In our continued quest to do all the things we didn't get to do last year, we went fishing. You might recall there were no vaccines widely available in the fall of 2020 and people in high population areas (e.g., us) were advised not to travel to areas of low population (e.g., The Shack). Oh, and by October of last year I couldn't sit in the car for the four hour drive or paddle a boat so we got skunked by default.
Not so this year. Unfortunately, we had to debase ourselves by using a bright pink ball of fluff of a fly instead of something that actually looked like something. You see, in the world of flyfishing, the most refined way to catch a fish is to see the fish feeding, determine what it's feeding on, use a fly that imitates what it's feeding on, and cast it upstream to the fish. Needless to say, this decidedly wasn't that.
But refinement be darned! We caught fish. Lots of them. All of us caught them. It was a good time. (And in spite of a lack of realistic dry flies, I'm still too refined to swear online.)
The big deal of the day was the boy casting, hooking, landing, and releasing a fish 100% on his own. I mean, it's about time since he's outgrown his kid-waders, but still super impressive!
The only damper on the day was discovering white supremacists had defiled the inside of the bathroom at the access area. (Given it's a pit toilet, that's pretty hard, but they did it with both their hate and misspelled slurs.) I reported this to the Department of Fish and Wildlife figuring maybe the next time I fished there it would be addressed. NOPE. I got a call back within 30 minutes and they were sending someone out right away. My heroes!
So the morals of this story: Don't be too good to fish with really ugly flies, teach your kids to fish early, and be a good person.
📍On the lands and waters of the Okanagan people.
