There are exceptions but when a fish takes it on the drift it will most often be a brown trout. Rainbows seem to like to smack the fly on the retrieve. Expect brook trout to do either.

One drizzly, chilled evening last week my line stopped, then twitched as it drifted by a rock ledge with a dark undercut cavern beneath. I lifted the rod and felt a weighty resistance, with just enough "give" to be a living thing instead of a snag.

The "thing" felt the bugger's hook and proceeded to bull and bore its way all around the pool, trying always to get back under the ledge. It took a long time to even get a look at the fish. When I did I was glad I'd trimmed the leader back to where it could, basically, pull to freedom a cow mired in mud.

I seldom ever measure, weigh or count any fish or game I'm fortunate enough to catch or kill. It's just not a habit I've ever acquired. But before I released that brown trout, I aligned his tail against my rod butt and took note of where his snout, still impaled by the bugger, nudged the graphite. If I ever get around to measuring that span I'm guessing it will tape close to 20 inches.

Hiking back to the truck at dusk I noticed how the dogwood blooms along the stream blended with the whitewater riffles, so that air and water seemed as one. Suddenly pungent in the gloom was the scent of mountain azalea.

Even an angler who fishes with Woolly Buggers can have some sensibilities.