Bill and I have been threatening to go fishing together for the better part of a year now … Schedules conflict, agendas don’t align, and of course it is not an overstatement to say that mountains sometimes present themselves and keep us from our wish to fish. And our wish to share the adventure with a buddy and his dog, and allow them to help you find the most in it. Sometimes with money and fishing, you find that you have to make certain sacrifices in order to do it … you have to commit. Both of us will be super rich someday and married to some supermodel of course. But for now, we milked every bit we could to generate the funds for a trip to feel the power of the ghost. The ghost of something lost. Fully committed, we went ahead and outdid ourselves on the guide and our accommodations. This is the story of not only our first fishing experience together, but our first time fly fishing for steelhead, our first time fishing with Gary and Steve, and for me the first guided trip I’ve ever been on (thanks Bill), and the first time fishing the Trinity.
It took till 115 in the am to get to bako on Jan 6th to get to bills house. This was a lot later than I had planned but I had to finish some things at work so I don’t get skewered while I’m gone … we sat up and talked because we just couldn’t help it and we ended up getting very little sleep before we hit the road…
It took us 30 minutes to get from Bakersfield to the Trinity. I know that seems like a stretch of the truth, but if you ask bill, he’lll tell ya that’s true!! We talked about flys and rigging/ techniques, we talked about work, and of course women … we talked about our questions in fishing, working, and women and life… Bill is easy to talk too… and we had great conversation on the way up.
When we got there, we ate a little and then went to check in at our cabin… it was off the hizzle!!! Right on the Trinity River…It took us about 30 minutes to get ready to go fishing and there we were…
We ran two flies under and indicator for the entire evening…
After fishing the first evening, we met up at the diner with Gary (copper dropper) and Steve (tech joe). At that point, they’d been out for several days and they had some great stories to tell us about their adventures. Big BIG fish stories. You could sense the sense of satisfaction in their delivery. It was really something that fired us up… we were amped, bigtime.
WE ran an indicator and two flies on 2X and 3X. The leader set up was like 1’ of super thick mono line from the flyline, a loop to loop of maxima green line about 1’ (indicator is attached to this section), then anywhere from 1’ to 4’ of 2x tippet to a double surgeons (stop knot for your weight) leading to your leading fly, tie the second fly off the bend of the hook and voila.
Each night we tied flies … the first night we tied what had worked for bill on the big boy: a Red Copper John. The second night we got inventive and came up with some pretty cool stuff, like a mixture between a copper john tail end, and a Kern Emerger/Robo PT front end…
The drive home took way longer than the drive up …
At the end. In bills house at the computer:
I was already gone, all we had left was a hand shake. Bill was already cropping the picture of my face when I was fighting my first steelie. He claims it could have been his greatest moment. We had both already pinpointed that we thought that the steel that smoked bill was the biggest fish we hooked into, and for me that also happened to be the greatest moment of the trip. So I told bill “you know I think my favorite moment was when we were fishing that first night behind our cabin, maybe 45 minutes to an hour into it, I was looking around, finally settling down even though we only had a short time to fish that evening… I was already having a ‘fleeting moment’, I looked at you fishing upstream getting a good drift off a ledge, I looked downstream and admired the magic of the pine trees in the picturesque fog, and of course the river … then I hear you (bill) go OOOOH! I look back and hear zzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ then complete silence as I see your rod tip lower till it’s pointed straight at the fish and SNAP he’s gone.
Both of the greatest moments where about someone else and a fish that got away. With fish that you came for, the fish that you didn’t get is a big part of you coming back. You ponder the mistakes you made, you land fish later on by not making those mistakes and you can go on forever with that one if you so choose. SO when you catch yourself in a fleeting moment, you better be ready to set the hook and strip … Though I suppose, all in all, at the end of the day, correcting your mistakes will never overcome the mysterious nature of the fish that get away. I find in my experiences that those fish have one thing in common for sure: One moment it’s in your life, and the next moment, like a ghost you wonder if you’ll ever see it again.
Check this out if you want to see some cool stuff from our trip:
http://s583.photobucket.com/albums/ss274/thecrismiller/?action=view¤t=
TrinitySteel.flv
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