Recently, we’ve discussed recording memories by taking better photos. We’ve also seen what makes a great fishing companion as well as memorable individual fish. But what really makes a fishing trip one to remember?
Is it just about the catching? Is it just ripping fish out of the water as fast as possible like some kind of machine, or getting the very biggest fish anybody’s ever seen? Or maybe it’s just a combination of those things … or, as the Grinch found out, maybe it’s just a little bit more.
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I was lucky enough to spend a week on the Nushagak River in Alaska. It was going to be a friend of mine and a couple of his old high school friends there. The first two days were slow as the fish were not in the river. I read two novels.
On the third morning, I saw a 35-pound king salmon jumping all across the river. This was when I figured out the purpose of this trip.
They had a gas-powered generator set up for the sole purpose of running a chest freezer they had flown in. Fish were slaughtered as quickly as they could be hauled in. To make matters worse, they could not speak a sentence without using the f-bomb as every part of speech — sometimes all in the same sentence.
It quickly becomes akin to being hit with a two-by-four. I was surrounded by shiny, silver, bright salmon and also subjected to the most ignorant people with whom I had ever been stuck. There’s no accounting for how many fish I caught. But it was unending torture — not a situation I would ever want to repeat. I don’t even have any photos.
Conversely, I’ve been on some trips in which I caught very few fish, or even none, but those indeed became memorable because they included one great catch. Such was the case in catching a wild 20-inch-long brown trout behind the home of an old friend.
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Then there was the huge largemouth bass I got on a 7-foot-long fly rod made by my brother.
Or maybe it was the redfish that is still the biggest one I ever caught on a fly rod while I was guided by another friend who in this case is no longer with us. (Side note: What do we do with the contact information of those who have left us?) Were those trips made better by the company? Most people would not consider a trip with only one caught fish to very memorable.
John Geirach once said, “Maybe your stature as a fly fisherman isn’t determined by how big a trout you can catch, but by how small a trout you can catch without being disappointed.”
Of course, once you say something like this, some wise guy has to be all tough and tell you how wrong you are, and real anglers only catch “Big Uns.” You know what? That’s fine for that guy, we all progress differently.
For me, I’d say that the answer lies somewhere in between. There have been the days when actual hundreds of fish were caught. Of course, there have also been times when nothing happened. I have had great trips in both situations.
What was the difference? It really comes down to the company.
I’ve been stuck in remote places with the worst company. I’ve also been fireside with good dudes after a long day and been exhausted after dragging a raft around a waterfall, knowing that the next morning would bring a good time with good fishing. I’ve been awakened in the middle of the night by salmon splashes next to my tent, and then I woke up everyone else, and we all tied into monsters.
For every trip to places like Alaska or Hawaii (big bonefish) there are dozens more with people we know and places where we are more familiar.
My father, Don Churchill, who was a huge influence on everything in my life, used to fish with me all the time. About seven years ago we took a golf cart onto an old, closed-for-business, golf course. We had a great time catching bass on fly and plastic worms. It seemed that every spot we tried had a fish or two.
It was a great day made even more exciting by my father catching a giant fish. When it jumped, it seemed to clear the bankside brush by several feet and made a sound like a canoe paddle smacking the water when it came down. Now of course, a fish like that makes any trip memorable. With my father being the one who got it and him not being able to fish at all now, it makes it even more so.
So it seems like our most memorable and meaningful fishing trips are those where the fish we caught may have been a factor, but more important was to have the people who matter really make it.
As Isaak Walton used to tell us, “Good company in a journey maketh the way seem shorter.”
That’s pretty much it.
