Little cutts, little girl.

In Film Canisters and Cane Poles: a fly history I commented how I might like to break out the old Eagle Claw glass fly rod sometime this summer and introduce it to a few cutthroats.  I got the opportunity this past weekend when my family and I took a short hike up a stream. Mostly it was just a day getaway.  A picnic.  A walk in the woods.  I even took note of a few features for the upcoming elk season.  But, like any outing that happens to pass near fertile trout water, a rod must also be involved.  Two hikes ago we were also along a stream, and I employed the ole "film canister" technique.  That is, I cut a long whippy stick for my kids to trade off flipping a fly into the stream with.  The results were less than stellar, mostly due to the young-ness and lack of intuition my kids possess so far when it comes to approaching water with the intent to catch something.  So this time I packed actual fly rods, knowing there was potential to put in more time on the water.  Even my wife carried her rod.  In the end though, it was still mostly me who fished.  The kids climbed around log jams, scaled high cut banks calving away into the water, took unintentional swims, and fended off all sorts of imaginary dangers that threatened our very existence in the woods.  My wife, very unaware of the danger she was being spared from, read a book in a tranquil patch of sunlight along the spruce-lined stream.  Her rod never got assembled.

My daughter however, joined me on two prolonged stints of casting.  The first one with the old Eagle Claw.  Generally she takes instruction very well and usually puts it to use right away, no matter what the topic.  Today she would have none of it.  I still snuck a hand onto the rod occasionally and made the fly land a little better, and those were generally the drifts that hookups came from.  She did, however, on her second round of casting later in the afternoon, catch one entirely on her own.  She made somewhat of a circular cast, lifting the line as it passed by her and rolling it back up in front.  And on that roll she picked up her first-ever unassisted fly-caught trout when the fly came to rest upstream again.  The fly line was not in her hands and as she lifted the rod the reel spun freely - the drag singing out like she'd just hooked a steelie fresh from the ocean.  Made for some excitement.  A minute later she dragged the nine-inch cutthroat onto the wet gravel in front of her and scooped it up for me to take the hook out of.  She insisted on personally letting each and every fish go that she was around for.  At least after she had come to terms that we weren't keeping any on this trip.

The faithful yellow rod of my youth found new life in the hands of my daughter.

Ten dollars for water and a beaver hole

A fishing trip is never just a trip.  There's always more.  Occasionally a trip is smooth sailing, but more often than not there is something else besides fish to make it memorable. 

As a kid I remember things happening that ranged from being stranded on a lake after burning up an outboard motor, getting tossed from the bow of the boat when the motor seized (different occasion), to losing a rack off the back of the truck that contained the coolers with the week's worth of food.

This past weekend my family and I took our first camping trip of the year.  One chore to accomplish before leaving was changing the switch that controls the water pump in our camper.   I'd had the time to take it off and match it with a replacement at a hardware store, but didn't get it reinstalled before we left.  I wasn't really concerned, I just figured I'd do it after we arrived.  It has a manual pump handle as well.  But as we wound our way up Highway 12 through the Big Belts bouncing over the frost-heave damage from the fading winter, I noticed water pouring out of the sink drain in my side mirror.  I pulled over to see what was going on and found water in the sink, but nothing else.  Maybe I'd overfilled the tank and some was sloshing out.  Never had that happen before, but I supposed it was possible.  As we crested and started down the other side, I noticed it again.  Turns out the bouncy road had taken the two pump switch wires and miraculously touched them together.  This time I found the pump running and the last few ounces of water from our reservoir spewing from the sink faucet.  Apparently the first time I stopped the wires had separated before I entered the camper to investigate.  Now, with an empty water tank - and two freshly duct-taped wires - we entered White Sulfur Springs in search of a water hose.  The hotel manager I spoke to at my first stop tried to smile away my request for water by saying  "water sure is expensive these days."  After a little more haggling we settled on me trading a ten dollar bill for a full water tank.  Once the deal was done, he softened, and seemed to enjoy the silliness of the whole situation.  "This is a first," he said.  "I've never sold water before." "Yeah," I said, "and I've never bought it from a garden hose."

