Short Handed

By Philip Johnson

I waited tables on a fly fishing ranch in Southern Colorado last summer. One afternoon, my buddy Jason and I couldn’t wait to hit the river after our lunch shift ended. We made a quick trip back to the cabin and grabbed our gear, and then headed up the valley to a stretch we hadn’t yet fished. We pulled up to the trout shaped sign that read “14”, hopped out of my truck, and frantically put on our waders and boots, and all the gadgets every addict knows too well. Then I hesitated, breathed in the cool mountain air, and smacked Jason—it was time to get on the water!

We trekked through the forest and down the hill, my lanyard clinking noisily around my neck. “Maybe you should lose the charm bracelet on our next trip,” Jason jabbed.

We made it to the water and I started to thread my line through the guides of my rod just like I always do. I was about to grab my leader when my line slipped down and got caught on a hastily tied BLOOD KNOT. Impatient and determined to beat my friend to the first cast, I pulled and shook my line until it gracefully broke my rod just before the third joint. I couldn’t believe what had just happened! I rattled off a series of words that would have made the most sordid of pirates cringe!

Jason was already on the water and I wasn’t about to cut his day short. I took a moment to think, then stuffed six and half feet of my rod down the left side of my waders and took off into the stream. Armed with 30 feet of line in my left hand, and two and half feet of rod in my right, I went to work.

After three casts my luck changed when a nice rainbow took my Caddis drifting past a small eddy. Wrought with joy, I taunted empty-handed Jason and turned my attention back to the task at hand. Playing fish with a chopstick wasn’t going to be easy, but I wrangled the sucker in and tried to bend down to pick him up. As it turned out, bending down with a makeshift splint in my waders might have been my biggest problem of the afternoon! I clumsily tried to rearrange my broken rod through my waders—something eerily familiar to a former middle school male—until I was able to get my hands to the water and send my prize on his way.

Once I figured out how to move around in my exoskeleton, it wasn’t as tricky as I first thought. In fact, I was catching trout hand over fist. I’m sure I looked like Shawn Bradley in Cotillion, but I had a fish on every tenth cast so I didn’t care. After an hour or so, I was up to eight or nine fish and my buddy hadn’t any luck. To my satisfaction, he was getting more pissed off by the second.

“Are you freakin’ kidding me man? I haven’t hooked a single damn fish.”

We kept working our way up stream and I just couldn’t help catching fish. It was absurd. Things just seemed to go my way and I wasn’t arguing. After it was all said and done, I’d caught 16 fish in less than two hours on a quarter of a rod. Jason ended up with two. Considering how my day started, I was thrilled. We meandered back to my truck in the waning daylight and headed back down the dirt road to the ranch. As we were riding home rehashing our respective days, I realized how lucky I was to even have had the opportunity to get out and fish in a place like this.

I realized the little things can bring you the most joy, the big things aren’t really big at all, and on even your worst day you can out fish a good friend.

Photo courtesy of Aleksandar Vrtaric of www.SuckMyFly.com. Philip is a 24 year-old sales and marketing professional who lives in central Texas (about to be eastern Australia) with a serious fly fishing problem. He’s successfully made it to step one of twelve and sees no reason to press on in his recovery. His other hobbies include playing the guitar, cooking, and making fun of bait-casters.