My Fly Rod

On last weekends visit to the creek the hard ware on my fly rod’s reel seat came off.  It’s been coming loose for several weeks now.  Ignoring a problem does not make the problem go away.  It’s not uncommon for me to leave my rod in the car because I go and cast several mornings a week.  With temps in the triple digits for the past month, I guess the glue couldn’t hold up.

It’s strange that I fish this rod so much but I haven’t really looked at the rod in a long time and now that the old guy is sick I started to look and think about the adventures we’ve had.   My mother gave me the rod when I was twenty.  I was living in Missoula, Mt.  and had the idea that I needed a “big boy” rod to go with the “big boy” waters.  My mother has no interest in fishing and actually asked me after watching the movie A River Runs Though It if that was the “type” of fishing that I did.  She raised me on her own and when I was younger budgets were tight.  As I got older her financial circumstances changed and I think she bought me the rod because she felt like I was short changed when I was younger, but this is pure speculation after years of looking back.  Just for the record I was by no means short changed in any way, but now that I am a parent I do understand how worry invades your thinking and you want the best for your children.  Anyhow, she bought the rod for me from The Fish Hawk in Atlanta.   When I was 16 or 17 those guys in the Fish Hawk would always cut me deals on flies because I could only scrounge up a few dollars at a time.  Almost weekly while I am out casting I remember the day my mother and I went to go and look at the rod.  The shop owner Gary took me out in the parking lot to cast the rod and I think specifically about him telling me to keep the rod up.  I have always had the tendency to do a side arm cast.  At the time I had never cast a rod that was as fast as this one.  It felt like I could cast to any fish within 400 yards and in hurricane force winds to boot.   Over the past twenty years that I have had the rod I can’t even guess at how many fish that I have caught on it.  A few big ones, a bunch of little ones, but all beautiful.  I have caught trout, large mouth, small mouth, bream, white bass, and crappy.  Heck, just a few days ago I caught a catfish out of a small hole below some ripples on my daughter’s Tiger Booger.  This rod has been good to me, and now that it is over twenty years old I have to say that the rod’s second function, besides catching fish, is being a catalyst for jarring my memory of great times.