“The angler forgets most of the fish he catches, but he does not forget the streams and lakes in which they are caught.” – Charles K. Fox
It’s approaching dusk on a summer night in Southeastern British Columbia. The setting sun in the valley has lit up the sky with an orange glow. It’s hot and dry here, and the wind is blowing—this is the desert.
The fish are starting to rise. Gradually, at first, but they start to show themselves in greater numbers. The soft plips of fish breaking the surface is growing louder and more frequent, and it’s becoming hard to ignore. Sitting by our campfire on the Similkameen River, my brother and I contemplate switching our rods from nymph rigs to dry flies to try and catch a couple of these rising fish before dark.
After a day spent paddling 12 km in a very leaky canoe, rigging up again is the last thing we want to do. We’re tired. We caught fish today—some quite big. But we lost a lot as well. The fish fight hard here, and they’ve left us with unfinished business. The impetus to finish the whiskey we brought is keeping us in our chairs for now, but that’s about to change. One more rise and I’ll do it, I say. I just can’t help myself.
Soon enough, I’ve got a tan dry fly tied onto my line. A size 14 stimulator, I think. My brother steals something similar from my box. We don’t take the time to look at what’s hatching. The fish are rising from bank to bank and the sun is going down. The temptation to get a fly on the water is just too strong.
We both cast upstream and immediately get simultaneous takes. Our rods bend deep into their backbones, absorbing the weight of the heavy fish as they turn into the current with their large fins. Then they run.
I yell for my brother to grab the net. His fish begins to tire, so I wade over and take his rod, trying to hold his fish against the current so he can help with the landing. But fighting a two front war is always a losing battle, and I can’t hold them for long.
After a few seconds my net man comes running and, with a stroke of luck, we scoop up both fish into the basket. We take the hooks out and hold up two beefy mountain whitefish of a couple of pounds. Slightly surprised with the catch being whitefish and not trout, we are nonetheless delighted with this end to our day of fishing. Time to finish the whiskey.
This is the kind of moment that becomes a fishing story that gets told for years. It has everything anglers like to romanticize: a setting sun, a ticking clock, a double-header, a close comrade, and better yet, a moment of redemption. Sure, the big fish stand out, but the things that make fishing so enjoyable are often completely intangible.
Fishing stories have a funny way of changing over time. The fish get bigger, the lines get lighter…the casts longer, and so on. But what it means to you does too. In the moment, it felt like we accomplished our goal for the day—that we had finally gotten the better of the fish and justified every lost fly and every gallon of water we bailed out of the canoe. But looking back, none of that is what sticks.
Years from now, you might hear me say they were four pound cutthroats that rose to Adams flies. But I’ll never forget standing in the river in the fading light holding those two rods up and hearing my brother run stumbling over the rocks to get to me before it was too late.
