First trip of the Year: >> musing
13 March 2004
At long last, biding my time against the forces of nature and various other commitments, I was able to initiate a trip back to the river.
March is a great month here in South Carolina. Things start greening up around here, the temperature becomes quite friendly, and best of all, the DNR begins stocking the rivers with trout. This is actually a great time to take kids and introduce them into the sport. They get to see and hear more than the running water. With spring coming and raising everyone’s spirits the way it does, it is the perfect time to shake off any cabin fever and get out into some healthy fresh air.
Now with that bit of Chamber of Commerce pr out of the way, my own personal reasons involve a bit more than the foregoing. I won’t go into a long boring list, because they will become evident one by one in this and other writings. Just call it a New Year’s resolution: to get out more and back into the things that I began as a very young man roughly forty years ago. That would be fly fishing for trout, tying my own flies, and developing an ability to write about things without becoming, oh, you know.
As it turned out, despite a late start and not arriving on the river until a little before one o’clock in the afternoon, the day has to be chalked up in the plus column. It was a pretty day, more sun than not, little wind, a few insects rising from the river (not many, though), and even a few willing trout. Well, heck, what else would you expect? They did just stock the river, you know.
under the bridge
I managed to engage six of the slippery denizens, releasing the first three voluntarily, the next one involuntarily (LDR: long distance release), keeping the fifth (deciding to start keeping a few in hopes of a family meal), and letting the sixth slip out of my hands before getting it into the keeper. I laughed. I am sure the guy standing on the bank thought, well actually I am not sure just what was going through his mind, but I didn’t care. It just tickled my funny bone.
Perhaps, it may have had something to do with the fact that my wife, Rhee, was along. Now, she is gracious enough to accompany me even to the point of bringing along a digital camera and taking a few shots of me stumbling around in the river. Not that she doesn’t enjoy taking a trip to the mountains, because that is high on her list of favorites. But she does not fish. She doesn’t mind if I do, though. Years ago, we used to backpack together, but that story is for another time.
Rhee came home with seventy-one pictures, mostly of me and quarry. But the one she missed? Of course it was The One That Got Away! I think that’s why I laughed. The fact that it got away with more than a little help from me is irrelevant. But since it was very much on the small side anyway, it simply was a lot easier to respond with humor than any pretensions of dismay. It would have a lot funnier if she had been there to record that bit, because she had just learned how take a rapid sequence in continuous mode. We all have our moments of missed opportunities, don’t we?
I was a little surprised that there appeared to be fewer fishermen on the river than I would have expected. Maybe some of them have converted to being hikers because the small parking lot above was packed full. Best guess was that some groups had planned an outing on the Foothills trail. No matter, I was just as happy that they were not on the river itself. It was not all that many years ago that I felt if I so much as saw another fisherman on the same river I was fishing, my spirits took a down turn. It partly had to do with the realization that my flies were not the first lure the fish were seeing that day. Seems silly now. I have gone in behind others and caught trout. Others have come behind me and caught trout. It doesn’t seem that the trout are aware of any of this. Strange.
W O O F
