Streamer Junkie

I’d look up at the mountains while I stripped fly line, then look back to the water. The mountains towered over us, and I couldn’t help but feel small. Which I’ve thought for a long time is something that’s important for people.

In a couple places there was just enough room for the canoe to pass in between protruding limbs and naked, sun-bleached trunks. They looked like old bones. Skeletons of the woods in their temporary resting places until higher waters would eventually move them again. They’d end up in the lake someday as smaller, whiter, polished driftwood stacked against a far shore.

Spur of the moment is how more of my fishing gets done than any well laid plans. I texted JP to tell him I thought I might be able to...

Just how it suddenly it felt like their young baseball days passed by so fast, the creek was suddenly low and the water temperature had risen. And where I am on my creek, just below a man-made impoundment of concrete, that means something; It meant the browns on this last couple miles of water had all dropped downstream into the next river, and that the bass had moved up in.

It was a week into trout season. So we went perch fishing.

It was there, so I fished it.

With the temperature right around thirty-five degrees the precipitation coming down all day was wet. It’s an odd place to find yourself. Standing in water only a degree warmer than the air, looking at everything you see covered in snow, while rain soaks and adds four pounds of cold to your favorite hat.

The afternoon was spent under that gray sky with the sun trying to penetrate it looking like nothing more than a distant low wattage lightbulb. For this time of year the conditions were really about as perfect as you could expect.