Fishin' Light

I regularly see guys on the trout stream who look like they’re moving in, who appear to have been tossed out of the house for going fishing one time too many, kicked to the curb with their worldly belongings, luggage and all, and they've toted everything to the water.

Backpacks that could attack Everest. Chest packs they can barely reach around, much less fish around. Fanny packs that would take a whole lot more fanny than mine to keep suspended. I shake my head.

But then, I’m a minimalist. I travel light, think light, fish light. I want less to carry, less to lose, less to hang fly line on. I don’t need four boxes with every trout pattern in six sizes and three colors. I don’t want five kinds of indicators, a ten-tall tippet stack, or gadgets and widgets and zingers out the whazoo. All that stuff just confuses me. Not that it takes too much to confuse me, mind you.

I just try to keep it stupid simple. I have enough complexity in my life without dragging it out to the stream with me. I fish because it gives me uncomplicated, quality time, so I do it with uncomplicated, quality stuff.

I load up my SmithFly 2X pouch with a 4x6 C&F box of flies, 5X and 6X tippet, a few spare leaders, some Gink and some Frog Fanny, a bit of wool, and a little shot. Maybe a Clif bar or two. Hang the hemos and the nippers and I’m good to go.

Fishin' light, unencumbered, leaving the luggage at home...

...and trying not to go fishing one time too many.

The Price

Folks fish for lots of reasons. For escape. For sustenance. For sport. For companionship. For communion. We fished because the transition from 65 to 55 on NC421, approaching Boone from the east, is easily missed and enthusiastically enforced.

Troy had a ticket to fix.

My phone rang on Friday. “Hi. Whatcha doin’?” When Troy calls and asks this question, I generally skip the formalities and jump right to “Where, when, and what weight rod?”

“Watauga County. Monday. Chase some small stream trout. But we have to make a stop.” And the sad story from his last fishing trip west tumbled out. So, since he had to go pay the radar-wielding piper anyway, why not make something good come of it? Sandwich the unpleasantness between a morning on the Elk and an afternoon on the Watauga. Ease the pain.

Now, I make it a habit of avoiding courthouses (and we’ll just leave it at that for the time being) but I figured a close encounter with the seat of authority was a fair price to pay for a day on trout water.

“I’m in…” I responded, as I usually do.

“… but, while you pay the fine, I’m stayin’ in the truck.”

Out of Focus

All Hallows' Eve on the Bridge

If you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you have come to realize that I have a penchant for obscure, out-of-focus images. They fascinate me.

Now, it could very well be that it’s a self-delusion mechanism, a way to rationalize the fact that I suck as a photographer, a way to excuse my shaky work, but I find a certain dreamy reality-warp in handheld shots taken in impossibly dim conditions. In their soft indistinction, they come closer to my perception of the shadowy scenes in front of my lens than any crystal-clear photo could ever hope to.

Moonrise Downriver

So these three shots are exactly how I remember this past Halloween on the old Bynum Bridge; an eight-hundred-foot, county bridge spanning my home Haw River, built in 1922 and closed to vehicular traffic since the turn of the century, replaced by the big, sterile four-lane 15-501 just a quarter-mile upstream. Each All Hallows' Eve, the Bynum span, now just a footpath, is decorated, end-to-end, along both railings, with jack-o-lanterns carved by the residents of the county; carvings of all kinds, created with every level of skill, and depicting an amazing variety of expression and perspective. Hundreds of orange globes enjoyed by hordes of folks, many in ghoulish garb, strolling the dark remote bridge, cooing over the creepy creations, and breathing deeply the aroma of lit candles, roasting pumpkin flesh, and rich river mist.

Upstream to the New Highway Bridge

It's a time and a place delightfully out of focus. And here, my friends, are the images to prove it.

The Dry/Dropper Double

A brace of browns on a single cast.
The dry/dropper double.
More fish in one drift than this river has been known to surrender in an entire day.
At least to me.

Orange-bodied Madam X attractor on top.
Bead-head pheasant tail on bottom.
Both, apparently, looked good enough to eat.

Negotiating two trout at a time is “interesting”
and the first few moments, when you don’t know exactly what you’re dealing with,
downright weird.

Glad that one didn’t zig when the other zagged.
I’m not sure that the 6X between them
(or, more to the point, my scrungy knots)
could have taken it.

Not particularly big guys,
but do a ten-incher and an eight-incher, taken together, equal an eighteen?

Let’s pretend that they do.

Subtlety

You can have your blazing reds
Your canary yellows
Your tangerine oranges

Keep your hillsides of gaudy riot
Those brilliant shows of doomed defiance to the coming chill

Give me autumn's subtle shades
Its lingering green nod to summer past
Laced with mottled acquiescence to dreary days ahead

Give me peaceful transition
Substance, not flash
With just a hint of color
To keep it fun

That's all I need of Fall
And, in truth, of 'most everything else

Healing

He slips quietly into the water and gazes upstream. None of the nervous energy that permeates the opening moments of a typical outing is visible in his carriage. Quite the contrary, his shoulders slump with a grave weariness that resonates in the wispy mists that cling to the surrounding liquid surface, the numbing hush of distant whitewater, the dark edges of this secluded sanctuary.

It’s been difficult times.

He stands motionless, his soft stare remaining upward. He looks not for the dimples of rising trout or for the emergence of this morning’s hatch or for the locations of prime feeding lies. His focus, if there is focus at all, is much farther away. Beyond the cascade. Beyond the distant bend. Beyond his understanding, though he tries his hardest. He looks for an answer.

He looks for why.

