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“You’ve got this…you topwater ‘pro’,” Nick added with more than a hint of good-natured sarcasm.
I snapped back to reality, freed myself of fly line and plucked the fly out of my hat, where it had come to rest after the quick-draw incident.
With shaking hands and a lot less confidence than I’d had just a moment earlier, I chucked the fly back out where it hit the water—not with the faintest of sound but instead with a big, fat splat. Perhaps not the most elegant of presentations but she was riding high and drifting into the general vicinity of the boulder where the fish had just shown itself.
Nothing.
A few more casts produced the same result and Nick said we’d better start hiking for the car.
But first, I had to make the obligatory last cast.
The red and yellow Chernobyl Ant hit the water and I squinted hard to see it in the low light as it drifted. As I strained to watch it swim through the drift, I was surprised to feel a heavy headshake on the end of the rod. The weird thing was I could still see the fly yet my rod was bucking wildly, the pressure coming from a point well downstream of my position.
It took a moment to process all that was happening and then it hit me: I had lost track of my fly and was instead watching a bubble drifting along. Meanwhile, my offering was actually about 10 feet further downstream than I thought and, in the meantime, had been slurped down by a steelhead while I was looking elsewhere.
It actually worked out perfectly. Since I never saw the fish rise to the fly, I had no cause to set the hook. By the time I realized it, the fly was stuck squarely in the steelie’s jaw and the fight was on. Dummy-proof dry-fly fishing…I love it!
The steelhead was nowhere as large as the one that I had seen a few minutes earlier, but it was my first ever taken on a dry and I’ll never forget it. Okay, so it took some serious dumb luck and lousy eyesight to make it all happen, but I’ll take it. And that fish was made even more special by the fact that it was the cherry on top of a day that will forever live as one of my favorites of all time. Great fishing and great friends…and a dry-fly steelhead…are you kidding me??
To this day, that fly lives on the wall next to my office computer and I can’t help but smile every time I look at it.
