The Fish We Catch Alone

On the meaning of the unobserved catch and release

I love going out with a pack of girlfriends to cheer each other on while we take turns fishing (and drinking beer). If I hook a big fish there is plenty of whistling and whooping. It feels good to get high-fives and fist-bumps after a nice catch. I would not trade these memories for anything. Still, the more I fish, the more I value the days when I am stalking the banks by my lonesome, and I find it is often the fish we catch alone that are the most significant.

I remember a story a seasoned salmon fisherman once told me. He was fishing solo, spey casting and swinging flies on a storied Atlantic salmon river. He knew the water and the patterns of its inhabitants well. He was a confident and experienced angler. He hooked into a sizable fish that ran him into his backing several times. He fought this salmon hard and long, and eventually was able to bring it in, but not without first exhausting it. In hushed tones, he relayed to me how he cradled the fish in the water, speaking to it softly, trying desperately to revive it. He wept and apologized to the fish, begging the salmon to hold on. Slowly the fish recovered and swam away, but the fisherman told me that this experience changed him. It humbled him in a way he had never before been humbled as an angler or as a man.

I recount this story because I was greatly moved by its telling, but also because the image of a fisherman weeping over a fish that is dying in his arms somehow illustrates the drama and the personal nature of the relationship between hunter and prey — a drama that often unfolds while no one is watching.

I do not have a tale that is nearly so remarkable, yet I can think of a number of solitary moments with fish who, each in their own way, left their imprint on my consciousness. Recently I hooked and landed a 19-inch rainbow trout on my home river. She came into my net on a day when I felt lonely and isolated, and the brief seconds I spent in her presence filled me with a renewed sense of hope. I remember a cutthroat trout, caught unexpectedly in a run I fish often. She had somehow survived alongside the browns and bows of this Western river, and she felt like a gift, a holdout from an earlier time. I remember a beefy brown who, sheltering behind a rock, eluded my streamer for two days before I finally caught him by sneaking up from below his hideout and twitching a big terrestrial across his nose. And then there was a young brown, slender and vigorous, who swallowed my caddis too deep and bled from the gills as I released him to die in the waters where he was born.

I caught these fish in gratitude, in joy, in victory, and in deep sadness. And there were many unnamed, unremembered fish who I caught after weeks, sometimes months of being off the water, who reminded me that there was still a true life to be lived if I was persistent and dogged enough to chase it.

On the days when I am by myself, I rarely bring a camera to the river, and when I do I feel irked by its presence, by the intrusion of an unwanted onlooker. Living in social media’s constant shadow, I cherish my private fishing memories now more than ever. They are the stuff of both wide-eyed campfire tales and quiet moments. And if I catch a monster, for a brief second holding its life in my hands, I am happy to have the encounter go unrecorded. For here, at last, is something untarnished in a world of compulsive posturing and posing, something that belongs only to me, and to the fish.

-EH, December 2020