“You really going to throw that thing?” our guide, David, asked from over my shoulder as I extracted the purple and grey ball of bucktail from the satchel-sized box that held my musky flies. “That’s the biggest fly I’ve ever seen!”
My thought was that by this time in the season, the fish had seen a lot of flies… but they’d probably never seen anything like the one I snapped onto the end of my bite guard. On the pause between strips, it looked as big as a cat. My fourth cast was ghosted by a musky well over four feet long. It followed below the fly all the way to the boat, but disappeared into the cabbage after I turned the fly into a figure-eight.
Even casting back-handed with a water load, the shock to my shoulder began to take its toll, and as the sky pinkened at dusk, I was looking forward to wrapping up the day with a hot shower and a whisky, not necessarily in that order.
“Let’s fish out this shoreline, past the downed timber and out to the point,” David suggested. “Just a dozen more casts.”
When we reached the point, he looked longingly at the next bay and the cabbage bed on the far side. “You’ve got this,” he said, full of encouragement. “Just give me another dozen casts… It’s the best part of the day!”
I reluctantly acquiesced, and my shoulder counted each cast. After the twelfth, I moaned, “Okay, that’s it… I’m shot,” and began reeling in my fly line. The fly had moved less than a yard when it was savaged and my rod doubled over from the weight of a good fish. It was large enough to do what it wanted for a minute or two before we brought it to the boat and into the net.
“Karma fish, if I ever saw one,” David said as he snapped a few photographs.
“Boy, that was lucky,” my fishing partner added.
“I’ve been shitting horseshoes since 1958,” I mumbled as I let the fish slip through my fingers and back into the lake.
