It ended up being a beautiful day. The sun would hide behind clouds and then the clouds would move past and you could almost hear the temperature rise a degree or two before more moved in and you could feel the drop. When the temperatures are hovering right between those two numbers where one means snow and the other means rain, yet neither is happening, I seem to notice the rises and falls of the thermometer with more awareness. Of course it might just be that I’m enjoying feeling the sun on my face only because I’m hoping it doesn’t warm up enough to feel a freezing rain on it instead.
I was pretty sure my brother had caught a couple certified pigs from this stretch a couple years ago, or at least this general area. He’d shown me pictures, huge twenty-plus inch fat browns, and assured me he’d released them, but never did come clean as to where he actually was. Just somewhere on the creek, and my suspicions told me somewhere around here, simply because he was living and working close by at the time. Of course, I wouldn’t have put it past him to rent a house and get a job close to a specific part of the creek just to throw everyone off as to where he was fishing. Nope, I wouldn’t put it past him at all. I never pressured him for the spot and he never volunteered it.
I’ll swear to anyone that it’s not about the fish to me when I go out, that it’s about the places. And the farm lake above any other place on the planet is more about the place than the fish to me, but there are great fish in it too. JP and his wife Bobbi were in the second Jeep and I really wanted them to get the full experience out of the trip. For all I know, any trip out to the farm these days could be the last. I expect to pull up to a For Sale sign one of these days, or worse, to the news that it’s already been sold. If this was their one and only trip to the farm, I wanted it to live up to the hype I gave it every time it became the subject of conversation. I realize that no one will ever love your favorite fishing spot as much as you, but like all fisherman, I try to impress its importance to me upon others. Because like all other fishermen, I just can’t help it.
I just started this too late. I wish I’d found fly fishing much sooner in life. It could’ve saved me a lot of heart ache. A lot of anger. A lot of depression. What you’ve got to understand is that even though I’ve always fished, there were a great number of years in between being a long haired head banger in high school stricken by the need to hunt bass in farm ponds with spinning rods and these years now, that I find time fleeting and calendars shrinking as I dream of chasing fish to the ends of the earth with a fly rod. The years in between were a distracted time the way I see it. There was always a fishing rod leaning in a corner of a closet or the garage that came out a couple times a year, but there were too many things taking my full attention, leaving almost none for the fish and the places they could be found.
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