Last weekend, I taught Pnut how to make an anglers cast in our backyard with a fly-fishing rod. This weekend, we went and bought our state fishing licenses and headed off to a four-season area listed in our fishing guidebook for NJ. Pnut has done plenty of fishing of his own. After all, no Venetian islander hasn’t searched for cozze on the beach, sold buckets of mussels to tourists, dunked their hands for eels or dived in the lagoon to spear something. But watching Pnut discover fly-fishing has been a lot of fun.
I gave him just a teensy bit of advice on his first cast (listen closely to my instructions):
And about two minutes later, this is what he caught:
What you can’t hear Paolo telling me is that the branch is “like a fly cemetery”. Our little nymph may rest in peace with a nice view of the river and all the fish that shall never have a chance to bite it.
I was pretty much done for the day after this (did you see the SNOW?), and sat in the car with the heat on full blast for another two hours or so while Paolo embedded a few more flies in a few more trees. And rocks. And bushes. When he returned to the car his face was flushed and he was elated. He hadn’t caught anything we could take home, except Angling Fever.
Fly-fishing doesn’t seem to be a sport with any beginner’s luck quotient, but we did catch this beautiful sunset on our drive home.
sunset