The rest of the trip went well, minus the wind.  Despite the 50 degree daytime temps, the wind kept conditions brisk to say the least.  Still, we knew we were pushing our weather-luck venturing out so early in the year, and all-in-all it was a good trip.  The water was clear enough to fish and the browns that fell for my jigs ranged from 12 to 18 inches.  None of the brutes I was hoping to encounter made an appearance on this trip. But I'll find them on the next. Or the next.

In order to liven things up a little, or maybe just to escape the wind, my soon-to-be-six-year-old son decided to spelunk down a beaver hole.  He had showed it to me, and talked about wanting to go down it.  But after some discussion of how that was a bad idea, I thought the matter had been settled, and went to tinker about the camper while he continued to play around its entrance.  A short time later the alarm was raised, and I find my boy head first down the beaver hole and out of sight.  The hole was dug from the top of the bank on the flat land above the creek and plunged sharply downhill toward the water, surfacing again near the water's edge on the steep face of the creek bank.  My son was yelling something about being stuck in the hole, and I was a bit thrown off at first about where that yelling was coming from.  I climbed down the bank to find his face poking out of a root mat a foot or two above the flowing water.  It seems the burrow had taken a bit of a turn at this point and he had become wedged.  He couldn't even turn his head.  I'm not sure where his arms were.  Understandably he was a bit upset, and I was doing my best to talk him through the importance of remaining calm while I tried to do so myself.  I couldn't let him see me seem worried, and I chastised him softly for getting worked up (while making no mention of the absolutely hair-brained act of diving head first down a hole he couldn't see into that was barely bigger around than his head).  Guess he's not claustrophobic.  What had been going through his mind!?  I'm glad no critters were home, and I'm glad it had an outlet - at least he was looking at the sky and breathing fresh air.  Otherwise he was in about as good of shape as he would have been had someone rolled him up in a carpet and leaned it against a wall with his feet toward the ceiling.  I climbed up the bank, relieved that he wasn't in any danger of drowning and that he was at least immobilized until I could figure out how to extract him.  I was already more or less assuming I was going to have to dig him out.  There was no way to pull him through the direction he was going, I'd already concluded that - although like Winnie the Pooh in Rabbit's hole, it seemed a shame to waste it. The bank above him was a tangled mess of dogwood and willow.  Digging would be tough.  I peeked into the hole to see perhaps how far I'd have to dig to be able to reach his feet when I noticed the soles of his shoes at the extent to which daylight reached into the hole.  Now I went into the hole head first.  Granted I didn't really fit, but I got my head in, and one arm.  There was enough space that we could talk, and I told him I was behind him.  I groped for the feet I'd seen, but couldn't find them, and asked where his feet were.  He started kicking them up and down, and I realized I needed just a bit more reach.  A little squirming and I had hold of one ankle.  I yelled to him to close his eyes and started a steady, firm pull.  He slid with less effort than I anticipated.  Perhaps it was his slick winter coat.  He moved enough that I could now back out myself and reach in with both arms, grabbing both ankles.  A couple more hauls and he was sputtering on the surface, smeared with mud and looking the part of a chimney sweep.  We hope he's cured of his curiosity about holes. I joked with him as I dropped him off at school Monday morning, telling him to be good and to stay out of holes today.  He looked thoughtful, promised he would, and then said that he might dig a few in the sandbox at recess.  I affirmed that would be fine.

He tried his hand at fishing for a little bit after being pulled from the hole, but the wind sent him seeking shelter before long.  The next day, before leaving for home, my daughter expressed her desire to catch a fish before leaving.  She's a much more dedicated soul than my son, except for perhaps the exploration of beaver holes and Lego creations, and she laughed at the wind for messing with her casts.  She managed to catch one, and she correctly declared it her first brown trout, which she named Brownie, and decided it should be supper.  It soon took up residence in the cooler as we headed home.  There was no further incident of mention, and in the end, we all fared better than Brownie.

