The Ecstasy of gold
By Nick Simonson
It was one of those spring days we’ve had an abundance of: warm but not quite hot and just windy enough to make it feel cool. As a result, the river was quiet. The fact that it was midday left only me, following a long morning run that ate up most of the front half of my day, and a couple of boats scattered up the two-mile stretch I patrolled under clear blue postfrontal skies, propelled one way by the rising gusts and slowed as I turned back against them. All the while the click-and-wiggle of the perch crankbait tapped out signals
from the bottom of the flow: a slow drag when it hit the mud in nine feet, a hard tap when it found a rock or boulder in the depths, and a steady whir when I found water over ten feet. The afternoon wore on toward the dinner hour, and I sunk into the comfort of the captain’s chair, my bottom half dead weight following the morning’s workout. As tiredness crept in with the lack of action, I decided to troll the fi nal stretch before returning to the marina. In the chute that paralleled the empty shore fishing area where normally a number of anglers stood on cloudy days and those with more favorable winds, I cruised along feeling the bangs and bumps of the rocks piled below in the snaggier stretch when suddenly one of them pulled hard, and hard again. I stood up and lifted the rod. With the heavy bend of a fish on the line, I snapped out of my daze under the bright sun and strong southerly winds that pushed against the boat as I slipped it into neutral and spun between the current pushing down on the stern and the wind pushing upstream on the bow.
