Kids areas Cool Stuff The Hooker Hooked
The Hooker Hooked
I caught my first trout at the age of five, from a mountain brook that
flowed into the Cheat River in West Virginia not far from our summer
cottage, using a piece of white wrapping - string tied to a stick and a
small safety pin on which I had impaled a cricket. It was a splendid
brook trout, at least five inches long and beautifully formed and
colored, and it fought fiercely, or would have if it hadn't been
derricked onto the pine - needled bank the instant it bit the cricket,
but on the way home I stopped to watch a man shoot a rattlesnake that
had crawled under the porch of his cabin, and lost the fish in my
excitement.
That ended my trout - fishing for a long time, as my family moved to a
suburb of Pittsburgh, and the creeks that ran near my home flowed
yellow and malodorous with coal - mine drainage. Summers I went to
camps and caught smallmouth bass in Ontario, a brace of rather puny
muskellunge in Conneaut Lake and one no larger in Lake Chatauqua, and
various pickerel, perch, bullheads, walleyes, rock bass and sunnies in
assorted waters. But no trout. I went to college surrounded by some of
the best limestone creeks in Pennsylvania, when a limit of browns over
two pounds with a five pounder among them was no unusual feat, but it
was in the midst of a depression the depression and a fishable split -
cane fly - rod complete with reel and fly line cost upwards of ten
dollars, which was more than I allowed myself for spending money for a
month. (The three Leonard rods and Meek reels my father had left had
been burned along with our house and most of its contents a few years
previously.)
After college I shipped as a seaman on freighters for a year, then
lucked my way into a writing job in a Philadelphia advertising agency.
They paid me fifteen incredible dollars a week for a mere 44 hours (the
shipping line had paid me the going rate of $26. So a month for a six -
hour work - week, plus, of course, a bunk and food of sorts) and I
saved enough during the first year to buy an extremely used Ford coupe
for $35. One June day I was in the office of a senior vice - president
of the company, and while waiting for him to finish a telephone call I
studied a photograph on his wall, of him in a canoe netting a big
squaretail.
"Like fishing?" he asked.
"I do indeed," I said, "but it's a long time since I've done any."
"Ever fish for trout?" he asked.
"Only deep - water lakers," I said, "and it was too much like laying the Atlantic cable."
"Got a car?" he asked, and when I said I did he changed the subject to
business. The next Friday morning he called me up to his office and
handed me an aluminum rod case in which was a three - piece 8 - foot 4
- ounce Thomas rod, a reel with a silk double - tapered fly line on it,
an envelope of leaders, a cardboard box with a dozen wet and dry flies
in it and a pair of hip boots two sizes too large for me.
"Duck out at noon," he said, "and drive up 6I I to East Stroudsburg.
Take 209 there until you see a big frame hotel on the left, right
beside the road, with a sign that says 'Charley's Hotel Rapids.' Go in
and tell Charley I said for him to see that you catch some trout. Good
luck."
I couldn't leave at noon because I had a lot of work to do, and in
those days you didn't take chances with a job that payed that well, but
at five o'clock I rushed out, packed my sea - going dungarees and
sweatshirt which was the closest I could come to a sporting ensemble,
and drove as fast as I could up 611. I found the hotel, a barn - like
white painted frame building so close to the DL&W railroad tracks
that the building shuddered and shook when trains roared by, and went
in and introduced myself to Charley Reihoret, a stumpy, volatile,
fierce - looking Alaskan with a ragged mustache. When I gave him the
message from Wes Gilman he assigned me to a room upstairs and told me
to change clothes and come back down. It was nearly dark, but I got
into my dungarees and boots and went back down. Charley seemed startled
at my outfit, and asked if I had ever fished for trout. I said no, and
he thought for a minute, then said okay, he thought he could help me
catch a trout.
On the porch outside the bar I set the rod up while Charley pawed
through the flies Wes had lent me and picked out a fairly large White
Miller, probably a #6. I had tied a heavy leader to the line because
that was the only kind Wes had lent me, but Charley said no, that's not
the right leader, and went back of the bar into a cigar box and dug up
a much lighter one, probably 3X or 4X. When he had tied the fly to it
he handed me the outfit and a flashlight - it was now quite dark and
led me across the tracks to the top of a high bank beside the creek.
"Take that path down to the water," Charley said, "and right at the
bottom there's a boulder with an iron spike in it. It's all that's left
of an old foot - bridge. Cast your fly straight out from there about
two rod lengths, no more, and let it swing in the current until it's
straight downstream. Don't use the light unless you have to. Don't use
more than ten feet of line or you'll get hung up behind you. Keep doing
that until something happens."
"What if nothing happens?" I said.
Charley shrugged. "Then come back and have a drink and dinner," he
said, and walked back across the tracks to the hotel, where several
other cars had pulled up since I arrived. I slid cautiously down the
steep path to the water, not using the light at all, and by the time I
had felt my way to the creek my pupils had dilated and I could dimly
see a boulder at the water's edge, with an iron spike stuck in it.
I peeled about six feet of line off the reel and flipped the fly
awkwardly into the water. When it had swung downstream I peeled off a
few more feet and flipped it out again. The third time I flipped the
fly onto the dark, rushing water I saw something swirl violently in the
current, making a wave almost a foot high, and at the same instant
there came a yank on the line that nearly tore the rod from my hand,
and no doubt would have if the leader hadn't popped like a rotten
thread.
I was too dumbfounded to do anything but sit down on the boulder and
light a cigarette with trembling fingers, and when the cigarette was
finished I walked back up the bank to the hotel, changed clothes and
sat down to one of those "Analomink Charley" meals that drew non -
fishermen from a hundred miles around and helped to make up for the
abominable beds and the noise and the cinders of the railroad. By the
time Charley came by the whole episode seemed somehow unreal, but when
I told him what happened he didn't seem al all surprised. "Better luck
next time," he said cheerfully, and hurried off to greet Gene Connet or
George LaBranche or Jack Knight or Preston Jennings or Jim Leisenring
or some other now - legendary figure of the trout - fishing world, none
of whom I had then ever heard of but some of whom it would be my great
privilege to know and to fish with in coming seasons on the Brodheads.
For although I didn't know it at the time I had been hooked as surely
and solidly as that big brown trout, and although he probably rubbed
the hook out of his jaw that same night I've never recovered from the
one he stuck into me.
It wasn't until I had fished that splendid little river for. several
seasons and had come to know Charley Rethoret well that I realized why
he had me use a light leader that night: he believed that a few really
big trout give a stream character and fishermen something to talk
about, and saw no reason to risk having a novice angler horse one of
his biggest trout out of the home pool. (When I wanted to try for the
Leviathan another night, Charley asked me not to, giving some totally
implausible reason, and I never did.)