Russ Beck tells us about a fishing on a cold winters day.
I nearly bailed the first time Chadd invited me to fly fish with him. I told him I had a cold, but he guilted me in to it, anyway.
“You know I don’t mind going on my own. If you’ve got a cold, that’s cool, but I was looking forward to going with someone.”
I did have an inkling of a cold: a tickle in the back of the back of my throat. But the real reason I didn’t want to go fly fishing was because I had never been before. Sure, I had spin-fished for a large chunk of my life, but my fly-fishing skills were nonexistent. I practiced casting on my back lawn for hours, but I figured making the fly line snap was a good thing. I thought making the leader fray only happened when you used a lot of power. I knew enough to know that I didn’t know anything.
But I went. I met him at Second Dam on Logan River on an early November afternoon. Fall couldn’t decide if it was staying or leaving. The leaves now dark brown or gone, hung above the clear and low water. We started at the reservoir, casting to fish that rose to midges. I decided my best bet was to pretend like I knew what I was doing.
After my second attempt at casting, Chadd said, “Maybe you should just watch for a while.”
I did. I noticed that although his fly line looked graceful and never stopped moving, his rod jerked with starts and stops. I watched Chadd’s line open up at the end and place the fly on the water gently. It didn’t make sense. So I watched some more. Then I tried again—but I shouldn’t have.
We moved from the stillwater to some riffles upstream and tried nymphing. I realize now this was an act of mercy. He probably thought that I’d be able to better handle the short casts. He was wrong. We cast to a hole next to the bank where we could see fish actively feeding.
He said, “cast as close to the bank as you can without hitting it.”
I tried and hit the bank. My line tangled in the root system of a tree leaning over the hole. I had to walk right through the fish to retrieve my fly and line.
“I don’t know how to say this,” Chadd said, “so I’m just going to come out with it: have you ever caught a fish on a fly rod?”
I’m not sure why now , but I was embarrassed. With my facial hair, large stature, and closet filled with flannel and wool, I felt like I needed a reason for not catching a fish on a fly rod this late in my life, but I had none. I hemmed and hawed for a bit and eventually said no. He nodded. I think he knew the answer to his question before he asked it.
“How did you do it? How did you get so good?” I asked.
“I’m not good.” He was tying a Glo-Bug on the end of my line, and paused to put the tippet in his mouth to lubricate the knot. “You’ll see people who can throw all their line without thinking about it. I learned by coming up here and messing up, by getting caught up in that root system.” He pointed to the spot I had just got snagged up on. “And that tree, and that one.” He pointed up the river.
“But you catch fish.”
“Yeah. I catch fish.”
I shrugged and waited for him to talk again.
“You’ll catch fish, too. You’ve got to catch your first. You’ve got to get the proof-of-concept fish. Then it will all make sense.”
As a response, I threw a cast that tangled onto the bank. My Glo-Bug wrapped around my indicator. When I retrieved the mess, the split shot dangled down like a broken clock’s pendulum.
He watched as I tried to untangle the jumble.
“You know what you need to do? Find an angler. Like one of those friends you mentioned earlier. Someone who knows what they’re doing, someone who doesn’t throw a tailing loop, and you need to stitch yourself to his back pocket. Ask him questions and buy him breakfast and find out when he’s going fishing and just show up.”
He emphasized the words that distanced him from me. The ones that made me know that he wasn’t offering to be my fishing mentor.
“What’s a ‘tailing loop’?” I asked.
“Exactly. Ask things like that.”
A week later, winter came and I met Chadd on the same river at the same time. My guides clogged with ice and my net froze and stuck to my back. Without warning or ceremony, eventually, I caught a fish. A brown much bigger than she should have been for my first fish on a fly. It was a short cast, maybe six feet under a footbridge. The split shot hit the water first and in front of my egg pattern. Chadd worked a side channel about twenty yards away from me. I thought about keeping her in the net and taking her to Chadd—somehow offering her as proof or a sacrifice or a tax or something else that I didn’t understand because I was new to this. It felt like there needed to be some sort of ceremony with fanfare and pomp.
But, of course there wasn’t any of that and I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I pulled the fish in and admired her exaggerated spots and her golden belly. Her gill plates moved up and down slowly matching my own breathing. I cupped her in my bare hands and slid her back into the cold water.
Chadd was right. After I got that first fish, everything started to change and make sense. I spent every hour I could on a stream. My casts became sharp, accurate and tight. I learned to roll cast and watching that line open up like a time-lapse recording of a flower blossoming was one of the most satisfying images of my adult life. I began to mend the line before I knew what “mend the line” meant. And, most importantly, I caught more fish. I’m still not good, but I’m competent.
Back to that wintery November day. After a couple of hours on the water we called it quits. I ended the day with that single brown—Chadd had around twenty, but that’s a guess. As an act of kindness, he didn’t give me an actual number. As we walked back to our cars I remember hitting my hands on my thighs to get feeling back in my fingers. We talked and laughed. Mostly about how horrible I was at fishing. We went to breakfast to warm up at a local diner. When the check came, I picked up the tab.
Russ Beck and Chadd VanZanten are about to publish On Fly-Fishing The Northern Rockies due out early June more details HERE