Streamer Junkie

I half heartedly drift a large black nymph pattern through all the slack waters I can find. In my mind I see it drifting, bouncing downstream, it’s black silhouette against the light brown water with the sun beating down on it as if it was a warm sunny day. It’s not a warm day of course, but if I couldn’t feel the cold on my face and hands then the appearance alone could have me fooled.

We drove down the road, pulled into a fishing access pull off next to the river, and the two of us did our best to dredge the bottom of what open water we could find while JP, camera in hand, recorded the morning for posterity. The trees were heavy with snow, evergreen branches weighed down with white precipitation hung low, again the river and surroundings seemed to be a black and white photograph.

 

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.