The Sportsman's Corner

With heavy rains blowing out my favorite local streams for much of the spring, I've gotten little fly-fishing in. For a while, though, several spots on the BFO River remained fishable.

One drizzly afternoon before the BFO was blown out, too, I'd hiked to the top of a pool where I'd been having some success. I'd just sat down on a log to wait for some flies to hatch when I heard voices: two guys in separate one-man pontoon boats were anchored at the head of the pool. I heard the first one say, "We'll be back by four. Nothing's happening on the river. You could have the meal ready shortly after that."

That sounded like a guide arranging a meal for his customer by cell phone. I then heard his customer. "Just sell half the shares and put the money in a liquid fund. We'll deal with that later. Don't sell the other stock. It's pretty steady."

I almost fell off the log. A guy sitting on a little paddle boat in the middle of nowhere was speaking on a cell phone with his broker, which seemed totally out of place. I disgustedly left for home. When I told a couple people about this later, one asked me, "Did this surprise you, Rich? Today's world is a lot different from the old one you still try to live in."

The other incident, a more enjoyable one, had occurred a couple evenings prior to the cell phone incident. I was at another spot on the BFO, fishing during a light hatch of sulphur mayflies. In the high water only a few trout were eating the bugs, but I was fooling them. It was nearly dark when I ran into a pod of four or five fish greedily feeding. I had caught a few nice trout here in other years. "Tie on a fresh fly," I told myself.

I missed the first fish to take it.

The next trout I cast to slowly engulfed the fly; I calmly set the hook. The trout zoomed out to mid-river. It took me several anxious minutes to coax him back to the edge of the river where I netted him. Although I was somewhat disappointed that the trout was a rainbow, I was amazed he was as long as my 23" landing net, making him the largest trout I have ever landed on a conventional dry fly. My photos in the near-dark do not do the fish justice. However, landing the big trout made a nice crystal moment for me.