An excert from the 2011 Fall Drake Magazine’s Fall Issue by Bruce Smithhammer.
READ Full Length Article
I’ve tied on something that would make a 3-weight double over, and I’ve fallen into the rhythm of swinging and stepping, flinging snap-t’s across two thousand cfs of river, the fly approaching the far bank before settling in deep for the swing. Let it fall too much to one end of the spectrum or the other and the critical balance is destroyed. A finger remains lightly on the line to sense anything out of the ordinary, like putting an ear to the train tracks.
There is no hard strike. No blistering run. No line flying off the reel as so often happens in stories, and only occasionally in reality. Instead, the fly just stops dead for a good, long, delicious moment of stalemate, which leads to a couple head-strong males with more hormones than brains, duking it out on either end of a line.
His colors are in stark contrast to the steel-gray and dull brown landscape. A numbing chill crawls up my arm as he slides out of my hand and disappears. It works its way up through my circulatory system, from digits to core, like some sort of frost vine creeping up my scrawny trellis. I know I’ve been at this too long today, and that I should leave now for somewhere warm, as it will take time and effort before my temperature returns to normal. The cold hurts but also feels good. This is training for a winter just around the corner. I’ll be thinking about this last brown of the year through the short, dark days; an ember at the core of an ebbing campfire that refuses to die. It is still fall, but not for much longer.
Tags: fly fishing fun for all to see, I call my little guy Drake, Online and Offline magazine, The Drake
