BARGAINING WITH THE FLOOD
By the time the rain begins, I have already missed several fish. More than several, actually, if you count the previous afternoon, when the Soça River was running clear. The first was an anxious specimen, yellow-gold in the sun, that ascended and descended a narrow run while I waited for its nerves to settle. Once, the trout swam less than a rod’s length from my boots as I stood, heron-still, pinching a tungsten bead between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. But the fish never relaxed and so neither could I.
The next was the color of gunmetal, darting from a deep eddy while I balanced on the rocks above. Three times it rushed the fly and each time I contrived to pull the fly away. I withdrew to a large boulder, out of sight of the river, and sat down, ignoring the parade of hikers on the nearby footpath. The fish had looked agitated. Not angry, but visibly aggravated by its failure to capture a meal. I clipped off the nymph and the tippet, rebuilt the leader with an arm’s length of 2X, then tied on a big cone-headed muddler. On my next cast, I watched the fly until it disappeared into the trout’s jaws. When I lifted the rod, the initial weight was thrilling. For a few seconds, I wondered if it might be possible to steer the fish around the boulders to a place where I could get my hands wet. Then the hook pulled free.
The third fish came while I was swinging the same fly near the confluence of a tributary about half as large as the Soça itself. While it seems silly to admit this now, my first thought was 10 pounds. That’s how the situation felt—not just solid, but truly substantial. I did not see the take because the muddler was 20 yards away and at least a foot below the surface. But I could clearly discern a limestone ledge the size of a banquet table and—judging from the surge of water—suspected the fish understood its geometry better than I did.
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