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Peter Cammann, The Streamside Guide
Confessions of A Fishing Guide
21st April 2008
There once was a very odd period of my life. That's when I really didn't fish very much.
It began during the last three years that I owned and operated a fly-fishing guide service. I'd started the company in the late '80s, during the big fly fishing fad that peaked in 1992 with the release of the film adaptation of Norman MacLean's classic tale, A River Runs Through It. I had reasoned that if I could figure out a way to get people to pay me to go fishing with them, I'd be able to fish more myself.
The strange thing was, the more dates I booked with clients, the fewer opportunities I actually got to cast to fish. One of the guys who guided with me once complained that he felt his graphite fly rod was little more than an over-priced pointer. He'd use it to show the location of a rising trout, which he would then have to watch someone else try to catch.
The more guided trips I took out, the less I fished. Eventually, the more days I spent guiding, the less I wanted to fish when I had a day off.
So, I played golf.
I golfed a lot when I was a kid, every chance I could get when I wasn't fishing. But it's very easy to fish all morning and play golf all afternoon when you're 12 years old. It's a bit trickier when you're in your 40s. Both sports are completely obsessive, require fantastic attention to detail, and eat up enormous amounts of time.
Golf may well be the greatest game ever created, outside of baseball (another game I love, but for which I have even less natural ability). Rediscovering it in the late '90s was a lifesaver, particularly since I found that I usually went fishing only if someone had a few hundred bucks to spend. I threw myself into golf. I joined a club and played every time I could.
I wasn't very good. Once and a while, I broke 90, but that was as well as I played. I only fished with clients, or with my daughter.
Grace was 3 when I went on my hiatus from fishing. She loved it and she would coax me out about once every week or so to fish for brook trout in the Mad River or in one of the beaver ponds nearby. It was always a lot of fun too and that made it very different from the experiences I was having guiding. Fishing was my job. It was work.
But, I really enjoyed spending time watching Grace fish. She got into riding horses later on, but she was wicked with an ultra light rod and a can of garden worms in her day. It was just so cool to see her spot the fish, watch as she made her cast (which could sometimes be a bit of a hazardous undertaking), hook and release her catch and then hurry up to do it all again. There were mornings when she'd fish with me until she completely ran out of worms. Then she'd ask that I go find more bait, so that she could keep fishing.
But I had golf. Golf gave me some vivid memories. There was that 3-iron shot in 1994 when I realized that I might be able to play this stupid game again, after almost 20 years of not having touched a club. Another approach shot in 2000 stood out too, when I played my first 85-stroke round since the summer I turned 17. It wasn't a perfect shot, but it arched through the air, on a line with the pin, bounced twice just short of the green and then just barely dribbled on to the putting surface. I missed breaking 80 by a single stroke on two memorable occasions, in '96 and again in '00, both times playing with my father. The final put on the first attempt at this feat was only a three footer, which I pushed off to the right. Nerves will make you do the stupidest things at the most inopportune moments.
That's a nice stack of memories. But also I remember the very first trout I ever caught. It was on a borrowed fly rod on the Madison River in 1969. I didn't know what in the hell I was doing but somehow I managed to land that rainbow trout, without falling on my ass in the water. I can see the last barracuda I caught one winter day in Puerto Rico. It wasn't all that large, but it was sweet, given how hard I'd fished that day and how few fish I'd spotted.
I recall every detail of a day I spent fishing on the Clyde River for salmon in '99. I threw flies at several huge fish in a small pool for over two hours before I got a hit. That salmon was on my line for less than five seconds before it broke off, but I'll never forget how excited I was when I got home that night, even though it was the only strike I had that day. There were days I caught fish and days I got skunked, but I seem to have stored more mental pictures from the days I caught nothing than from all the days I played what I felt was my best golf.
Maybe I just sucked at golf?
That could well be, but what I finally realized was that I really loved fishing. I was still playing golf, but I'd started fishing more too. All that fishing was cutting into my golf time, I mused.
What the hell was I thinking?
Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. I'd wandered around a lot of New England's and New York State's most beautiful golf courses and discovered that I missed fishing. Because golf and fishing are both played out in gorgeous places, it's easy to fall in love with either one of them. I know that a lousy drive can kill a hole just like a poor cast can spook a fish and that in spite of that, there's always the next hole and there's always another fish.
But at the end of 18 holes, you count your strokes and that determines whether you've played well or not. There's no score in fishing. There's no last hole. I don't know anyone who's seen his or her blood pressure shoot up as a result of casting to a rising trout either.
