Never give up
You mean in life, or fishing? I hear you. When I write, you never know which one I’m talking about…sometimes, many times - both. I know I lose some folks on this blog by blending the two, but I pick some folks up, too, that are intrigued by how much the two have in common, and what great symbolism and perspective fishing offers on life. You should try it sometime. Read fishing stuff and think about your life. You’ll be surprised, and it just may help you understand a little about yourself, others, and the relationships you have with others. Heck, there may be a half dozen things in this post, you never know. I’ll start out talking about a recent fishing trip I took with a good friend, and we’ll see where it ends up.
I picked up the phone. “Craig”, a friend said on the other end of the line. “I can go fishing tomorrow morning”.
“You read my mind”, I replied.
8 am the next day I was loading up the boat with goodies, tackle boxes, spin and fly rods. On this morning, the lake was flat glass calm like a clean slate, and man did I have a good feeling about it. The coffee tasted good, the lake had that wonderful morning smell, my jacket felt warm and the cool air on my face finished waking me up. Drake, who of course was going, already jumped in the lake after minnows, making sure he waited until he was next to us to shake.
Off in the distance I could see bass driving minnows up to the surface and slashing through them like a razor, flying end over end at times. The first “pattern” of the day became apparent, so I thought.
We got on the boat, Drake jumped on, and we idled the boat out to the sunken island where all the commotion was, drifted into range of some splashing bass and casted large fly minnow imitations into the bubbles that remained on the surface from their earlier feeding. “There’s one”, I said, “Oops - he’s off”. I made the common mistake of reaching down to turn the trolling motor in a different direction, which almost always results in a lost fish. Though it looked like we hit the jackpot and would be catching fish hand over fist, we caught one more on that pattern, then the bass just quit. They had been chasing minnows all over the lake, and just quit.
We shot over to a drop off line that always produces well with the flyrods, but no takers that day. Slid up on a flat, then to a depression in the flat which almost always has fish around it, too. Nothing. Uh oh. Though the wind was switching around to the southwest, and the day promised 80 degrees which is usually good fishing, the lake patterns were going to be tough…again.
My friend for the day, Derek, and I have done a magnificent job of picking tough days to fish together on my home waters. It had been several in a row, and by now I bet he was wondering how much I had fished that lake, and oh, by the way, if I was really a guide or whether it’s just a story.
A couple of more patterns, one of which was an inflow current pattern that had produced good results last time we fished together, again nothing. We stopped right over a huge school of gar pike in the middle of the lake, 50 feet of water, where they were feeding on something. A splash here, a splash there. Everywhere we saw a splash we cast a minnow fly, and this went on for 30 minutes - no takers. I’d never seen anything like it. We strained to see what they were eating. We saw no minnows whatsoever. We conclude they were not eating, but splashing the surface for some other reason. We left, and tried a couple more drop offs. Not even small bluegills on nyph flies, which are almost always eager to hit flies.
We stopped for lunch at Riverside Pizza on the river that passes right behind Golden Drake Outdoors. Drake jumped off the boat, peed, and jumped into the shallow water to resume chasing minnows. If we couldn’t catch fish, he was going to. It had turned into a bright sunny day. I was slipping into that daze where I was irritated at not catching fish. Frustrated. Can you imagine? A gorgeous late September (tune flash - and I really should be back at school) day on the water and I’m…irritated at not catching fish. What an idiot. How many people would give anything for a day like that and I had to find something negative, even if it was as a little thing as stupid as that. It’s almost like I had to find something bad to try to balance out so much that was was really good, like a chunk of me has to have some negative somewhere. Can’t just let the good things be good things and overlook the bad. Hmmm…. it’s about life again. See what I mean?
After lunch and something to drink, we felt refreshed ready to take on one more pattern before calling it a day. It had to be a drastic shift in approach, location, lure, and presentation. We decided to try the rivers that interconnected the chain of lakes, so we pushed through the next lake up and into the river upstream all the way to the headwaters. We anchored there, and rigged up, and used the trolling motor to ease ourselves downstream at our pace, not the current’s pace.
We started out with finesse plastic worms, just to see what was around. I cut my black plastic worm down from 4″ to 3″, super finesse, cast upstream out of the sun into shade and cover. Drastic change. Bang! A 12″ largemouth. Drake finally gets to lick a fish. Derek was into a nice fish too. Another largemouth, several rock bass, a couple of really nice largemouth, and we were into the swing of things. Derek switched over to the flyrod and his hand tied clouser minnow and caught several bass and rock bass right in a row. Man, is he a great fly caster. He even caught one nice largemouth in the churned up mud a boat had caused as it went by. That was very interesting, as I always thought boats scared the fish in the river. Another rule broken. Derek added a perch to his flyfishing bag for the day, and in fact that was the first perch he ever caught on a fly, so good deal. Drake got in all the fish licks he wanted, and laid down on the bottom of the boat to nap.
We would have stayed longer, we hadn’t even fished the best part of that particular river stretch, but business called and we had to leave it there. That’s ok. We had stuck with it, worked at it, and it was worth it. Yes, it was the most beautiful day out on the boat I can remember, but there’s also something special about not giving up, trying new and creative things from the endless possibilities, endless ability to hope, and then having things work out. How sweet it is.
