Stuffed salmon?
11/25/08 06:56
A Kokanee salmon, caught earlier in the day.
We were coming back from a short but pleasant hike along McDonald Creek Sunday. November, in general, has been unusually nice and Sunday was no exception — the sun was shining, the air was cold but not unpleasant and the conversation ranged from the darkness in the financial markets to when it had been worse to how little, really, we could do about it.
Why let Wall Street ruin a perfectly good day in Glacier?
At the end of our hike we crossed the one lane bridge near the outlet to Lake McDonald. Below us, kokanee salmon were spawning, their orange and black shapes gliding in the clear water beneath us.
Earlier in the day I had stopped and caught a fish with a fly rod, just to see if they would eat a fly. Most didn’t. One did. I gave the fish to another fisherman who happily took it home to smoke it.
Now a spin fisherman was trying his luck and wrapped his lure into the bridge. He asked if I might be able to get it out, and, after a bit of maneuvering, I was able to reach down, unsnag his lure from the timbers and let it fall to the water below. The lure landed nearly directly over a fish, briefly caught it, before it was able to squirm away.
The man laughed.
On the other side of the bridge three youngsters were also fishing with spinning rods and directly above them a man was decked out in neoprene waders and wading shoes and vest and hat and all the other crap that goes along with a fully equipped fly fisherman.
He was lobbing something big and heavy at the fish by the looks of it. His rod wasn’t loading right and jerked back and forth against the weight at the end of his line. Fly fishing, done right, can look downright elegant. Fly fishing done wrong, looks like a body with one joint badly broken.
The fly fisherman kept flailing the water and then he did something I didn’t expect: He walked right across the lies of the spin fishermen to go after salmon he couldn’t reach with his lousy casting.
And then, he did it again and again.
Salmon scattered to and fro. The fly fisherman, caught none of them. Perhaps salmon, even in death, know an idiot when they see one.
The rules of fishing, spin or fly, are that you never walk through another fisherman’s lie. You give them their space, unless they say it’s OK to walk through.
I suppose that’s just common sense. But common sense and courtesy are lost on some folks. You can outfit them with all the fancy gear, the expensive rods, but you can’t buy brains or decency or sportsmanship.
A friend of mine had a more blunt assessment.
“We should have stuffed that fish you caught up his ass,” he said.
A novel approach, I suppose, but one that certainly would have caught this goon’s attention.