Matt was eleven the evening he put it all together. He had been able to cast quite well for a number of years, but the Deschutes demands some size and strength beside just casting ability. He had been landing my hooked fish for two days when we were fooling around on an open flat in the early afternoon.
Looking up the shoreline he saw a rise and asked if he could wade up and try it himself. It just happened that we were at the bottom end of what I would consider the best mile of shoreline on the whole river. It also happens to be the ugliest and unfishiest looking mile of shoreline on the whole river. No one fishes it. That's why it's so good. I thought it might be early to start out on what would probably be the whole evening's fishing, but I remembered how slow we would fish with Matt casting, so I nodded and we were off, Matt with his three weight and me with a four.
I held Matt's hand as we waded up the shoreline to where the first fish had showed, set him up and had him begin casting to cover the spot, but the fish never came back. Some good water was above
so together we waded into position, me standing inside and just upstream from Matt, directing his casts to the holding lies. Matt got a rise from middle sized fish but missed it with too much slack. Ten feet above that he got another one and missed that one as well. He slammed the rod down on the water in anger and cursed, rather quaintly, I thought for an eleven-year-old. But another fish showed just above, so on we went.
For the first hour we settled into a pattern. The rises began coming with regularity. First, Matt couldn't hook the fish because of slack, so he worked harder on retrieving line faster as the cast came
downcurrent. Then, with less slack, he began breaking them off with beginner's overstrike. I would hand him my rod to keep on fishing while I reloaded his rod with another fly. The distance between rising fish was dropping to about one every thirty feet. Once he finally controlled his strike, to his horror, he found out that hooking a fish initiated a whole series of events and problems that he had never appreciated before when I had handed him a nice, controlled rod and fish. The fish ran downstream
right at us of course, down and out, and Matt wallowed in slack. They were either gone by the time he caught up to them slack-wise, or broke him off right as he came tight. Matt was near to tears in
