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.
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.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 2016-Ausgabe von Field & Stream.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September 2016-Ausgabe von Field & Stream.
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LIVING THE DREAM
After the author arrives in Maine’s fabled North Woods with a moose tag in his pocket, an adventure he’s been wanting to take his entire hunting life, reality sets in, and he learns a valuable lesson: Be careful what you wish for
Get the Drift
How to make an accurate windage call under pressure
First Sit
An icebreaker outing in a pristine spot produces the rut hunt of a lifetime
A Local Haunt
The author finds a sense of place in an overlooked creek, close to home
A Hop and a Pump
Jump-shooting rabbits with classic upland guns is about as good a time as you can have in the outdoors
Welcome TO camp
Is there any place better than a good hunting camp? It has everything: great food, games and pranks, and of course, hunting. Shoot, we don’t even mind going to camp for grueling work days in the summer. Here, our contributors share their favorite stories, traditions, and lessons learned from camps they’ve shared. So come on in and join us. The door’s open.
THE DEERSLAYERS
Before you even claim a bunk, you need to eyeball the hardware your buddies have brought. In the process, you’ll see that the guns at deer camp are changing. What was walnut and blued steel may now be Kevlar and carbon fiber. The 10 rifles featured here aren’t your father’s deer guns. They’re today’s new camp classics
THE JOURNEY TO PIKE'S PEAK
Last summer, the author and three friends ventured off the grid to a remote fish camp in Canada. They hoped for great fishing, but what they experienced was truly something else
Stage Directions
When early-season whitetails vanish from open feeding areas, follow this woods-edge ambush plan
Rookie Season
A pup’s first year, from preseason training to fall’s big show