Big Trout, Short Story

I went out to my favorite local tail water this past weekend. It was my first trip out since the neck injury. My buddy Jason and I headed out there and the weather was glorious. About 50 degrees and sunny all day, with not another soul on the water.

I had tied up about 9 czech nymphs and planned to show Jason the way to slay it out there with them. As fortune would have it, czech nymphing just wasn't the ticket that day. We both had a hit or two without hookups.

We come up to a slow stretch of the river and Jason spots a rainbow about 60 feet below us in the canyon that is actively feeding in a lane. It's hard to read the size, but it looks every bit of 20 inches.

Let me preface this by saying that this river is known for its wiley trout. Any fish of size has been around the block and doesn't stand for the slightest hint of foul play. The approach, the cast and the drift all have to be purrrrrfect. Jason just picked up fly fishing this year and has really excelled, but catching one of these trout would be a challenge even for an experienced angler.

Jason climbs down the boulders of the canyon wall to the water and ties on an egg/nymph rig while I stay up on the rocks to spot for him. I told him how far away the trout was and damn if he didn't lay an undetected cast above it with a top notch drift right for its face.

The 'bow took a nonchalant glance at the egg before lazily wavering away.

"He's lookin... he's lookin," I stammer. "Nope he didn't go."

I see Jason's shoulders sink in a gesture of dissapointment as he gets ready to pick up the line for another cast.

"Wait, wait! Hes turned back at it... and hes following!" I yell out in amazement.

All I know from that point is Jason sets the hook and a flopping splash errupts the placid surface.

"Holy shit! YOU'VE GOT HIM! Holy shit!" I cry as I fumble for my net and begin to scramble down the canyon wall. Jason is tripping backwards, stripping line, letting it out, laughing, cursing -- doing the big fish shuffle.

I get down to the water, net in hand, and raise my eyes ready to do this only to see the tension in his rod abruptly release and the line skip across the water... fish off.

We crack a smile and give a high five just for the excitement of the ordeal. It's not every day you get to hook into a fish like that in a place such as this.

"The adrenaline is wearing off and it's being replaced with saddness." Jason laments.

I chuckle because I sure know that shitty feeling.

It turned out to be a bad knot on the fly and he knew it before we even took a look at the end of the line. It would have been his personal best trout.

I once read a story in which a young boy hooks into the biggest trout of his life and it breaks him off. The boy is sitting on the shore with his head between his knees crying when an old man walks up with a long gray beard scattered with odd looking, rusty flies. The old-timer tells the boy that maybe it was necessary for him to break that fish off in order for him to have the tools to catch a big one later on down the road. He plucks a few flies out of his crusty beard, hands them to the boy, and fades into the woods...

...and so is fly fishing.