Pirates

I spent last Saturday with my son jumping from spot to spot as we drove along the Missouri downstream of Holter Dam.  My wife and daughter were having a "girls' day" in Bozeman, so what better to do than hit a stream.  Mostly I just wanted to see what the pulse of the river was as the rainbow spawn gets underway and to get my son on the edge of some water.  He's not the fisherman I was at five years old, or at least thought I was, but he's not opposed to it either.  He doesn't last as long at it as I wish he would, but I'm patient and not pushing it.  The adventure eventually gave way to him climbing rocks, digging holes, and building a spent shotgun shell collection - as I continued to pick apart eddies and experiment.

He didn't catch any on this outing, but he was still living on the high of his last trip out when the weather broke and temps stayed above freezing long enough for me to take his little fingers near water.  On that day I'd plunked him down above an eddy that slammed into the bank at his feet and the depth dropped away instantly - meaning that all of his cast, no matter how poorly executed, would be in productive water.  I rigged him up with a nightcrawler on a pencil lead bait rig and cut him loose.  We only caught two fish that particular afternoon, but it was a father-son double to behold.  I had hooked a beauty of a 19-inch rainbow that was performing acrobatics and raking my line all over a boulder when he announced he too had one on.  His, a 22-inch rainbow, had picked his worm up while he'd been watching my fish do its thing.  My fight quickly turned to a haul as I worked as quick as a could to get my fish out of his way and focus on him.  We'd already determined we were keeping fish for the next day's dinner, so I essentially tossed mine to a pocket in the rocks and turned to help him.  I expected mine would likely flop back in the water, but I didn't much care.  By the time I was of any use to my son, he nearly had the fish to the bank.  It cooperated with him uncannily.  His little Batman kiddie pole is no fish fighter, and neither is he.  But my only involvement in the whole fight, other than to keep my fish as far away from his as possible, was to step in the water behind the fish and tail it onto the bank.  He'd managed to do the rest.  He now laughed and laughed as he watched me wrestle two powerful fish at once on a steep, rocky bank.  His was a fish I couldn't allow to be lost though.  I knew he was already envisioning fillets on his plate.  No five-year-old needs to be catching a 22-inch rainbow.  I was in college before I caught a trout that size. 


But, here on this current trip, the thought of the possibility of another monster waiting for him in that river didn't spur him on.  Like most any time my son is with me, we kept a couple fish.  A pair of bright rainbows above the 17-inch mark taken 40 miles apart.  In between we landed some nice browns.  We'd walk along rocky banks on the outside of river bends and watch the drift boats go by working the slacker water on the opposite side where rainbows were likely staging on the bars for the spring spawn.  In the pockets and eddies among the jumbled rock we'd flip and pitch jigs as if we were standing in the bow of a bass boat tossing to docks.  I landed one brown after he chased me to the bank and then turned away, only to fall victim to a quick drop of the rod tip and a figure eight maneuver. My son liked working the jigs among the rocks - I think he imagined the jigs on a grand pirate adventure along a rocky coastline.  But the next stop resulted in him spending 45 minutes collecting every single egg he could find where someone had previously landed a fish or spilled some bait.  Those eggs are still in a little box, dried to a crisp in the laundry room.  Some of that pirate's buried treasure I suppose.  The stop after that became a cliff-climbing endeavor, and the stop after that he unearthed a centipede and a few spiders and as he dug into the river bank.  I landed the best brown of the day at that spot and we admired it together before I returned the trout to the water and he returned to the centipede. I'm glad he was there.  I'll miss these days, but I look forward to when he mans the oars on the water while outfishing me too.  Although its probably the little sister we both need to watch out for....