Wet lines

I have found that no matter how many books you read, you will never learn as much as spending time with an old timer on the water. When I was a kid my mother’s uncle Arnie taught me all I would ever need to know about fly fishing. My dad was a great fly fisherman too, but I guess at that age you just don’t want to necessarily take advice from your dad.

My education began one day when everybody was going to go on a float down the river and there wasn’t any room for me. Arnie saw my dismay and said, “We’ll drop you all off up river and Eric and I are going to go fish on the little river.” We launched the floaters on a section of the Clark Fork River and we drove to a tributary called the St. Regis. It was a small stream that was either too high or too low, in my young mind, for any decent fishing.

Arnie took me to a little pullout off the road and we grabbed our gear and started into the bushes. When we hit the river Arnie said, “Lets go find an old fiend of mine.” I thought he meant maybe the owner of a battered rusted out old pickup I had seen a few turnouts back. Instead he told me about a fish he knew about in the river.

“I’ve been catching him for about 5 years now, always in the same place,” he said. “Tie on a muddler minnow and cast right in the fast water above that rock.”

As I was tying on the fly I noticed my hands were shaking a bit. I don’t know why I was nervous but I felt like this was a solemn occasion. My first cast caught the other bank and snagged on an Oregon Grape bush. After I retrieved my hook from the offending branch, I casted again and hit water. “Let the current feed it naturally into the seam between the fast and slow water,” Arnie said. After a few casts I finally had a strike and I couldn’t believe such a large fish would be in such shallow looking water. Arnie laughed with a kid’s glee as I fought the fish to shore. As we landed the beautiful Rainbow I looked at Arnie with a new respect. From that day on I listened every time he talked about fly fishing.

My young eyes began to see rivers and lakes in a new way. I saw how water moved on itself and would sit and watch as bugs and debris filtered through it. I found a new meaning to matching the hatch and how one little color could be the difference between landing the fish and not having a strike. I learned how even a small stream could hold a big fish, and where to find it.

Every time I cast a fly I think about Arnie and those lessons on the water. Thanks again Old Timer!

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