fishermen. The fish easily twisted loose, shredding my thumb. I managed to unhook it without further bloodshed.
They called me for dinner then, tearing me away from the lake before I could wade out of sight. Ten minutes, three new fish. What else did this pond hold? Were there fish of any size?
After dinner I enlisted my roommate who came with his girlfriend to row the obligatory cabin canoe in the fading light while I cast to the shoreline. Clouds of pumpkinseeds converged on the fly wherever I threw it. I changed to a red streamer with a chamois tail to discourage the smaller fish. Now I was dead serious.
We worked to the right of the beach. Casting from a sitting position in the bow of the canoe was awkward and the light 6 wt rod was overloaded by the large fly. Fifty feet down the shoreline I splatted the streamer down beside a submerged log. Out of my peripheral vision a long, torpedo shaped shadow screamed into focus, charging the fly from fifty feet away. It was so big and came so fast I pulled the fly away before it could connect. When I got the line straightened out again I looked for the fish, and finally spotted a long shadow sulking under the log. I laid the fly beside the log and looked again for the shadow but it was gone. Then the line came tight and nearly three feet and six pounds of chain pickerel burst upward in a four foot jump. This was clearly the biggest fish I had ever connected with up to that time. I stripped in line to stay tight and yelled for Tom to back the canoe away from the shoreline. The big pickerel jumped again as cleanly as a salmon, then rushed into deep water straight towards us. I stripped in more line and got myself squared away, but I was really shaking by this time. Then the fish ran to the right, then away. The line came tight, stretched, and parted. In the cramped canoe bow my feet were standing on the line.
"What was that?", Tom asked with all the nonchalance of a non-fisherman who obviously assumed these things happened every day.
"That was the biggest goddamn pickerel I ever knew existed."
The evening was done with that. We drove back into Boston and for the next three days until graduation I could see that huge pickerel hanging in the air. As usual when it came to my closet fishing life, there was really no one with whom I could share the momentousness of my discovery. Because, although I was returning to Seattle for the summer, I was knowingly doomed to spend four
more years of post-graduate work in Boston. But from then on, it would be with a car!
