Streamer Junkie

I almost bought a bed, snapped back to reality in about ten seconds, and started looking at pedal kayaks...…..I ordered it at exactly the right time, or the last minute depending on if you looked at it from my point of view or the industry’s. I got it the third week of May. I’m still sleeping just fine on my couch. What a bone head move that would’ve been. 

Find something you believe in, and believe in it one-hundred and ten percent. If you don’t shape your life around it, then do you really believe in it?

But not only did I totally ignore the fact that I was sure I wouldn’t catch anything, but I began fishing, working my way downstream where the fish would be facing my approach in such clear water. I know the right way to do things, I just ignore them a lot of the time. And now that I’m forty-five, I feel as though I can start blaming my age for my stubbornness.

I’m feeling like I’ve fallen for the same joke twice now. But one brook trout did rise to my caddis. It jumped completely over it, never touching it, then shot back under a log jam. Again we laughed because there’s nothing else you can do.

Spruce traps are young Spruce trees bunched together tighter than a full dance floor in a Miami night club on a Saturday night, growing in the shadows of old spruce trees and on top of the fallen and tangled generation before them. The old generations of tree trunks and fallen branches lay in piles and crossed like natures own booby traps, covered with moss and rotting, and are so hard to navigate that even the deer and bears avoid them. The chances of broken ankles and legs are probably greater in a spruce trap than they are in a game of Twister with an MMA fighter. When you can, you go around at all costs.

We only had three tenths of a mile of trail to get to the river, but that was the issue in my head. We had an entire three tenths of a mile to get to the river, and this kayak cart was a cheap piece of crap. I knew it. The kayak knew it. Every rock on the trail knew it.

He asked me if I caught more fish with the fly rod and I chuckled. On some days yes, on some days no. I was happy to pass on some advice and see it registering on his face, and even happier when he offered to help me carry the kayak up to the car. I don’t know if I could’ve gotten it up there that afternoon without adding more scars to it… and me. I was beat.  

As soon as the Clouser began to rocket forward a wind came from out of nowhere and blew it a good fifteen feet to the left of the fish and I let a four-letter word fly. Not that I would’ve caught either one of those fish, but a bad cast only adds insult to injury. Then the unexpected happened.