Wandering

The spring sunshine feels good on my shoulders when the chilled breeze lessens. It is past Noon, and the April waters it is hoped will awaken soon. I walk twenty or thirty yards then stand and watch the wrinkled coverlet of the river’s surface. Moving ever upstream, I find no signs of life, simply glare and the vagaries of current. The scene is beautiful though it displays no promise.

After a few hours of this I finally see a subtle wink of light across the run, there where the current levels out a bit and bounces off the angled edge of a bankside boulder. I find a seat in the browned grass on the riverbank, just high enough that I may watch closely for another wink.

Waiting, I check the fly that has spent the past few hours taught against the nickel silver ring that serves as hook keeper: Gordon’s Quill awaits the season’s first cast.

Perhaps half an hour passes, and then I see that second wink of light, and the soft ripple beside the rock that lets me know that a trout lies there. There are wings on the surface of the run. Just a few, but clearly enough for this trout and this angler. I rise and step softly into the flow, study the currents and begin an approach to take advantage of their ability to mask my movements. The speed and direction of flow tells me to position myself upstream from my now conspicuous bankside rock, and I work slowly toward a spot that looks perfect.

The high spring flow pulls me up short of my mark, and I can feel my heart rate rising in my chest as I anchor my feet to find a steady hold amid the current, to feel confidence in old legs months removed from wading rocky river bottoms. Thus secured, I take the fly from it’s keeper and squeeze a tiny pinch of floatant onto my finger tips, then massage it gently into hackle, tail and wings. I have done these things many thousands of times, though here and now they feel new.

Pulling line from the well-worn spool of the reel, I pull the leader knot through the tiptop and drop the first ten feet of line on the water, wiggling the rod to feed more slack into the currents. The fly itself comes to hand where I blow away the water droplets and settle in to study the rolling surface along my particularly interesting rock…

There! A wink and a ripple are spied once more and my rod hand comes up as I trade the fly for a handful of trailing slack, the first of several to be loosed as my cast is extended toward it’s ultimate goal.

The fly alights and drifts down past my rock, once, twice and finally a third time. In an electric moment of expectation and joy, that third drift doesn’t make it all of the way past my rock, becoming another wink of light and a ripple before my eyes!

The arch of the bamboo meets the trout’s desire for freedom as he swings out away from the bank and into the full force of the run. My reel chatters in protest for the first time since autumn, and the new season begins at last!