It's a slightly familiar stench - I swear I've smelled it before, but I can't quite put a finger on it.
Wait...could it be...? Yeah, it's THAT stench!
The animal pictured above is symbolic, of course, and really doesn't deserve such an unfair, slanderous commentary on my part. He's really just the namesake for the most offensive, embarrassing, and dreaded catch phrase a fisherman can hear: the "skunking."
Unfortunately, I received one today, the first in many, many days on the water in 2010. Today's skunking was so incredibly thorough that I began to wonder if I really know anything about what I'm doing when it comes to fly fishing. Not only did I not catch a single trout, I'm fairly certain that not a single fish so much as sniffed one of my budget-conscious flies. While I could come up with a litany of excuses - the water was too high (it wasn't); the water was too murky (just slightly); the sun was too bright; the barometric pressure was radically different; the river gets too much fishing pressure - none of them would be plausible to even the most naive among us. More likely "operator error," as they say. I was fishing lazy and shaking off rust from two weeks on dry land.
It's like anything else, this obsession of mine. Use it or lose it. Practice makes perfect. Blah, blah, blah.
I'll stop short of bathing in tomato juice, but tomorrow it's game on. I'm declaring jihad on the Poudre's trout.
1 comment:
I had to laugh - not at your misfortune of getting smoked - but at your comment:
"...I began to wonder if I really know anything about what I'm doing"
Every fly flinger I've spoken to has had the same thoughts at one time or another - comes with the job, I guess.
But if we never have 'those' days, how can we ever fully appreciate the epic ones?
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