Ever had one of those days where it seemed like all of your gear was falling apart all at once? Great, then I'm not alone.
Went fishing last Sunday and within a half hour of making my first cast, I noticed that the bite valve of my camelback hydration pack had torn and half my water had leaked out. These things must have a siphon effect, so if the valve goes bad they just dribble all water out. What a PITA that is. Luckily I had another bottle of Gatorade in my pack, because I'm now over a mile from the truck.
Then I opened up my fly box and went to tie on a PT, and the fly just came apart in my fingers. I tried another and that one came apart too, it was like they weren't finished properly, I don't know anything about fly tying, but they had one loose thread by the eye and if I tried to clip or pull that, the whole fly came undone. Dangit.
So there went my last four PTNs in #16. No idea what happened there, must have been a bad batch. I knew I needed to restock those, but I figured 5 PTNs would be good enough. Of course, the reason I was tying on another PTN was that was the only fly the fish wanted all morning and the first one I tied on was looking pretty ragged. Oh well, fish on with it, I guess.
Then at about noon, I'm standing in the middle of a run called The Groove. It's a fast, narrow, current rip that goes right down the middle of the river. I set the hook into a reasonable fish and played it even with me. It's kind of tricky in The Groove because the water is really jetting by, even though I'm only standing just over knee deep, it's tricky to land fish by hand in really fast water. So I reached back for my net and I can't seem to get hold of it. I'm standing with a fish on, in fast water, and I'm trying to reach to the back of my vest because I figure the net is hung up somehow so that I can't reach it. I'd already used the net multiple times, so it has to be there somewhere, right?
Dammit! It's not freaking there anymore!
I landed the fish and released it, and the I waded back to the bank and took off my vest/pack thingy. No net! The net retractor is still hanging there on the D-ring, but the cable broke and the net must have fallen off somewhere earlier in the day. It could be anywhere. If it fell in the river, I'm hosed, but it could be hanging on any one of about 1000 prickly ash trees that line the banks as well. Great.
About now I'm thinking, "OK, sh!t happens, so what? A day of fishing where a bunch of gear falls apart is still better then a good day at work." Well, as they say in the infomercial for those knives that never need sharpening, "But wait, there's more. . . "
About an hour after I noticed that my net had gone on walkabout, I felt my left boot getting kind of loose. I waded to the bank thinking I needed to retie my boot lace. Yeah. No lace.
In retrospect, that was totally predictable. My wading boot lace must have broken and somehow, in the current, it unthreaded itself or got hooked on something and freaking disappeared! Now this really isn't funny, because I'm about a mile into the valley from the truck and then 2 miles downriver, so walking out isn't going to be fun, but I'd have to quit fishing because I can't risk having the current pull the boot off my foot. Losing it that way would be a disaster as a 3 mile hike would be a little hard on the neoprene wader foot not to mention my foot.
Think, think, think. What would McGuyver do? Think, think, think. How do you make a boot lace out of dry grass and tree bark? Wait! Fly line would work! So I stripped my fly line off the reel, and cut a few feet of fly line off the butt end so I don't mess up the taper. Hell, that's the part of the line I never see so nothing lost there
. I doubled the piece of fly line up to make a new boot lace, and I'm back in business. And to be honest, I'm feeling pretty chuffed. I'd have patted myself on the back, but then that would have reminded me that my net was missing. One step forward. . .
What else could go wrong? Glad you asked. I figured I was safe when I got back to the truck. Sadly not. My keys must have been jammed in my vest pocket such that the remote's lock/unlock button was pushed down. The keyfob remote was stone dead. Figures. The good news is I just need to go shopping for flies, get a net and a net retractor, find some boot laces, and get a battery for the keyfob thingy and I'm back in the saddle.
As the immortal poet Ringo Starr sang, "You know it don't come easy." Hard to really complain, it's just funny how everything comes unglued at once some days.
Grouse
When it all comes unglued.
, I shouldn't laugh Grouse, but it's nice to see such days aren't confined to this side of the pond. It'll even out next time.
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