Being Broken: A Fly Fishing Trip Interrupted

Yesterday I fly fished the local hotspots in a kayak, and yes, caught many fish. But as every fishermen knows, the farther you get from your starting point, the bigger the bass will get (at least in your mind).

L&T Nancy plays guide, Ned plays the guided. (click pic for big image)

It’s not true, of course, but it sure as hell seems like it is, especially when you’ve got a boathouse filled with Grand Lake Canoes, picnic baskets jammed with sandwiches, and the afternoon free.

Into the boat we went, and up the lake we headed.

Gray? Overcast? You bet:

The Underground goes minimalist (click above picture for bigger image)

Great fishing? It sure as hell started that way — my first cast (because there were three of us in the canoe, I started the day with a casting rod and a black plastic “senko” bait) netted a footlong smallmouth.

My fourth cast got bit (I missed him). My sixth cast was good for an 11″ smallmouth. And while it slowed slightly after that, it was looking good. Real good.

So food, in fact, that greed overcame me, and we decided to run to some “better” water, my thinking being you want to spend the “cosmic” fishing days on the best “big fish” water you’ve got. Plus it was dead calm — great fly rod weather.

My tools ready for a day of carnage on the water.

In other words, I knew I was going to slay ‘em. Big ones too. Real big.

Of course, the Greeks taught us that hubris wasn’t rewarded so much as punished, and halfway to the “cosmic” fishing spots, the punishment appeared: the outboard motor suddenly slowed and quit.

Stopped. Dead. No runnee. No movee.

The Motor Stops. The Engine Whine Begins.

You run the full gamut of emotions when your outboard motor dies. You move through anger and denial, fruitlessly bargain with the motor to start, then finally accept that it’s not going to run.

Your fishing trip is dead.

Still, we got lucky. The motor would idle (I suspected fuel line blockage), and rather than dismantle anything in the middle of the lake, we put-putted (slowly) to the nearby cabin of some of Nancy’s relatives.

There we pulled the motor apart, and discovered that I was… (tada!) dead wrong about the fuel line. A plastic part in the throttle linkage had broken, leaving us dead in the water.

And speaking of dead in the water, while we were working on the motor in the thigh-deep water , I looked down and saw a pair of leeches in the process of forming a close, personal attachment to my thighs.

I reacted like anyone would, which is to say I screamed like a pre-teen girl in a slasher movie calmly and carefully brushed them off before they could do any lasting damage. (And here I thought I was going to catch big fish.)

Fortunately, the L&T Nancy’s Uncle Peter was happy to tow us downlake, and yours truly stayed in the canoe largely as ballast to steer and offer expert towing advice.

It wasn’t a fun-filled ride, especially when we putted through a short rain squall and I realized all my rain gear had been moved to the other boat.

Still, any boat trip that ends back in your own boathouse — limbs, digits and eyes intact — should probably be considered a success, and it’s possible I actually started to feel that way after I stopped shivering.

Still, hope springs eternal in the hearts of all fishermen, and this morning (Friday) I awoke to the very gentle patter of raindrops on the cabin roof.

Yee-ha! It’s going to be a perfect fishing day. I can just tell. I’m going to catch big fish…

[tags]fly fishing, fishing, smallmouth bass, grand lake canoe, senko[/tags]