Playing a salmon

 I was thinking recently about some of my early salmon fishing escapades.

I caught my first salmon at Grandy's Brook near Burgeo in Newfoundland and was well and truly hooked from then on.

The guides on that first trip were the Hare brothers and it was Clayton that put me onto the first grilse I ever hooked.

The big lesson for me was that hooking a salmon is only the beginning. Playing one is something else entirely.






Before leaving on this trip I'd discussed my upcoming adventure with the great fly-tier and raconteur, Jim Harding.

Jim's advice about playing a salmon was pithy and to the point. "When he pulls, you don't. When he don't, you do".

Well, it turns out to be pretty good advice and I have offered it many times myself to new adventurers.

When I got back from that trip I couldn't wait to try for salmon on the rivers in my home province. There are some good ones too, the St. Mary's, the Margaree and the Medway to name but a few.

There is a spot on the Medway River called High Rock Pool. Before the run was depleted and the river closed to salmon fishing it was one of the spots that could sometimes be fished without a boat.

Shortly after my return from the Newfoundland trip I headed out to High Rock Pool to try my luck. Trust me, skill was not going to be a factor in that day's activities.

The Medway is a lovely river. A gravel road runs down one side of it's length. The other side is well treed and wild with a few campsites and cabins.

The River Road makes a slow turn and the view opens up at High Rock Pool. It is pleasant to pull over for a few minutes and watch the angler lucky enough to be fishing while you are headed to work or on some other errand that keeps you off the river.

That's how it was this day. I was standing at the top of the run, casting a Blue Charm, quartering down stream and concentrating with all of my might on every bit of fishing lore I'd heard in Newfoundland.

There was a truck pulled over on the road across the river. Watching I supposed with envy as I fished. Just then I noticed something odd in the water. It was a blue shape, bobbing downstream in the current and slowly sinking. It was almost lost to sight when it struck me. That is my jacket.

It must have blown off the rock behind me into the river. I mentally wrote it off as lost when another thought hit me: My car keys are in the pocket!

As fast as I could I stripped in my line and made a desperate cast at what I now could see was an air bubble trapped in the material of the jacket, barely keeping it afloat as the current rushed it away from me.

What a miraculous sense of relief when the line came tight and my hook set firmly into the sodden mass. The rod arced with the weight and I struggled with the rushing current to reclaim my keys.

No easy thing, I had to skip across the rocks, gradually working the closest thing to an anchor I've ever had on a fishing rod, into the slacker water below me.

At some point I looked across the river towards the road. Imagine my embarrassment as I saw not just a couple of vehicles pausing momentarily in their journey but several cars parked and people standing on the bank watching what to them must have seemed like a lucky fisherman battling a huge salmon.

The whole thing became much more complicated as I tried to retrieve the damn jacket all the while keeping my face averted in the hope that no one would recognize me.

I finally had to reach down into the water below the rock I was standing on, grab the soaking wet jacket and hoist it up.

Acutely conscious of the crowd on the opposite shore I pantomimed my disgust with hooking this strange thing, snapped my leader, leaving the hook in my jacket and flung the whole sloppy mess into the bushes.

Burning with self-consciousness I opened my fly box and tried to portray calm as I tied on a new fly. When I slid my gaze back across the river, the road was mercifully empty.

I leaped like a deer into the bushes and grabbed my dripping coat, feeling frantically for the reassurance of car keys in the pocket, then I got the Hell out of there.