The Two-Headed Fly Fishing Vacationer
By Tom Chandler on Jul 17, 2007 in Fishing Report, Travel
You wake up the first day of your vacation and viola — you’re two people.
One wants to hit the water (hard), while the other wants to relax, soak up the beauty, revel in the utter lack of ringing phones or pinging e-mail software, and get reacquainted with the L&T Nancy while you’re both temporarily shorn of your career responsibilities.
Everyone who wants to be here, raise your hand.
OK, I didn’t have an out-of-state license yet, so I couldn’t hit the water right away. Instead, the L&T Nancy and I lounged all morning, hiked the hour into the tiny town of Grand Lake Stream, bought non-resident fishing licenses, ate popsicles, got the lowdown on the fishing (river slow, lakes OK), and hiked home.
In other words, a perfect day, topped by an almost interesting sunset picture:
Damn bird and boat didn’t cooperate. Life is imperfect.
I knew it was too much to ask that the bird and boat would align in the sun trail, but you hope anyway, and when it’s clear it’s not going to happen, you click the shutter when they do line up, marking the result down to the imperfection of nature.
I would have clicked the shutter on a few smallmouth bass pictures — I just now got off the lake, having kayaked and fished around the local submerged rockpiles for a few hours — but I forgot to take my camera along.
No matter. Plenty of smallie pics to come, though most will likely show fish with subsurface flies in their jaws as they don’t seem too interested in the topwaters.
A few minutes ago, it was perfect kayak fishing weather, but the wind picked up pretty quickly and I paddled back to the dock. In just the time it took to write this post, the wind has picked up considerably and moved, now blowing in from the south, putting a good chop on the normally placid waters around the dock.
It’s a good time to be on dry, unchoppy land, writing, drinking beer, and wondering what I’m going to do this afternoon. The river? Perhaps. More family are due in, and putting off the evening hatch for one more day isn’t the worst thing you can do at the start of a two week long vacation.
In the meantime, we’ve got plenty of fishing action coming in Jim Troyer’s report on his fly fishing trip to Baja, (expect Part II later today or early tomorow).
See you on vacation, Tom Chandler.
Technorati Tags: fly fishing, kayak, maine, grand lake stream, smallmouth
Mad Dog | Jul 17, 2007 | Reply
OK, T & N, you need to adopt some vacation rules. It’s OK to do all of things mentioned in your post…
What’s NOT OK is to get online at some point in the day and write articles for your great blog. A vacation is a vacation. We’ll be happy to read all about it when you return.
Sheesh! Next thing, you’ll be emailing and IMing each other late at night to see how each other’s day went.
md
Tom Chandler | Jul 17, 2007 | Reply
Writing is what I do when I’m on vacation…
KW Morrow | Jul 17, 2007 | Reply
Sounds and looks like you’re off to a great start! Hope it just gets better from here. I spent last week down on the Spring River in Arkansas at my brother’s condo. We caught smallies, bluegills, and trout…all in the same stretch of almost-too-warm-for-trout river due to all the recent rains.
We fished quite a bit, drank too much, ate well, and talked a lot. We even played a couple of hours of tennis one cool morning. We mostly fished the lake by the condo in the early mornings, goofed off during the heat of the day, and fished the Spring River in the evenings.
It’s not Maine, but it was nice. So I hope you have a spectacular trip.