Mik and I have been learning how to fish the past couple of weeks. When we first moved here, we were ecstatic by how close the lake was to our new home. A ten-minute walk will lead you right to the edge of the lake.
So that first year, one of the things we did was to buy fishing equipment from good old Army and Navy, which also supplied most of our camping and crabbing essentials. We were surprised by all the options: PowerBait that came in colours like Fluorescent Red and Captain America, rubber worms, eggs that smelled like garlic, marshmallows, and all other sorts of brightly-coloured, glittery stuff that made us think we had accidentally walked into a toy store. After about an hour of scratching our heads over hook sizes and bait (“Hey, hon, what’s difference between this jar of green dough and this jar of yellowish-green dough?”), and avoiding folks who looked like they knew what they were doing, we bought a rod and spin reel set that came with a bunch of hooks and fake worms. We then proceeded to not catch anything for the next few months.
Actually, that’s not true: Mikhail did nab a trout once. It was during a camping trip up in Pye Lake near Campbell River. In his excitement to show me, he dropped it back into the lake. I never did quite forgive him for that.
Fast forward to five years later. I decided, now that we have no more money for food all this spare time in our hands, to pick up fishing again. Like the geeks we are, we looked it up online first. Then we had a meeting. We were all like, “It can’t be rocket science!” and “How hard could it be?” We agreed that our 24-year-old selves were idiots for trying to fish in the middle of the day, in a spot where you couldn’t see any fish, and that we shouldn’t overthink this. A friend had told us that the trout in Buntzen liked yellow PowerBait. If that worked for him, it should work for us.
If it’s not yet evident by now, my husband and I discuss all our decisions like we were in Season 2 of The Walking Dead.
So we went to the lake. And we tried to fish. We forgot how to cast a spinning rod and cursed the “broken thing” for like half an hour before we remembered we were supposed to put our finger on the line while casting it. And then the PowerBait kept falling off. We’d throw our line and watch the fish bite for a few minutes before completely stopping, because hey, isn’t that our PowerBait floating right beside the bobber? We cursed our dads for being nerdy office workers who considered hiking a “sport” and not teaching us any of this. We questioned our sanity. We swore at the fish.
Two hours later, we both got bites within five minutes of each other and came home with two small trout, high-fived, and said, “Let’s do that again!”
I think I had a metaphor for life prepared in the back of my mind to round off this story, but I got distracted reading about wet fly fishing and can’t wait to try that this afternoon…
Do you like sarcasm, drama, and lots of talking before sword fights? Do you sometimes wish your epic fantasy had more feelings? Then please support my hungry brood and give The Agartes Epilogues a try!
