Welcomed

Coming home brings all of the charms and challenges of a favorite place.

The morning began with beautiful blue skies and brilliant sunshine, buoying with my spirits. I could blink into those skies and all but feel the river warming. I worked through my morning chores, just like a normal morning, like any day of that precious span anglers know as dry fly season.

Waders donned and into the SUV, that special Leonard ACM behind my seat, I felt downright giddy as I told Cathy our destination. Once near the river, I strapped my wading staff about my waist, hoisted my vest on my shoulders and joined my rod and turned the locking ring of the reel seat snug, sublimating the excitement to take a slow deliberate pace down to the riverbank. At the moment I set foot upon the grass beside the flow, a cascade of wind rushed up the valley on cue, a welcome from the Red Gods.

I laughed and told her of the typical events anglers are presented with, sudden winds, rain and the creatures of the realm, all and any tossed out as a greeting as welcome. She has read every word these many years, but all I could do was laugh and utter: “it’s true, it’s true”…

Even though as I chuckled at the wind, trying to catch line and leader as it was blown around my head, I eventually managed to string the line through the rod’s guides and knotted a Quill Gordon to the tippet. I sat beside her to see would be the next act, pointing out the rises between the gusts.

The winds vanished as quickly they had descended, and at last I took up my rod and waded slowly through the clear waters. My legs began to gather a bit of stability with each step, sensing the familiarity of these rocks, as I worked my way to the thread of current where those rises were showing. Of course, a few gusts returned and played with my first casts, but within a few minutes I had my fly alighting along the trail of bubbles bouncing over the rocks shrouding the fish rising haphazardly.

Nature and the Red boys had an ace in the hole though, one challenge still to overcome. That first rise that came to my drifting fly brought the rod up just on time, and I felt a spirited dash. There I was smiling with every turn of the reel handle until I drew that fellow near to see the thick white lips that seized my lovely dry fly – a chub.

My mangled fly was discarded, amid a pang perhaps of doubt: might the handful of moving risers before me wear those same big green scales? Could such a favorite reach doom me to a season beginning with rising chubs?

I knotted a fresh quill and studied each rise in turn. Some were questionable, but to my eye there was one that drew my eye immediately. That big shapely head rose a second time, leaving nothing to fear! The winds chose to erase the vision at that moment while I was planning my cast.

Once the next calm spell I watched carefully, hoping that fish would return.

I found no more of classic head and tail rises, but there was some evidence. A soft rise and a mayfly I was tracking was simply no longer there, and the Leonard sent my fly dancing down that line of drift, twice and thrice, and I answered with it’s quiet disappearance!

The classic Hardy LRH Lightweight reel has a characteristic wail when one’s fly line and backing leaves it’s spool at a high rate of speed. To an angler, it is a symphony, a pure expression of ecstasy. Not a chub this time, not indeed.

There was another fisher downriver who had arrived as I was working out into the river. After I had finally snubbed that first run and made a few turns of the reel handle, the demon on the wetted end of that line dashed another screaming run right at him. He turned and I caught a mix of surprise, perhaps even fear, might he be at risk of bodily harm.

I saved him though, turned that downstream flight and began the long line stalemate, the gaining of a few feet of backing and then surrendering it, short dashes and turnabouts as a powerful fish gives his all. I thought I had beaten him half a dozen times, all to lose whatever line I had gained as he charged away headlong.

I backed slowly toward the riverbank, working shallower and working toward a patch of smaller cobble where I might work him into the net. When I got the first good look I understood, for my eye caught the bronze and butter color of the expected brown trout. This was a migrant from the wide Delaware, green, red and silver, and he knew no quarter.

Finally, I stretched out the net, and guarding the fine tip of that lovely old Leonard, drew him in. I wanted a photo, but he had battled so long and hard, I honored him with a quick twist to the steel and a gentle return. There was no holding him into the current, for as that cold bright water touched him he was away like a dart! Welcomed back to the river, to life, as he welcomed me.

Perhaps the rarest trophy of these Catskill rivers are those special wild rainbows which exceed twenty inches long. In more than thirty years I have touched half a dozen, and each has been uniquely memorable. I will leave you a memory of another from the past.