Parked by my favorite lake 2 hours out of town, I stuffed body & layers of clothes into tight waterproof waders (How did they shrink so much in just 2 years?!), blew up the float tube, grabbed my equipment, fly rod, lunch, life jacket, flippers & lucky hat, & launched myself into the cool, serene water. WHAT A GLORIOUS ESCAPE --tall evergreens surrounding the small, glistening lake, the occasional bald eagle, but especially the water rings all around me as large rainbows sipped bugs off the surface. Finally! A day to watch fish take my visible fly! What luck!
But the next 4 hours were a slap-stick comedy of my errors--
- I discovered that I'd left my fishing reel at home.
- The reel I then borrowed from a kind local fisherman fell apart when my first rainbow struck the fly.
- I held the reel together to land the 2nd rainbow. YEAAA:)
- As I was whining to my husband, who was fishing another part of the lake, about all my dumb mishaps, I forgot to hold the borrowed reel together. So its spool with 200' of fly line fell out of the reel, bounced off my float tube into the lake.
- Luckily I retrieved the spool by pulling all 200' of its line into a rats nest onto my lap.
- I spent the next 90 minutes unknotting the mess of line to wind it back on its spool-- all of this while sitting in my float tube in the lake.
- I finally got the borrowed reel back together, kicked back into shore to return it to the kind man who lent it to me.
- By then it was time for us to quit fishing & go home.
From a fishing standpoint, I've definitely had better days:)! However, it's hard to describe the beauty of fly fishing from a float tube, half in & half out of the the fish's world. Landing the fish & gently releasing it unharmed are a very personal & intimate experience for me. Although my special day was full of mishaps & frustrations, it was still magical.
No comments:
Post a Comment