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48 °F Forecast | Road Cams Thursday, January 27, 2005 Today's News | Classifieds | Autos | Homes | Jobs | Tempo | Health | Community | Home Delivery SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics Tempo AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map SPECIAL SECTIONS Since We Asked Outdoor Journal Menu Guide How To Guide Wellness Connection Readers' Choice Real Estate Showcase Real Estate Guide Joy Magazine Homelife Magazine Wedding Guide Passport to the Rogue Valley EXTRA Newspaper in Education Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People Volunteer Opportunities Moving to Southern Oregon? MARKETPLACE Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Classifieds Place an ad eSouthernOregon Automotive Communities Entertainment Publications Recreation Calendar CUSTOMER SERVICE Frequent Questions Advertising Information Home Delivery Employment Contact Us Media Kit Network Affiliate Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Email Story to a Friend April 22, 2004 This type of cast is a fisherman’s nightmare Outdoors Commentary By MARK FREEMAN Mail Tribune The last Saturday of March wound down my winter steelhead season on the Applegate River, and I paid one final homage to it by not putting my gear away that night. That trip ended my steelhead fly-fishing in waders until the Rogue River’s summer steelhead in September. Between seasons, I miss the ambiance of river-soaked clothes in my 4Runner. I like to drive around town pretending to be Robert Duval in ‘Nam — "I love the smell of wet neoprene in the morning. It smells like fishing" — until the aromatherapy wanes and more acceptable senses prevail. So at 3:36 p.m. Sunday, March 28, it was time to call it quits on the Applegate. I rolled the back window down, reached past the marinating waders and over the Little League equipment for a fly rod that inexplicably wasn’t there. My best and most precious fly rod and reel were gone. I stood gape-mouthed in the garage, with images and sensations flashing rapid-fire from the day before. Advertisement The rod in my right hand. Hiking through the forest from that last, out-of-the way steelhead riffle. Sweat on my neck. River water in my wading boots. Cool. Dark. Reaching the 4Runner. Rolling down the back window. Dropping the tailgate. Putting the rod on the roof. Pulling the waders off. ... How could I be so careless? I drove away with my best fly rod and reel tumbling off the roof. And I knew instantly that I’d never get them back. My chest imploded. I couldn’t breathe. I groped around the garage, then throughout the house, hoping I had taken the rod out the night before and put it away. Nothing. Sometimes I put rods in my driftboat. I looked there, again and again, expecting somehow to conjure up the Sage rod and Orvis reel. How could I be so stupid? I slumped into the driver’s seat and headed upriver toward Applegate Dam, trying to make hope pound doom out of my consciousness. It might be there, lying in the grass at the trailhead ... no, it won’t and you know that, you idiot. This felt worse than when my dog died. I bought that rod in 1991, believing I found the perfect rod to forge my relationship with the upper Rogue’s summer steelhead. For decades, fall fly-fishing was relegated to wading only in the upper Rogue each fall, so anglers don’t harass spawning chinook salmon. But in ‘91, fly-fishing from boats became legal, opening the prospects for steelhead nymph-fishing. Though commonplace now, dry-line nymphing with weighted flies was an upper Rogue theory at that time. But I knew it would be the future, and the new rod helped start it. I settled on a Sage Graphite II — a bit outdated at the time and barely affordable. At 9½ feet, it was great for "high-sticking," or keeping as much excess line off the water as possible. And rated as a 5-weight, it was light enough to make any tussle with an adult steelhead memorable. I matched it with an Orvis DXR reel. More than a couple hundred dollars at the time, it had the best disc drag I could afford. At its lightest setting, I caught spring creek rainbows on 2-pound tippet; heavier settings could stop a Volkswagen, plenty of firepower for Elk River fall chinook fishing with a 10-weight rod. The combination proved beautiful. They made fly-fishing for steelhead from a driftboat in the fall disgustingly easy. One guy would row, the other would cast into pockets, behind rocks and along ledges, dropping Ugly Bug or egg flies right into the noses of the big steelhead that streamer-fly anglers never could reach. In the past 13 years, I caught more steelhead with that rod and reel than most people see in a lifetime. Then I just drove away from the Applegate without it. And no one would turn it in. Not if he knew what he’d found. Orvis doesn’t make that reel anymore. Knock-offs cost at least $300. Sage doesn’t make that rod anymore. Comparables now cost more than $500. Worse yet, I also had four spare spools for that reel, holding all the various lines I use for salmon and steelhead fly-fishing. With no reel body, the spare spools were useless. I was out of business. I reached the upper Applegate, turned down the gravel road and drove to the trailhead where the inexcusable offense occurred the day before. I spent 30 minutes scouring the area. All that proved was that human nature prefers the salvage laws of the high seas when it comes to ownership issues. Finders are keepers; every kid knows what losers do, and this loser almost did it on the drive home. Then I thought, wouldn’t this be funny if I got home and found the rod propped against the wall near the dining room table? I even bounded through the door like that might be true. It wasn’t. I told a few people what happened. Half laughed the if-it-was-really-important-to-you-you-wouldn’t-have-left-it-on-the-roof laugh. That didn’t help. I took out a classified ad begging for the rod and offering a reward, but I never believed it would work. I did it only because newspaper employees get free classifieds. It ran two weeks. I got one call from someone who recognized my phone number and offered a more sympathetic version of the if-it-was-really-important-to-you line. People said my face sank whenever they mentioned the lost rod. So we all just stopped talking about it. The ad expired a week ago Monday. That night, while sifting through a half-dozen phone messages, the unbelievable happened. I called the return number immediately. It was true. The next morning I met Rick Shields, the Jacksonville Cemetery sexton, in the Jacksonville Market lot. My rod dangled out of his pickup bed. He said he saw me drive off late that Saturday afternoon. A half-hour later, he almost ran over my rod in the dirt road. Shields took the rod home, told his friends that if anyone says they lost a rod that they should call him. Then a friend gave him my ad. "I figured someone would claim it, eventually," he said. "That’s an expensive rod." I gave him an embarrassingly small reward and we talked fishing for most of his lunch break. In 20 minutes, I got a lot more than my rod back. And at the end, we talked like friends. Then Shields stuck his reward hand out. "Listen, I don’t want your money," he said. "Take me fishing someday instead." Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life Opinion - Politics | AP News | Archives | Site Map E Southern Oregon | Classified Copyright © 1997-2005 Mail Tribune. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions Website Feedback ADVERTISERS A D V E R T I S E R S SPECIAL SECTIONS Auto Finder Job Finder Home Finder Joy Magazine Homelife Magazine Tempo Readers' Choice Real Estate Showcase Since We Asked Outdoor Journal Moving to Southern Oregon? Volunteer Opportunities Student Loan Consolidation Conference Calls - $50/Month Home Security Systems Trunks, Footlocker, Trunk, Footlockers