Trout Dreams

You know the ones. 

It's morning and the camp coffee is in your hand.  You poured it from the percolator that is now beside the hat-full of fire someone started from last night's coals.

There's a light drizzle on and it is cool but in the dream, you're dry and toasty from the bed quilt at home. Camp seems the half-dawn stage between the early crew and the late-abed: the midlands of dreamtime.

You might stroll down the river lane from camp where one or two of your buddies are already on the water. Sometimes you hear them calling to one another as barking dogs in the distance. 

The river's surface is dimpled with the tiniest drops from the misty bits and fish are rising. Lots of fish are rising.

Your buddy calls up in a voice filled with smile that they're taking whatever it was you were tying last night. Your flies. They're taking just your flies.

That's a great dream. Sometimes I get to the river with a rod in one paw and a biscuit in the other. Sometimes, just the coffee. Still, great dream.

Size 17 Bear Paw Adams in the vise. The head on this one is off-sized because I broke the thread on the final wraps and had to remediate. I think the large head helps anyway.

He's bushy, floats like a cork, and trimmed below the hook gap sits nicely in the film from the beginning making a moire pattern which is a trick in drawing up the fish.

I love a good coachman -- the herl, you know -- but the Bear Paw Adams (tied with all the grace of a bear paw) is a buggy fly that worked fine for me three years ago and so is again gracing my box.

A guide friend looks at 'em and says "Kinda fat ..." in a restrained sort of appraisal. The over-sized hackle (hackle gauge? Pftttth,), tubby dubbing job, general displacement of a medium-sized frigate, and aerodynamic properties of a penguin are all elements of charm.  

His flies only ever look like the ones in pictures and he whips the bastards out even in size 17-18 with astonishing speed.  

The perspective of professional fishermen comes close to the fashion magazine effect: no woman looking at a fashion magazine ever feels good about herself next to those beauties. 

I say it's all the better those women in magazines aren't real. Like the ancient Greeks, we'd be pushing off too many warships from the shore in the morning to have time for important things. 

Like lazy trout dreams.

Prost.