Zipping My Fly by Rich Tosches

Author:Rich Tosches
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

And Then There’s Saratoga Lake

(Note: I would have come up with a catchier title for this final story about the fantastic fishing around Saratoga, Wyoming, but frankly, I used up nearly all of my creative talent on “The Cows Are Trying to Drown Me” and am now struggling just to slap a name on these stories.)

Saratoga Lake sits just on the edge of the town, nestled among tall grasses and juniper bushes and high-desert sage. We’d been directed to the lake by the owner of the Great Rocky Mountain Outfitters fly shop in town. We gave him the prerequisite $35 each, grabbed the flies he forced us to purchase, and headed for the lake.

The flies were tiny mysis shrimp. The fishing was amazing. Huge trout cruised the weed beds edging out from the shoreline, occasionally making themselves known with gigantic splashes and swirls as they moved through clusters of the shrimp. Sometimes we’d see them moving along under the surface, browns and rainbows of five and eight and even ten pounds. My hands shook as I tied on my first fly, partly because of the presence of the giant, startling fish but mostly, I believe, because of the enormous amounts of George Dickel whiskey we had consumed in the cabin the night before.

I laid out about thirty feet of line on my first cast and began a slow, twitching retrieve that perfectly mimicked the natural movement of the shrimp. Which was a good thing, because “slow and twitching” was all my hands were capable of. With all due respect to the George Dickel distillery and what I’m sure is its battery of lawyers, it’s a fine whiskey unless you have any plans for the following day—such as getting up.

Anyway, I had retrieved the fly perhaps five or ten feet when the fish struck, a heavy, surging tug that stripped line from my hands and had me making loud, whooping noises. The five-weight rod bent heavily and from my left someone shouted, “Keee-rist! What is that?”

(Turns out it was one of my cabin mates and George Dickel drinking partners on the shore who had coughed up something, something that had apparently been dislodged from his small intestine by the whiskey, and he was now staring at it.)

The battle went on for almost ten minutes, long screeching runs followed by heavy, sulking head shaking as the monster trout tried to get rid of the fly. When he appeared on the surface about ten feet away, I greeted him with the magical words a fly angler saves for these moments of complete and utter exhilaration:

“Holy shit!”

* * *

I had about half of the fish in my net a few moments later, stumbling backward toward the shore as I gently dragged him along on the surface, a rainbow trout of astounding proportions. My rear end plopped down on a clump of grass on the shore, and after removing the tiny shrimp from the corner of his mouth, I held him for a moment on the lake surface.

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