More Tales from the River
September 30, 2001
It was late in October a couple years back and my mind, body and soul were dog tired. I’d been guiding salmon for five months straight and I was in desperate need of a vacation. One of my clients hooked and landed a nice 20-pound king at first light. Knowing full well that that the bite had been very tough the previous few days, I felt very good to have a fish on board right out of the chute.
While the guys exchanged high-fives in celebration of their good fortune, I slid the fish onto the stringer and tossed it over the side. The only problem was a few month’s worth of sleep depravation had my brain running on “energy conservation” mode and I forgot to do one teeny little thing before I threw the salmon into the water…um…tie the other end of the stringer to the boat.
I watched, horrified, as the king slowly spiraled 15 feet to the bottom, dragging the rope behind it like a doomed fighter plane coughing up a trail of smoke. Hey guys, about your fish… I spent the next 20 minutes trying to snag the rope with a treble hook…all the while thinking up excuses to tell the Game Warden when he came down to investigate my suspicious behavior. There was just enough current in that spot to make snagging the stringer impossible, so I decided to take action.
Though it was a chilly autumn morning, I stripped down to my shorts and dove in. Fish three miles down river probably heard my gurgled screams as I streaked down through the icy water. I quickly grabbed the fish and, on the way to the surface, I realized that I was going to have to think fast to avoid being the brunt of many jokes. There were several other guides in the same pool and they’d seen me go in. If they found out what I was really in the drink for, I’d never hear the end of it.
So, as I surfaced, I kept the fish low and out of sight and yelled in an excited voice that would easily carry across the water to the other boats…
Yea, it was a Rolex! And it’s brand new! None of the other guides ever said a word about the incident.
Heads up…er…DOWN!
Another day during that same long, tired month, I was holding a freshly-caught salmon by the tail, preparing to give it the coup de grace with my mini baseball bat. Nearly delirious with fatigue, I reared back and took a mighty cut.
SWOOSH!
A big, fat swing and a miss. And in the process, the bat went flying out of my hand, and helicoptered mere inches over one of the client’s head at about 110 miles per hour. A second or two later, the bat splashed down about 100 feet behind the boat. Without saying anything, both guys looked over at the bat bobbing along in the current and then glared back at me like I’d just tossed a kitten through a ceiling fan. For a second, I thought I had a mutiny on my hands, but the gentlemen just sat back down and were quiet the rest of the outing. Whenever I went to bonk a fish later that day, however, they would hit the deck like we under attack by hostile natives shooting flaming arrows from the bluffs above the river.
Now that’s Amore!
There’s a spot on the Feather River where the water sweeps around a long island and then comes back together. The current seam that forms where the two flows converge holds tons of salmon during the fall. As a result, bank anglers flock to the run and line both sides of the river. When the bankies are thick, it looks like two opposing armies engaged in a cast-off as they throw their lines towards one another.
The river is only about 30 yards wide there, and anglers on one side constantly hook the lines of those on the other side and vise versa. Well, the “Gauntlet” as I call it, is pretty intimidating to run through in a boat when there are volleys of lead being lobbed back and forth.
I always try to be as polite as possible and wait for a break in the action before I dash through. One afternoon, several rude boaters had run the Gantlet before me and had stirred the bank crowd into a frenzy. In a unique show of solidarity that day, they were prepared to deposit any and all sinkers into whatever boat was foolish enough to pass through their domain next. Unfortunately, that was me. I nervously eyed the angry throng from a distance before I made my move. I stood up as I rowed the boat in place, waiting for an opportunity to squirt through. There was no hope. They were going to murder us.
Just as I was thinking about giving in and heading back upstream, one of them shouted something at me.
Do you know how to sing in Italian? he called.
That was a new one on me. For a moment, I said nothing, trying to figure out what the guy meant. Then I realized that he’d probably never seen a drift boat before. With its upswept bow and back end, the boat must have kinda looked like a gondola. Especially since I had two passengers sitting in the front while I rowed from behind. So, I broke into a few bars of That’s Amore. There were a few long, uncomfortable seconds as I stood there on stage, belting out my tune. And then the bankies went wild. They all reeled up and let us pass through, and to this day, I’ve never had a problem getting by that spot.
Ah, ain’t fishing fun?
Comments
Got something to say?