Winter Story Telling

Another favorite winter pastime is telling fishing stories. Now you've got to know that a fisherman lies only when his lips are moving. But this is a story I told recently that really (my lips aren't moving) happened to my dad and me. We went fishing and landed a whopper, but neither of us caught it. This is how it happened.

You'd have never heard this story if I hadn't asked Dad to teach me how to fly fish. I wanted to learn mostly because fly fishing is a constantly moving work of art. Stand back and watch a fly fisherman work his rod and line and try to tell me it's not a thing of beauty! Well, I wanted to make this art, too.

Little did I know how much hard work and practice goes into learning to fly fish. The basics are a lot like this:

1. Hold the rod/reel in your dominant hand.
2. Strip out a few feet of line with your other hand.
3. Swing the rod at about eye level, ending each half of the swing at an imaginary 10:00 and 2:00 o'clock.
4. Strip out more line and feed it into the line that's going out in the 10 and 2 movement.
5. On the last swing, let all the stripped line out, hold the tip of the rod at 10:00 and allow the fly to daintily land on the water before the line does.

Sounds easy enough, doesn't it? Well, if you've ever tried it you know how agonizingly frustrating it can be.

Dad 'let' me work on this technique until I could consistently hit a ball cap he'd placed in the front yard about 20 feet from the driveway (where I was standing). I was not allowed to stand in the grass or get any closer to the hat. After about three years of this, he let me try my hand at fly fishing. Don't get me wrong. I was fishing all the time, but I was perfecting my bait casting and cane pole techniques while I waited.

Dad and I had gone to Blackmon's pond. Mr. Blackmon, who owned the pond, was family to me by extension. My best buddy, Charlie, was Mr. Blackmon's nephew. Since Charlie and I were inseparable, he became 'Uncle' to me.

Anyway, Dad and I went to Blackmon's pond for a hands-on lesson on the water. Even though I had practiced lo, these many years, I could still stand improvement in Dad's eyes. That was partly because I was using Dad's split bamboo rod his brother (my real uncle) had brought back from Japan after The War. You know, World War II. It was real limber and thus difficult to control. I just couldn't get the fly to drop first (refer to #5).

Well, I was tired and frustrated. My right arm hurt. Dad couldn't figure out why his excellent instruction hadn't produced a superb fisherman. We began sniping at each other as only a teenager and his father can. He jabbed; I parried. I jabbed; he parried.

Finally I just threw the rod down, proclaiming in my best teenager's angst, "Well, nobody's perfect!" Little did either of know the stars had just aligned, producing the only modern miracle (predating the '69 New York Mets' World Series win by five years). Everybody knows about the Mets because they did it for TV.

The rod lay on the ground. The fly lay on the water's surface, looking for all the world like a real bug. At least it did to one 3 1/2- to 4-pound largemouth bass. The fish came out of the water, mouth agape, swallowing the fly whole.

We both stood there dumbfounded as the fish raced away, taking up the slack line in the water. Did I mention the rod was a split bamboo number (irreplaceable) that had a reel on it that predated my ancient brother?

At the same time we both thought that thought. Dad lunged for the rod; the bass came out of the water and 'danced' on its tail; I ran for the car trunk that had the net in it, as we were using 2-pound test line. Luckily for me Dad caught the rod before it got to the water. He played the fish for a while and then insisted I land it. Almost reverently I took the rod that transferred every twitch the fish made to my hand, up my arm and to the part of my brain that true fishermen posses. Trust me ladies, compared to this feeling sex can be overrated. But that's mainly because the fish don't talk back and we can pretty much go fishing whenever we want. Dad scooped it up with the net as we both let out a whoop Mom might have heard back at the house.

This could have -- and should have-- been the end of the story. But it wasn't. Although Dad would have driven through town with this bass splayed across the hood of the car to show it off, we just took a picture of it and gently released it back into its home, free to fight us on another day. To this day I still don't know how much the fish weighed, but Dad swore the negative weighed two pounds!

But what really happened that day concerns our relationship. That was the day we bonded as men. Fishermen.

Dad's gone now. He lived until almost 94, and we talked about that day every time I saw him. We shared that father/son moment for many years. As an aside, I asked Dad for a motorcycle for my 15th birthday. Instead he gave me a hand-made Heddon rod that has that old reel he bought in the 1940s on it, killing fish even today.

Thanks, Dad.