(HOST) Commentator Bill Mares reflects on why he enjoys fishing so much, especially during Autumn.
(MARES) Gingerly, I step and slip down the 45-degree slope covered with rain-slick pine-needles, down to the boulder-strewn bank of a Northeast Kingdom river. The exact location you’ll never learn from me.
This is one of my favorite fall fishing spots. I always catch fish here.
Mist rising from the river blots out the far bank. It’s cold and will grow colder, before the sun and my excitement thaw my paws.
In the fall you can fish all day long. You don’t have to wait for the evening rise. Hungry fish are storing up food for the winter. I’ll be storing up memories. In the fall I’ve got most of the water to myself, especially here. I’m alone with my catches – and the ones that got away.
With a wading stick I three-point my way across slippery rocks out into the river. Manifold water sounds blend into a stream side string quartet of violins, cellos and a viola.
I pay out the line with the Zug Bug fly I attached last night. Unlike the early season, this is not a time for dry flies, which are cast to rising fish. I’m fishing blind as it were, hoping for a strike. This is pocket water, where behind each submerged boulder can lurk a lunker or lesser fish. Or so I believe.
I begin casting short and long, across and down, letting the fly drift over those boulders. (After 10 casts, I change flies. After another 10 I change again.
The far shore becomes evident. A flock of mergansers flies overhead. The elements pull me in three directions at once. The river pressing against my waders pushes me downstream. A wind blows up-stream into my face. And, above starch-white clouds scud across a blue-denim sky.
Suddenly, 220 volts without the pain shoot through the line and up my arm. A silvery fish cartwheels in the air like a circus acrobat. I raise the rod to keep the tension and pray the fish is good and truly hooked. It races down-stream pulling out 50 feet of line. It jumps again.
After two minutes of zigzagging, the fish tires, I maneuver it closer, closer until I slip the net under the squirmy green-backed trout. What a fish! This shimmering flapping kaleidoscope before my eyes mimics all the fall colors around me, from river to trees to sky. I carefully release the hook and gently return the fish to the water. Two hours later, I scramble up the bank, six fish in my creel of memories and one in my vest, for dinner.
As Isaak Walton, the St. Francis of fly-fishing, wrote almost 400 years ago, "We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling."
(TAG) For more commentaries by Bill Mares, go to VPR-dot-net.