I’m not a purist fly fisherman. I love almost any kind of fishing experience, lakes, rivers, and saltwater, (both for the grill and catch and release billfish.) But I admit that alone or with a few friends on a crystal stream, catch and release fly fishing is my favorite. Because we fish on streams where brown bears are fattening up on salmon, one of my most important friends is always a dog. I love the beauty of a char, cutthroat or rainbow trout going airborne. I assume that if they knew that I was planning on releasing them, they might not fight so hard and put on an aerial display. But I’m not going to ruin the experience for all of us by telling them.
Which gets me to the story of one brilliant afternoon on our favorite river in Alaska. Carmen and I were fishing with another couple who had flown in to join us at our remote cabin. It was early fall, and the arctic char and rainbow trout were fat from feasting on millions of salmon eggs deposited by spawning sockeye salmon. An eighteen-inch fish might way more than three pounds and we had already hooked fish that were two and three times that size.
My friend Chris had matched the color of the salmon eggs with a fly and then shared it with the rest of us. The match was so accurate that we were hooking trout about every four or five casts. Often two or three of us would have fish on at the same time. Sometimes I was so busy unhooking fish and releasing them back into a deep pool that I would go a half hour or more without personally making a cast.
My black setter, Winchester, would race up and down the bank, wading into the water to watch the fight as each of us hooked fish. As I carefully removed the hook from a fish, he’d bark excitedly and then chase the freed fish back into deeper water. He loved the game and seemed most excited when I released the fish.
Occasionally one of us would wander back to the jetboat and retrieve a cold beer from the mesh bag dangling in the cold clear water. Winchester would wander the gravel bar, sometimes barking wildly as a bear in the woods behind us got too close. After several hours of great fishing, the four of us found ourselves sitting on a log, beer in hand, just talking and watching two eagles in a cottonwood tree who hadn’t moved since we’d arrived.
“They’re waiting for us to leave,” said Carmen, “then they’ll come down for a fish dinner.” The three of us looked over at her and Chris said what we were all thinking. “Why not catch a rainbow for the grill tonight?” A four-pound rainbow, filleted, would feed all of us. If we caught one in the next hour, we’d granted ourselves to fish, the menu was set.
We went back to fishing and ten minutes later I landed a perfect dinner fish. Winchester looked incredulously at me as I pulled it up on the bank and smacked it on the head. He walked up and sat next to the fish as I went back to fishing. A moment later I felt him bump my leg. I looked down and he stood up to his belly in water, the dinner rainbow in his mouth. His eyes smiled and then he walked a bit further into the river, dropped the fish and danced as the current pushed it into deep water. He then turned and gave me a look that said plainly, “Don’t worry about that mistake, I’ve got your back.”