Sitting here in my Wintry-March living-room, surveying the snowy moguls in my backyard longing for some open-water and wondering if this melt-off is going to gain some steam here, my memory kicks me back to early September 2011. Just a half a year ago, and yet it seems so long ago. People tell me that our kids' childhoods go by so fast and to enjoy every minute of this fleeting time. Man are they right!



The days still warm, but as the evening faded to twilight the cold and moister air rose up out of the lake. It was already a time of evening when most reasonable people are telling stories back in camp around a blazing fire. I am not a reasonable person. Never have been. It's just my five-year-old son and I. Rowing the boat down the lake back toward camp, each of us trolling flies of my creation that my son has named the Black Mamba just fast enough to be in motion, but not much more. The last evidence of that day's sun was just a fading ribbon of orange and yellow on the southwestern horizon. The daytime breezes had dropped to windstill, easy, slow oarstrokes but enough to keep me warm, despite my short-sleeves in the rapidly cooling air. My son had starting asking to get back to camp for some s'mores maybe 30 minutes previous at the far end of the lake from camp. If his mother ever found out how much past his bed-time we were still out here trolling... I had caught several nice enough fish, certainly nothing to write home about, but my son was still 0 - for something and fishless. He had had several savage grabs, but his attention waivers between grabs to a greater extent than mine and none became tight-line hook-ups, despite my digs on the oars to tighten the line when I saw him get grabbed. At this point he is Ishmael to my Ahab, thinking of a camp-fire, graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate, probably even his sleeping bag in the tent and he's becoming less and less interested in my blind-ambition to get my son into a blankety-blank trout if it kills us. Stars were starting to show and the water was now just blackness, but even without seeing it, I know the dropoff at the front of the little cove where our Black Mambas were about to pass and right then it hit me. That undeniably fishy feeling that tells you without a doubt that something is about to happen. The lapping of the waves on the shoreline rocks stopped and everything got quiet as if in anticipation with more stars and planets shimmering into life and my son's line twanged taught I popped the oars several good ones my sons flyrod pounding down and the drag I had probably set too loose spinning out of control line jumping off his reel in spurts his impressed "whoa!" and several deep splashing whops somewhere out there in the darkness and a fatty rainbow 2-feet long (didn't measure it, so sue me if it was only 23") eventually into the net. We said our ritual "'bye fishy" and slipped her back into the inky water.

Time for some s'mores...