“If God had intended us to weigh trout, he would have given
them bigger scales." Don Zahner
I had a conversation with another trout angler the other
day, when he asked me “What is the biggest trout you have ever caught?” I am a
little too sly and old to be drawn into this ego trap, so I answered “10
inches.” He looked at me strange, and walked away to refresh his barley pop.
Of course I was being facetious, but as I thought later
about memorable fish this year, it seemed that many of the bigger fish were
left out of the trip down memory road, and instead I seemed to value fish I had
worked for with a special presentation, an amazing cast, or….? Foremost may be
a ten inch brown that took a grass hopper cast with little back-cast room at
fifty feet and requiring the fly to ride down a 6” slot and kiss the left side
of a boulder to put it under a clump of grass. When the little brown ate the
fly, my friend exclaimed” Wow! You earned that fish!”
How do we measure success? Or should we? Is it measured in
size, quantity, or happiness? Can that happiness come from a small fish caught
a certain way? The questions and the philosophy filled my head as I hiked the
coulee hills near my home and finally emerged accompanied by a cheap merlot, (it
was a good Monday) and some jazz later in the evening.
See, the comeback to that anglers question should have been
“What is the most beers you have drank?” and then “Now, what is the best beer
you have ever had?” Provokes thought doesn’t it?
Satisfaction does not always equal large or many, and
neither skill. A sip of a vintage wine may be more memorable than the college
party when you drank all that punch, strapped a bra to your head and ran naked
into the dean’s swimming pool… or maybe not…. Bad example.
Degrees of difficulty may be like a fine wine that makes the
dinner come together. You figured it out. You delivered the perfect cast. You
beat the wind, tied the perfect fly, figured out the hatch, etc. You solved the
little problems on the stream.
Size does not necessarily equate skill as one angler figured
out after he returned from a big western tail-water full of pictures and
stories of 20” browns and rainbows, only to get skunked in a spring creek ten
minutes from my home. This is why some of the most popular destinations in
fly-fishing involve a simple equation: Where can one take a person who can’t
cast or read water, and get them into a big fish? (or even a fish at all!)
Aha… are the lights going on yet? How many pictures of
enormous rotting Midwest salmon do we have to look at before we realize size is
relative? They don’t count you say? Well… they did for the guy who caught
them…. Which is fine too. We all have to start somewhere.
However, there inevitably comes a point when we perform a miracle
on the stream, and are rewarded with what we consider the booby prize: a small
fish.
I think it is the effort and the skill that are their own
reward. Satisfaction and difficulty are inherently related.
So don’t get down in the dumps when some fumble klutz
bounces a wooly bugger off the back of their head and somehow hooks the biggest
trout you have ever seen. That 6” trout you took with an unweighted nymph
fished upstream without a strike indicator has it beat.
Just don’t get it mounted…..
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