The $340 Setup That Lost to a Kid’s Paw Patrol Rod

This Keeps Happening

It wasn’t the first time. Two years ago my cousin Mike came to visit from Chicago. Mike had fished exactly once in his life, at a stocked pond at a company picnic. I took him to my best smallmouth spot, the one I don’t even tell my fishing buddies about because it took me three summers of walking the river to find it.

I handed Mike a spinning rod with a tube jig already tied on. Showed him where to cast. Told him to let it sink three seconds and reel slow.

First cast. Three-pound smallmouth.

Not a dink. Not a rock bass that felt heavy for a second. An actual, honest-to-God football of a fish that smashed the tube so hard Mike almost dropped the rod.

I caught one fish that afternoon. It was eight inches long and I didn’t take a picture of it.

Last summer my wife’s friend Sarah wanted to try fly fishing. She had seen A River Runs Through It once. I spent thirty minutes on the lawn teaching her a basic roll cast, which she performed like she was trying to kill a snake with a garden hose. I figured we’d walk the river a bit, she’d get bored, and I’d fish for real after she left.

Her third actual cast landed a dry fly, a size 16 Elk Hair Caddis that I tied myself by the way, about four inches upstream of a cutbank. The drift was terrible. The fly was dragging like a water skier. A brown trout the color of a copper penny shot out from under the bank and ate it anyway.

She held the rod up like it was on fire and the fish stayed on. Fourteen inches, wild brown, released. She handed me the rod and said, “That was fun. Do you want to go get lunch?”

I had been working that river for two years without catching a brown trout out of it.

The Gear Is Not the Problem

I know guys who own fly rods that cost more than my first car. Their vests look like military surplus. They have spools of tippet organized by diameter in little plastic boxes, leaders sorted by length, fly boxes arranged by insect stage. They can name every mayfly species on the river and tell you which one is hatching based on the air temperature and the phase of the moon.

Half of them get outfished by teenagers with a Zebco 33 and a can of corn.

I should know. I was one of those guys. Still am, most days. The difference is that now I’ve accepted it enough to write about it, which is progress, I guess.

Here’s what I think is actually going on, after spending way too many hours thinking about it while not catching fish.

Beginners and kids have two things that experienced anglers have talked themselves out of. The first is luck, obviously. But luck isn’t random. Beginners put baits in stupid places because they don’t know any better, and sometimes stupid places are exactly where the fish are. The second thing is focus. A kid with a bobber is watching that bobber with the intensity of a hawk because nobody told him he’s supposed to be watching his line, reading the current, checking his drag, adjusting for depth, and mentally cycling through four retrieve patterns all at once.

I’ve spent so many hours on the water that my brain is running about six layers of fishing theory simultaneously while I cast. Mend here. Let it swing there. The water is a little fast for a dry fly, maybe switch to a nymph, or actually a soft hackle in the seam, wait is that a rise in the tailout, do I have the right size on, should I re-tie…

Meanwhile a nine-year-old with a Paw Patrol rod is staring at one thing and one thing only, and when it moves, he sets the hook.

The Day I Figured It Out

It was a Tuesday in June. I had the day off and the river to myself, or so I thought. Water was perfect. Slightly tinted from a rain two days prior, not blown out, flowing at maybe 350 cfs on the gauge. I rigged up a double nymph setup under an indicator and started working a run I knew held fish.

Two hours. Nothing. Not a bump, not a splash, not a refusal I could see. I changed flies four times. Adjusted the indicator depth. Switched from 5x to 6x tippet because maybe the fish were picky. Moved upstream. Moved downstream. Fished a seam. Fished the soft water behind a boulder. Fished the riffle at the head of the pool.

Around noon I sat down on the bank to eat a sandwich and saw a guy walk past with a spinning rod and a five-gallon bucket. He nodded. I nodded. Five minutes later I heard a splash and looked up. He was pulling a rainbow out of the same run I had just spent two hours on.

I watched him catch three more in the next twenty minutes. Worm and a splitshot, under a bobber, drifting through the same water my size 18 Pheasant Tail had floated through forty times without a sniff.

When he walked back past me with his bucket dripping, I asked what he was using. He showed me a container of nightcrawlers from Walmart.

“They been hitting these all morning,” he said.

I had Pheasant Tails. Copper Johns. Hare’s Ears. Prince Nymphs. Three colors of mop fly. A CDC emerger I paid seven dollars for at a fly shop in Montana.

The fish wanted a worm.

That’s the whole thing, right there. I had spent so much energy trying to outsmart the fish that I forgot the most basic rule of fishing: give them what they want, not what you want them to want. The guy with the bucket wasn’t a better fisherman than me. He just wasn’t making it complicated.