I heard a knock on the door this morning. It was a deliveryman with a new fishing rod for Paul.
It’s always a good day when you get a new fishing rod handed to you at the doorstep.
I was excited. I’ve never used a rod quite of this sort.
The season is closed right now for trout but there is no law against casting an inch-long piece of red wool yarn when the wind drops and the sun is setting.
I’ll likely line her up sometime tomorrow and have a go at it waist deep in cool autumn water. There are those that will look at me out there tossing a line with no hook and think I’m crazy.
Maybe they are right, but I’m having lots of fun. Isn’t that important in these challenging times.
It isn’t always about catching fish.
That’s cliché I know but also quite true. Although I rather catch fish than not catch fish. I rather go fishing than cut the lawn, even if I don’t catch fish. But no fish will be caught without a hook for sure. I suppose I’m practicing for catching fish.
But I can catch fish anyway. I don’t really need to practice for pure capture purposes.
I’m confusing myself. I really don’t know why I can’t stop playing with new fly rods, or old ones for that matter. I don’t know why I’m exciting about getting out on the water with a piece of red yarn.
There’s something magical and mysterious in all this that neither physics nor psychology can fully explain. But there is plenty of both in the mix.
Maybe it’s metaphysics. There’s beauty in a exquisitely cast fly line, cutting through the wind like an arrow, not unlike a golf ball hit solid and long, or a wailing captivating guitar riff. I play no golf, and guitar badly.
Although, I do appreciate both.
Speaking of golf, once I went fishing with two friends for a whole day and caught absolutely nothing. On top of that I was forced to listen to excessive twangy country music on the over two-hour drive to Gambo River.
Good God, was I ever glad to be out of that car and in the water. On the return leg I threatened to hitchhike home if such and such channel was tuned.
Anyway, we had a grand day, or at least I thought so.
“You mean you drove all that way, fished the entire day and brought nothing home?” That’s what was said to me. I responded: “There are those folks who spend the day hitting around a ball with clubs and also bring nothing home.”
Maybe I made my point. It was the end of the conversation.
Seriously, why could I possible need or want a new fly rod?
Hold on there. Need and want are very different words, and words matter.
I don’t need another fishing rod in any rational hunter-gatherer practicality. No, if the word need is remotely justified over mere want, than it is for some higher esoteric notion.
Or at least higher in my narrow biased view. I don’t often try to explain.
Goldie stopped asking years ago. It’s not because she understands.
I’ll try to explain.
I got my first fly rod as a gift from Dad for passing Grade 3 at Sir Wilfred Grenfell School in St. Anthony. I remember the moment so well.
He came home from work early and was waiting at the kitchen table when I arrived home. I didn’t think to try it out in the driveway with a piece of Mom’s wool. But I was some happy.
We were practical folk, so we went fishing after supper. I don’t remember the tangles and snarls. I do recall catching a trout, and then later that year a salmon. There were no poetic loops of long line I’m sure and certain.
Dad was no “A River Runs Through it” sort of Dad with a metronome to teach fly casting. I had to learn the finer details of the long rod on my own. Dad thought me to catch fish.
That was a long time ago.
These days my fishing life is vastly more complex. But it’s the same kind of fun.
I still feel the excitement, the rush, the thrill. I don’t think there are pills for that. The fish are bigger, the rods a tad more expensive, and the travel longer. Dad is gone, but I have made wonderful friends through fishing. We travel and feel the thrill together. We need it, or at least want it, the fishing and friendship welded into one.
On a serious note, or I suppose secondary, because the last part was the crux of the matter.
Sage is making a new line of spey rods that I just couldn’t resist. They call them Trout Spey and I chose the 11-ft 3-in 4wt model.
That’s the biggest rod in the line-up. For those of you not immersed deeply in the rabbit hole of angling, spey rods and that style of casting is typically associated with big rivers and big fish like salmon and steelhead.
The spey casting technique is thought to have originated on the River Spey in Scotland, a region of the world that some of you connoisseurs of single malt might be familiar.
We are a long ways from there, literally and otherwise.
Trout spey is a class of rod designed for two handed spey casting that is more friendly to use on smaller waters and smaller fish, but not too small.
I’m thinking along the lines of estuary fishing for seatrout with the smaller flies they like, silvertips, brown hackles and so on in size 12 and 14. Then there’s summer salmon fishing. I break out the big irons on the Codroy in early June, full on spey, like on the River Spey. But by mid-July and into August the rivers run low, the fish grow more wary and a more delicate approach is necessary. The flies are tiny and the presentations precise.
I could use a single-hand rod but I love spey casting.
Or maybe I just want a new rod, like I was seven years old again. Who really knows?
Christmas is coming and I will be writing about outdoor stuff for under the tree, including fly rods of course.
Paul Smith, a native of Spaniard’s Bay, fishes and wanders the outdoors at every opportunity.