After what seems an eternity he lowers his eyes and surveys the water close at hand. This trip was to be an escape from that which cannot be escaped, from the weight of it; an unconvincing capitulation to the harsh truth that the stream continues to flow despite his heart’s deepest certainty that all things should have stopped. He did.

But ingrained muscle memory eventually overcomes bone-deep inertia and he gently strips line onto the moving waters, a mossy green strand that drifts away behind him like sweet memories departing on the currents of time. With a quiet ease he retrieves these memories and sends them airborne, his subdued cadence imparting a graceful fluidity to his cast, a quality seldom experienced, before.

Remembrance swirls hypnotically around him in long, lazy loops. He surrenders to the rhythm, puts the weight aside, and lets his mind ride the soaring silk. He thinks of nothing more than the movement of arm and rod and line, the tumble of water, and the silent drift of a dainty wad of deer hair. He loses himself in the minutia. He forgets everything else…

…but for only a moment.

It’s a start.

The Photo Bin - October 2012

The fall change is just getting started here in the North Carolina Piedmont so I loaded the long rods into my four-wheel-drive time machine and leapt a week into the future, seasonally speaking, by driving northward into southern Virginia for a day on the Smith River. The colors, and the day, were spectacular.

The Smith regularly kicks my ass but I keep going back, this time to explore a promising stretch of the tailwater that I'd seen but not fished. I'd tried to hit it this past summer, but a double-nymph-rig tangle of diabolic complexity on my opening cast and a surprise early dam release thwarted me before I could get a fly properly soaked.

This day, however, was more than I could have hoped for and I can't wait till the cascade of color finds its way to my neck of the woods.

Grow Gather Hunt Cook

I don't get excited, these days, about trips for the mail. Sure, it's a nice walk down the ridge, along the winding gravel road, but what typically awaits in our rural box is disappointing. Junk. Bills. Solicitations. If it wasn't for the exercise and the chance to listen to the birds, it wouldn't be worth it.

But not this week. This week I was looking for something. Something good.

I have had the great pleasure, these past couple years, to follow a captivating blog out of Australia - Rohan Anderson's wonderful Whole Larder Love. Now, to my great delight, he's published a book to accompany his online work that advocates and celebrates "the innate need for a relationship with nature through the soil, plants, water, and wildlife." It was delivered today.

There is a sense of satisfaction from getting your hands dirty, nurturing your food from seed, and enjoying something that nature has provided, while inevitably spending time outside in the elements to make it all happen. Our basic primeval needs can be satisfied with some time spent out in the fields, foraging in the forests, and hunting and fishing as our ancestors did. Our affluent, post-industrial-revolution society looks down its nose at this rugged lifestyle, preferring the conveniences the civilized world provides. I know which I prefer. - Rohan Anderson

Whole Larder Love, the book, is many things: cookbook, gardening primer, gear advisor, hunting and fishing journal, survival manual, education tool, father's gift to cherubic children. It's a dirt-to-table roadmap and a peek into the fascinating lifestyle of a gifted individual who's investing his soul into the pursuit of a simpler, healthier, more natural way to live.

And it's unbelievably beautiful. Roh's camerawork is as earthy and appealing as the natural lifestyle itself. It was this imagery that captured my attention two years ago and it continues to delight me today. If you're into that kind of thing, Whole Larder Love is a lovely addition to your coffee table, though that alone seems a terrible waste. It needs to be used.

So my mailbox trips have been rewarded and I'll dig deeply into this wonderful work in the coming days and weeks and years.

I just wonder what will motivate me to go down the hill tomorrow.

Salt Substitute

I leaned back for a moment, closed my eyes, and breathed deeply the
spicy bouquet of salt, sweat, and scorched cork.

That was going to be such a good opening line. It rolled around in my head the entire three hours that I followed Bill’s boat trailer taillights down Highway 70, east towards Cape Lookout. A good line, yes, but now I can’t use it. For while there was plenty of salt and a fair share of sweat, no reels were harmed in the making of this post. No drags were toasted. The albies were nowhere to be found.

I have to admit that my saltwater fishing experience is thin, but one thing that I’ve come to learn is that while you might hit our North Carolinian blue waters with a target species in mind, you often end up fishing for something else - fishing for whatever’s decided to show up. A salt substitute.

The redfish are not being cooperative? There are probably speckled trout running along those same grass lines. No cobia hanging around the buoys? You can bet there's bluefish chasing mullet in the surf just to the west. And if the autumn bait ball blitzes aren’t being driven by false albacore, then catching the Spanish mackerel that are creating the chaos is a mighty fine fallback.

We listened to the crackle of the radio, eavesdropping on the guides as they, too, searched for pods of the armor-plated torpedoes. And, in between the static they're-not-here-eithers, we crashed one feeding frenzy after another, putting deep bends in the 9wts, catching substitute mackerel and blues - that is, when we weren’t hastily tying on new clousers after our previous offerings had been shredded to the hook or sawed off at the 40lb mono. They're toothy buggers, you see.

So while we failed to truly test our Abels and Lamsons or to get reacquainted with our bright fluorescent backing, we did just fine with the stand-ins. We may have missed the albies, but, when you come right down to it, it’s the place and the company that typically makes the trip worthwhile anyway.

And for that there’s simply no substitute.

Note: That was Friday. Sunday, I hear, the albies were all over the place. What can you do?

Buck Sunday

Looked up from my desk a few moments ago to see five whitetail bucks wander across the ridge above the house, thirty or so yards from my window; a couple of nice eight-pointers in the entourage.



Look out ladies.



Fine way to start the morning.