Just so everyone knows: guides have “those days,” too… It’s Saturday afternoon and with the wife hosting a bridal shower, it was a chance to escape to the river with Captain Don. Beautiful day, light winds, excellent flow—in short, perfect! And so it was, until I hung up on the bottom with a demo rod from a company other than Scott and Sage. A couple of “Can I get it off tugs” and, “Whoa! This rod just blew up!” El-Snappo, right in the middle of the butt section. To make matters worse, I lost the tip, and the upper two sections of the rod in the process of trying to save the what I could. Yikes! All the while, Captain Don continued to boat trout after trout on his streamer, though the one pictured is one of my few. Even though I started over with another rod, no matter what fly I tossed, Don continued to lay a clinic on me…
“OK, the sun is getting lower, time to head upstream for some dry fly action. Surely, my fortunes will change,” I think. We stop and have a nice chat with a couple of our fly fishing friends, and soon we’re casting away. “Let’s see…I’ll move the boat right over to there….Lift the anchor… SNAP! KA-SPLOOSH!
You know, 130 lbs. of anchor makes a heck of a splash when the rope that holds it cashes in its chips! Now we’re drifting down river, anchor-less! Unbelievable! Fortunately, however, after a couple of drifts over where we thought it went Bye-Bye, we found it. Now how to get it back…
No problem, per Captain Don’s Plan A, strip off the shirt, empty the pockets, and bombs-away, into the river I go, holding on the gunwale, anchor rope in hand.
“Swim down to the anchor and tie off the rope,” chirps Captain Don. Right, I’ll just do that in eight feet of water flowing at 2100 cfs. Needless, to say, that plan, however plausible it may have seemed to Captain Don, made absolutely no sense to me or the river. No way was I going to reach that anchor, tie off, swim to the top, and smile. So, on to Plan B—return to the river Monday and try to extract the anchor with Don’s soon to be fabricated, custom anchor-hooker-upper. Stay tuned!
Captain Tom Kuieck
