Run A Mok

Amid the chaos of one of the country’s craziest spawning runs,the author discovers the Zen-like secret to salmon fishing. Hint: It doesn’t involve actually catching fish.

- Bill Heavey

If the chain-smoking angler upstream gets any closer, we’ll both be sucking on that cigarette. The guy has eyebrows like huge leeches, and he’s muttering incessantly to himself in one of the Slavic languages. He is standing 8 yards away and has been stealthily lengthening his casts so that his drift finishes almost at my feet. Any closer and I’ll step on his fly. Accidentally, of course. You can’t blame him, really. When the big ones are running on New York’s Salmon River in October, the meek inherit bubkes.

I’m fishing the Long Bridge Pool in downtown Pulaski. My downstream neighbor, also 8 yards away, is a tall kid with a starter-kit soul patch, lime-green hair, and a fish-skeleton tattoo on his neck. It must have taken a lot of work to look this unemployable. Thing is, the kid knows what he’s doing. His cast- drift retrieve cycle takes all of 10 seconds—a kind of economy that comes only from time on the water. The 8-yard interval, in effect for the 150 yards I can see up and down the river, has nothing to do with good manners. It’s about self- preservation. We’re all fishing chuck-and duck style. The method involves long, soft rods, short lines, and at least half an ounce of split shot to get down to where the fish are. (The noodle rod, in fact, was invented here in the 1960s, when someone at the Salmon River Sports Shop slapped a mono-filled spinning reel onto a Fenwick fly rod as a way to absorb the shock of a 40-pound chinook grabbing the fly 10 feet away.) At the end of each drift, you do a roundhouse back cast and lob the rig back upstream. At any given moment there are any number of hooks and lead weights flying through the air. We’re all mad to catch fish, but we all want to go home alive, too. Thus, the 8-yard rule.