Free Troutsmith by Kevin Searock Page A

Stream. Then I cleaned Duncan’s net by swashing it back and forth in the water and shaking it dry before folding it up and returning it to him. Duncan looked at me in amazement. “In all the years I’ve been guiding anglers on the chalkstreams, you are the first to clean my net before giving it back to me,” he said.
    The end of that week-long, week-short friendship was a sad occasion for both of us. We had shared so many moments of victory and defeat on the broad water of the Test and on the smaller, more intimate River Meon southeast of Winchester. On one of our last mornings together Duncan greeted me in the parking lot of the White Hart in Stockbridge. “I have a present for you,” he said simply, and then he gave his net to me.

Turning Back the Clock
    Would you like to be young again? All of us ponder this question at some point in our adult lives. The best response is probably “Yes, if I could have what I have now and know what I know now.” But it seems to me that, of all people, we as twenty-first-century anglers are in the best position to travel back in time and relive some of the events of our fishing youth. How different things would have been if only we could have fished then with the skill and wisdom we have today. Then again, maybe not much would change, given the limits of the tackle and gear we used in those early days and our limited opportunities to fish. At any rate, there came a day when I thought it would be fun to try and turn back the clock, both to answer these questions and to compare freshwater fly fishing as it was for me in the mid-1970s with how things are in my fly-fishing today.
    The rod rack on my basement landing bristles with the latest graphite rods fitted with racy-looking fly, spinning, and casting reels. But in that gleaming array of twenty-first-century tackle there is one outfit that looks as forlorn and out-of-place as Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. It’s a green Garcia Conolon “3-star” fiberglass fly rod that was originally eight feet long (now a tad shy of seven feet nine inches), with a Heddon 310 single-action fly reel attached, and it was a Christmas present in 1974. This was the rod and reel that I used to catch my first trout on a fly, and I kept them as a remembrance.
    Not much tackle has survived from that period. As a teenager I fished hard on a tight budget, and most items of tackle I had in the 1970s were lost, broken, or worn out and discarded long ago. Only the rod, reel, and an old Perrine aluminum fly box survive, along with my fishing journal for 1975–82 and my first fly vest (vintage 1976 or ’77). Every now and then, especially when I’m taking a break from tying flies on a dark winter night, I walk over and pick up my old rod, flex it, spin the reel a few times, and reverently set it back in its place of honor on the rod rack.
    My old green fly rod set a record for end-to-end damage that stands to this day. Somehow I kept fishing with it because I never scraped together enough money to replace it. I don’t remember when I broke the tip off, but the repair job was simple. I just biked over to the local sporting goods store, bought a replacement spinning rod tip, and glued it onto the end after cutting away the last snake guide and its thread wraps. The next snake guide had only half of the original thread wraps; the lower foot was tied on crudely with peach-colored sewing thread. This must have started to unravel, because at some later time I reinforced it with black electrical tape. Another snake guide was completely rewrapped, this time with blue sewing thread (and not a bad job really). I liked the nickel-silver ferrules, perhaps the only detail this rod shared with fine cane rods of the day. All of the original decals were worn away except for part of the Garcia crest below the stripping guide and three gold stars above the grip. The keeper ring had completely disappeared. A moment of