Sportsman's Legacy by William G. Tapply

Author:William G. Tapply [Tapply, William G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family/Relationships/Non-fiction
Publisher: White River Press

BILL, KATE (MIKE’S WIFE) AND MIKE, FISHING ON WILLARD POND, 2009

We trolled for landlocked salmon in Sebago and Moosehead Lakes. We anchored over points and dropoffs and dangled crawfish and crickets in just about every deepwater smallmouth lake in New Hampshire. One August we trekked to the uppermost waters of the Connecticut River near the Canadian border, where I tried … and erred … and eventually figured out how to fish a spinner fall for rainbow trout in the dark.

I’ve taken my kids on some expotitions. We spent a week rafting the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho. We slept under the stars and fly-fished for native cutthroats. Sarah, who was then eight, liked to strip in the little gemlike trout I hooked. She kept count of them, and when we made camp in the evening she took my fly rod down to the river and tried to imitate my casting. For the most part, I bit my tongue and let her try and err, and she got so she could slop out a dry fly twenty feet or so.

On the fourth evening an eight-inch cutt flashed up and gobbled the fly. She lifted the rod instinctively and caught her first dry-fly trout all by herself. I was glad that I was sitting back on the rocks watching instead of standing by her elbow whispering instructions. It was too dark to record the event on film. But the picture of her big brown-eyed grin remains clear in my memory.

Mike, Melissa, Sarah, and I spent a day in Ben Trebken’s Amethyst five hours out to sea where the horizon completely encircled us. We caught albacore and yellowfin and skipjack tuna, and when one of Amethyst’s engines quit on the way to port, we limped in under the stars. In recent years we’ve spent our Memorial Day weekends at Blaine Moore’s summer house on an island in Maine’s Great Pond—a more civilized version of my boyhood weeks at Sysladobsis and Upper Dobsis. We have yet to find a magic cove on Great Pond, but Sarah has caught smallmouths on Woolly Buggers she tied herself.

My kids love expotitions. But I think they prefer the spontaneity of ex-plores, just as Dad and I did.

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