Lines on the Water by David Adams Richards

Author:David Adams Richards [Richards, David Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36382-4
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2001-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

Nine

BY THE END OF THE sixth summer I had managed to learn to fish. And I fished mostly alone, leaving the cottage where Peg and I lived in the summer at dawn and trying to get back by mid-afternoon. I always carried with me, besides my dog, two rods, two reels weighted with weight-forward lines for those rods, three boxes of flies—bugs and butterflies being my favourite—a flashlight, a spare pair of jeans, and waders, two jugs of water (for the radiator), a thermos of tea, and a lunch bucket of sandwiches.

I love travelling the rivers alone, and now spend much more time by myself than with other people, even though I’ll never forget them for teaching me what they could.

By then, my line was touching the water where I wanted it to and I was able to cover the water I wanted to as well. (But I still got knots and flubbed casts and had days when nothing went right.) I no longer used a blood knot, but went with nine or ten feet of leader. I was using both hands, without having to think about it, and felt comfortable whenever I went fishing.

Often I did not make it back by afternoon. It would be dark when I left in the morning and dark when I got back out at nightfall. I stood in pools in the pouring rain, too stupid to come out of them, and I wallowed about the shore in the desperate fly-soaked heat too stupid to go home. And more than once I had to rely on luck to get my old truck started, miles away from anyone.

Some days I would start into Little River Pool just above the Miner’s Bridge on the Norwest, but go on the long rough road into B&L.

The year before, Peter had seen a grilse jump in the swift little run, directly off from where the path came out unto the shore—on the other side of the river, and he left B&L Pool one day and went down and hooked two grilse. Although most people bypassed this run, which ran tight to the other shore between two rocks, grilse always rested there on their journey before moving into the pool proper. Or they would rest there and move right through the pool. So we usually stopped to throw a line over it. It was easy to reach. One just walked out up to their knees and threw a short tight cast into the top of the run, defined by an eddy swirling over a submerged rock. From there to another rock half-submerged about thirty yards downriver, it was a run alive with possibilities.

This run below B&L didn’t look like much but it was often as not productive—until about eleven-thirty in the morning, when the action would taper off. It fished better in the morning than in the evening, and you could take fish on a variety of flies. I fished bug on the Norwest. But I’ve taken grilse on butterfly and Black Ghost, and Blue Charm, there as well.

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