Well, I woke up Sunday
morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt. I contemplated
spending the rest of the day staring out of the window, imagining fishing trips
and fish that never had happened, and probably never would. But the
cobwebs started to clear, and I figured I might as well go fishing. I
loaded a new two-hander in the car that I’d been meaning to finally master.
This time of year, the fish – smallmouth bass, mostly – are sluggish and hold
deep. So I had low expectations for fish, but just wanted to get out there and
throw some line. I had an old Atlantic salmon fly, a “General Practitioner”,
that I thought might be a reasonable crayfish imitation, so I tied it on, and
let ‘er rip.
I’d been fishing for maybe
20 minutes, if that, when I had a socket-wrenching tug on the line. I
have to be honest with you: I have never experienced a strike like that, in 30
years of fishing. Then followed an immovable line, and so I began to question
whether I’d actually felt something pull back, or if I’d simply hung up a rock.
But I wasn’t stripping the line at the time, so it had to have been a
fish. It was then that the line started slowly moving up and to the
side. I realized that I was, indeed, attached to a fish and in that
instant, it seems the fish came to a similar conclusion for it shot straight up
river, emptying my reel of all the fly line and much of the backing before I
had realized what was going on.
And the end of this sprint
the fish revealed itself to be a leaper and this was indeed apt because despite
the distance the fish had put between us, there was no mistaking that this was
a large Atlantic salmon. In fact, to be honest, it was massive. And
try as I might to simply focus on the now questionable task at hand, even at
that time, my mind started to do the math. This fish could not have come
in through the St. Lawrence River because the river I was now standing in, the
White of central Indiana, was not connected to the St. Lawrence or even to the
Great Laurentian Lakes or the rivers that flow into them. This fish
clearly would have had to have come up the White from the Wabash, via the Ohio
River. And to have entered the Ohio, it must have come up the Mississippi,
which it would have entered after first navigating south along the Atlantic
Coast and then around Florida, before heading north through the Gulf of Mexico
to enter the river in New Orleans.
While my brain
multi-tasked between contemplating this incredible journey and landing the
protagonist of said journey, I heard a voice behind me.
“That’s quite a
salmon. If you’d like, I can try to net it,” she said.
I turned to see a woman in
waders (but, oddly, with no fishing pole) holding a very large landing
net. “Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.
“It will be the largest
Atlantic salmon I have ever netted, and the only one from this river, I might
add – but yes, I am handy with a net,” she replied, with a smile.
“I’ll never land it
without help, so if you see the opportunity, go for it,” I said…nervously.
After several more long
runs, and several spectacular airborne acrobatics, the fish began to tire and I
managed to steer it into some shallow water. Approximately 40 minutes had
passed since I had hooked the fish. To be totally honest, at this point I
still had little faith that I would land it. I had never even seen a live, wild
Atlantic salmon before, much less one as enormous as this one. While upright,
the fish’s broad back was stunning, but when the fish finally rolled and we got
a look at its depth, we were both momentarily speechless. Luckily, the
woman snapped out of the salmo-stupor in time to net the great fish, and
together we pulled it ashore.
Much whooping and
hollering ensued, while she congratulated me on the catch and I thanked her
repeatedly for netting it. She then produced a scale from her kit and we
weighed and measured the fish. The salmon taped out at 49 inches, and according
to her scale, which she said was certified, the fish weighed 47 pounds and four
ounces. She used my camera to take several pictures of me with the fish, and we
then discussed what to do with it. We accessed the Indiana Department of
Natural Resources (DNR) website via her smartphone, and could find no reference
to any regulations concerning Atlantic salmon other than those that come from
Lake Michigan or its tributaries, which this fish most clearly did not. So I
dispatched the fish quickly with the priest she had, and we made love several
times in succession, taking yet more photographs.
When I woke up an hour
later, she, and the giant salmon, were gone. I gathered my things and drove
straight to the fly shop. I told the story to understandably skeptical ears,
but then remembered my camera. I said “I’ve got pictures!” and immediately
turned on the camera. To my horror, she had deleted all of the photos of the
fish! Luckily, still on the camera was a single photograph. It was a
photo of me, asleep on the ground, which she must have taken after our
lovemaking.
“Look!” I shouted, and thrust
the camera at the fly shop employees.
“What’s this?” replied the
manager.
“It’s me,” I said.
“After we caught the fish and I had sex with the woman who netted it.”
“How is this proof you
caught a 47 pound salmon?” said the kid behind the counter, clearly quite
skeptical.
“Well why in the hell
would I take a photograph of myself? And how could I? I was
asleep. Look!” I said, waving the camera before him.
The kid raised his eyebrow
and exchanged glances with the store manager and the other clerk. Much glance exchanging ensued.
The store manager then reached
over the counter and held out his hand.
“Mister, that is one hell
of a fish. That’s a record’s gonna stand a long time.”
We printed the photo on the
fly shop’s printer, and they hung it up on the braggin’ board, next to the old
and weathered photographs of fishermen of by-gone days. For their
generosity, I let them keep the General Practitioner, which they pinned to the
board as well. The shop manager called me just today to tell me they
can’t even keep those flies in stock now.
 |
| New Indiana state record Atlantic Salmon, upper right |
[This piece was published in a slightly different form in the Fall 2013 issue of "The Drake" magazine. Thanks to Tom Bie and "The Drake" for putting it out there.]
