posted by Dan on Oct 5
Some time ago I got into fishing at night in the Clearwater intracoastal waterways, fishing the dock lights. This is stealth fishing, Very quiet, you fish on a flat calm night, with not a ripple in the water. You approach these lights, cut the motor, drift into position, slide the anchor without a sound, and fly cast to the light.
Some lights would hold Snook stacked up right before your eyes and others would hold big saltwater trout. This is when you shake when you make a perfect cast, saying to yourself, please have the right fly, and don’t make me look like a fool now. These were prayers when you see this many fish at a 40 foot cast away. QUIET. Three guys on the boat each take a turn making their cast so as to not kill one another with the flies.
Now, there was this fellow on the flats boat who would always jump ahead and always make the first cast. And on top of that he would narrate his cast, and how good it was, and on and on with too much constant talk. It would drone on so eventually it just became noise.
Suddenly, dead quiet. I was sitting changing a fly, the boat owner was making a new leader, and we both turned around to look at the quiet behind us from our very noisy friend. He was sitting at the end of the boat dead quiet, and very pale. He pointed to his thigh and low and behold he had hooked himself in the leg. And that had shut him up.
The boat owner laughed, dug out his camera and photographed this guy’s leg. Then he promptly removed the hook from the guy’s leg, at which point the guy started his noisy narration again.
“Why did you take that out? We had some peace.” (My own narration).
