The other evening I was paging through Schwiebert’s Nymphs, admiring his hand-drawn color plates of natural insects, when the book carried me back to the Crnica, in Serbia’s Kučaj Mountains, and my early years of fly fishing.
Back then I was trying to become a better angler by reading everything I could find: books, magazines, anything that might help. Most of my catches were rainbow trout that had escaped from the local hatchery. I did catch some native browns, but the smaller rainbows were much easier targets for a young angler.
It was a beautiful spring day. The blues and greens were almost impossibly intense: a spotless sky, bright water, and tunnels of willows and hawthorns hanging over the stream. Rainbows held beneath the drooping branches on both sides of the main flow, and their eager, splashy rises were easy to spot.
On my leader was a brown Voljč-style sedge tied by Andrija Urban. My rod was rather crude for this lovely limestone stream: a dinosaur of a Silstar Composite, 8½ feet long and rated for a six-weight line. It threw a line well enough, though.
I cast the sedge just above the nearest rise, and my tippet caught on an overhanging branch. I tried to free it from a distance, afraid of spooking the fish. The fly stayed a hand’s breadth above the water, twitching in the breeze, right over the spot where I had seen several quick splashes.
And then came a small miracle.
The trout leaped out of the water and took my fly straight out of the air. It hooked itself, the tippet pulled free of the branch, and a few minutes later I was admiring a bright little rainbow in my hand.
None of the books I had read had a chapter on this. In all the decades of fly fishing since, I have never managed to repeat that feat.
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