A familiar friend.

I took the opportunity to take the rod out to the place that got me hooked on trout. I spent many a day of my youth dredging through the river searching for the biggest and baddest fish in the water, and time and time again it was a 6 inch stocker Rainbow!! To say the East Branch of the AuGres River is a shadow of it's former self is an understatement, but every year it gets stocked with fish and every year the Steelhead and brownies come out of Lake Huron to spawn and run up to the "Good Holes" that us locals think that we only know about! (not true btw). But being a local does have its advantages, one being I know there are Steelies that run in there in September despite what everyone else tries to tell me and I know where they are! The river has been dredged changed and in some cases just plain ruined in my opinion, they have slowed the water and in turn warmed it, but be damned they are always there , just in less numbers. So as I walk the banks of this changed but familiar water i see a familiar friend across the river from me, a younger and less jaded version of myself who is so intent on catching that lunker he seems not to notice me. He doesn't seem to care that the river has changed and that the fish numbers aren't as good as they used to be. He seems so content that he is here and he is fishing that nothing else matters. I can see the hay scratches on his forearms and the sun burnt neck that you only get standing on a hay wagon all summer long, and the hand me down spin rod in his hands has no name linked with greatness or a dollar amount but rather a belief that in his hands holds the rod that will catch the fish hes been thinking about all day. I miss my old friend and I think I need to look him up and see if he wants to go fishing again. But this time I think I will follow his lead and smile, and be grateful that I'm in the water and not on the "hay wagon".  SMELL THE ROSES!

<((><
Jeff

The East Branch of the AuGres River.