6/14/07

There are two (silly, I admit) number goals that I set for myself each season.  I'm not a numbers guy (anyone who has spent any time at all guiding cringes at that term) but I do like having quantifiable accomplishments that I can get excited about.  I want to have a client catch a trout over thirty inches and I want to have a double that measures at least four feet combined.  Much of this is luck and if I do not reach these arbitrary benchmarks I do not lose any sleep.  But if nothing else, it gives me something extra to hoot and holler about on the river and getting demonstratively excited is one of the things that keeps me vibrant and upbeat throughout the long season.  Today both of those goals were attained in the span of an hour. 

It was one of those days where most everything seemed to fall into place.  I was paired with a couple of guys who can really lay it down and happen to be a pleasure to spent nine hours with as well.  We drew the furthest beat from camp, a difficult stretch of river at normal flows not to mention during high water with treacherous wading and limited structure.  If you go there with inexperienced clients, you are in for a long day, but it does hold some serious pigs.  If you can get a cast to him, the fish of a lifetime lives there. Today we found him.

The ride up, an hour in a jon boat that can be cold and miserable, was actually somewhat pleasant, we saw bear and moose.  A little wildlife viewing can break up an early morning haul quite well.  This only works when the clients are open to a wholistic fishing experience.  Sometimes you get the sports who are too focused on the fish to even notice the lumbering majesty of a bear much less the subtle beauty of spring tundra.  These guys allowed themselves to be immersed in the whole experience.  The fishing started slow but neither of the guys were too perturbed, they were sharing the scenery of this wild stretch of water and content to spend a day on the river with one another.

Around noon, we started to hook into fish, a few of them were nice, in the two foot range, but nothing spectacular for this area.  I had them fishing about fifty yards apart, working depressions in a big gravel bar with rapid current.  One guy was set up above a deep bucket that I knew was holding fish, but he wasn't having any action.  I put on a heavier streamer and stood on his left shoulder, coaching him into the right swing.
"cast about fifteen feet to your right and let the fly swing back...there he is!"

He set the hook and the fish didn't move, after fifteen seconds I knew he was into something big, I wasn't sure it was the trophy we were after but I had a good feeling.  I elected to walk back to the boat and  retrieve the net.  When I got back, several minutes later, he still hadn't seen the fish.  He fought the unseen brute at length, the fish staying down in the bucket and not doggedly not allowing itself to be seen.  With calm determination, he continued to lean against the eight weight in his hands while trying to keep footing in the knee deep surge of the river.  His partner had seen me go for the net and had walked down to witness the battle.  When he finally coaxed it into the fulled telescoped rubber net (no easy feat in that current) it measured thirty one inches in length with a nineteen inch girth.  It was about a fifteen pound rainbow, a river dwelling buck still wearing his plumage from spawning.  I was downright giddy and I couldn't have imagined a client I'd rather see holding that bow.

The angler who caught him leaves tomorrow, two days before the rest of his crew.  He's leaving early to pick up his wife from a cancer treatment center.  His friends kidnapped him for a week while his wife was away at treatment so he didn't spend the whole time staring at the walls and tearing himself up.  He told me all this, very matter of factly, after we shared the experience of his fish of a lifetime.  He told me about the house they had just bought together, how she had picked all the furniture and how he would change it if she died.  He didn't look at me as he spoke, he watched the water, cast his line, I held the boat in the current, working it across the raging current pouring over the gravel bar.  It was more like he was talking to the river than to me.

The mood was not soured by our conversation, we all remained in high spirits.  An hour after he caught his toad, they doubled up on twenty five inchers.  Around three o'clock, the guy who leaves tomorrow said the only thing he hadn't done yet was catch a fish on a mouse.  We jetted back downriver for a half hour to my go-to mousing hole and he landed three in forty minutes.  At that point he cut off the mouse, handed it back to me and said he was ready for a cocktail and a cigar.  I don't smoke cigars but I did partake in one tonight, sitting on a deck overlooking the twilight river and recounting the tale of the day's fishing.  I hardly even noticed the clouds of mosquitoes.

Some days you feel like things work out the way they should, like there's a strange serendipity, or at least balance in the way things go.