First Fish

A new post for the New Year

2021 kicked off with a bit more consternation than I had bargained for — a new COVID diagnosis for a family member and a whole lot of worry. So I did what any self-respecting fly angler would do: I buried myself in a fishing project. I had acquired a new rod, long and lean for Euro-nymphing, and I set my mind to learning how to use it.

The problem is, it’s winter, and there is not a lot of open water. A creek runs through town and still hasn’t iced over completely, so I decided to stage my efforts there. The flows are low and the fish are spooky, but the banks are shallow enough that if the ice breaks and a foot punches through I won’t drown. I’ll just feel silly. It’s pocket water and technical fishing. I figured I might as well start with something challenging. If I could learn to use these techniques here, I could probably use them anywhere.

I spent two days experimenting and making lots of mistakes. The only fish I saw were those I managed to spook and practically step on. But the days were sunny and beautiful, and despite fishing near a couple of public parks, nobody bothered me. I was 20-feet down from a car lot, but I was lost in the snow and the deep eddies behind boulders, where I could see the grey torpedo outlines of rainbow trout shivering in their feeding lanes. I tried to imagine what it’s like to never be able to rest, to never be able to stop, to always have to keep yourself afloat like a fish. Perhaps now more than ever I’m able to understand.

On the third day I started to get the hang of things. I started to figure out how high to stop the cast, how far to extend my arm on the lay-down so that I had the right amount of leader on or off the water. I started to gain some control, and I started to figure out which techniques I needed to use where. It was only a beginning, but it felt good. I cast up towards one of the pools I had been fishing repeatedly over the last few days. I knew exactly where the fish were holding. Finally I made the right cast with the right line placement. I saw the leader bolt upstream, nailed the timing on the hook-set, and caught my first fish, a small, bright rainbow. A little brown trout came later in the afternoon in another pool, when I let my nymph drift down deep. At first I thought I’d snagged the bottom, but I set anyway, and again I drew a fish to hand.

I didn’t take a lot of time with these fish. It’s cold, and I could only leave my hands in the water for so long before they started to burn. I couldn’t lift the fish from the water for fear of their gills freezing, but I admired them in the net and carefully let them go, their miraculous forms burned into my memory. These were my first fish of the New Year, my first fish of 2021, a year that holds as much trepidation and foreboding as it does promise, a year that more than any other looks awfully uncertain. These two fish, living and swimming in 36-degree water, surviving brutal winter, I welcomed them into my net and released them back into the world, and I want to, I have to believe that they were harbingers of something good.

-EH, January 2021