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Humor January 2016

The Grumpy Old Man

Grumpy Goes Fly Fishing

By Don Rizzo

Trout are extremely intelligent. Their priorities are eating, resting and reproducing. In fact, that's their entire agenda. If that's not proof of intelligence I don't know what is.

Recently my son invited me to go fly-fishing, something I had never done. If you poke around the underbelly of the sport, you discover that it is very elitist. There are at least three reasons (but I can only remember two of them):

  1. There are so few truly wild trout left in the nation's streams that you have to fly to either Alaska or Idaho and hire an expensive guide in order to find them. So every time you want to fly fish seriously you have to ante up a few grand.

  2. Getting outfitted to fly fish is similar to suiting up to blast off to the moon. Starting at the skin level, you need to buy a "base layer." Only plebeians wear underwear. For a "base layer" you pay about 100 times as much as you would for old-fashioned long johns. A base layer top by UnderArmour is about 70 bucks as an example. Fly rods themselves can run $750 and up. Then there's reel, line, waders, overshoes, blah blah. You get the idea.

When you start adding it all up, fly-fishing becomes an elitist sport. The definition of an elitist sport is one that takes a ton of money to indulge. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the refinement of those who participate. A couple of the crudest people I know have strings of polo ponies. If you can pay you can play.

However, this little outing didn't take us to some wild, untamed river. It took us an hour or so up Hwy 400 to the Georgia Mountains. If fly-fishing is a 747, this trip is a Piper Cub on a trial flight. So anyhow, poor little outsider that I am, I tagged along to see how the elite amuse themselves. I got off to a weak start because I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning to meet the group. Will the fish be annoyed if we get there at a civilized hour, I wondered? Do they fast after an early breakfast?

Anyway, we piled in the car and headed for sun up in the mountains as I dozed intermittently in the backseat. Finally after leaving the main roads and negotiating a few hundred nausea-inducing hairpin curves, we pulled into a scruffy looking combo roadside diner-gas station, gift store and overnight lodge. We were in a part of the mountains where you better git it here or it ain't gittable. We stomped into the empty dining area, all boots and flannel shirts very macho and outdoorsy.

A teen-age girl behind the counter stared at us blankly, definitely unimpressed.

"Morning," I said cheerily. "Whataya have to eat?"

"We got some food," she responded.

Hmmmm, maybe she needs me to be more specific.

"How long would it take you to make an egg biscuit," I tried gamely.

"Bout as long as it takes to fry the egg," she responded.

"Okay then," I gave up. "Make me one," I said.

Actually she made it quickly and it was excellent. Mountain women take your questions quite literally. They also know how to be tongue-in-cheek and poke a little fun at a city slicker.

After breakfast we hit the river. I guess the trout had had time to get themselves up, do their stretching and were ready for a big day. Trout are extremely intelligent. Their priorities are eating, resting and reproducing. In fact, that's their entire agenda. If that's not proof of intelligence I don't know what is.

The guide indulgently outfitted me in ill-fitting waders, overshoes and a beat-up rod and reel. That's the minimum equipment for a novice like me. At first he wouldn't let me out of his sight, afraid that my casting would get out of control and I'd set the hook in my cheek.

"I'll stay with you till you land one," he volunteered.

He showed me the basics of using the weight of the line to cast to a pre-determined spot. After a few dozen entanglements, I was managing pretty well.

Finally, as I let the fly drift down the rapids, POW!, the rod doubled.

KEEP THE SLACK OUT, KEEP THE SLACK OUT he screamed. And I would have obeyed instantly if I had only known where the slack was hiding. With a monumental tug the trout escaped. I got the next one to the net and he hauled it in – a lovely rainbow. This is an area where all fish are released, so we only have pictures to temper our exaggerations. Well, long story short, we fished all day, catching and releasing quite a few very nice trout. I was very proud to be catching large lovely trout in their native habitat.

"I didn't think trout grew this big in Georgia," I mentioned to the guide as we finished the day.

"Oh, they don't," he said. "We come out and feed them fish food."

"What? This is like fish farm?"

"Well not exactly. But we fatten them up. And ‘cause they know they'll get fed here, they hang around this section of the river."

"These are trained trout?"

"Well I wouldn't use that term," he said defensively.

Oh well. You've heard the term "as easy as shooting fish in a rain barrel." This was one step up. But it was still a lot of fun.

 

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