Ralph Rainbow

If we hadn't seen Ralph, a brightly colored rainbow of 16 or 17 inches, Asher and I would have left the Owens River content with a few bass we'd caught and a handful of other strikes. We did see him, though. In fact we saw him very clearly, holding in a current line where a spring branch flows into the Owens. He was right across the stream from us and holding steady.

If you fish much, you likely know where this is going and may have a similar story. Short version is that Asher and I spent probably 45 mintes of our day standing in one place and making short targeted casts to present lures to a single fish, which actually hit a Rebel Micro Minnow once and which turned on other offerings just often enough to keep us interested. I couldn't help but think about how pretty Ralph would look in pictures. In truth, though, the motivation to keep casting was much less practical than that. Being boys, Asher and I simply wanted to win.

We didn't win, and we left Ralph Rainbow sitting in the same spot where we first saw him. In truth, though, the game of trying to make that one fish bite might have created a longer lasting shared memory for Asher and me than if we had caught the fish. At least that's how I prefer to think about it!

#RebelTroutTrek

Useful Daydreaming

The line between my work and play has long been more than a little fuzzy, but lately it would be tough to separate daydreaming and doing my job. A few days ago I mentioned the Rebel Trout Trek, which my 10-year-old son Asher and I will be taking together this summer. Because summer lodging fills up early in many of those cool Western mountain places that we'll be visiting, now is the time to make reservations. Because one stop leads to another, I sort of needed stops laid our fairly well in order to start reserving rooms. Therefore I've been doing a lot of gazing at Google maps and reading about places like the Madison River, California's Eastern Sierra and various little lakes in the Colorado Rockies. And being pretty bitten by the trout bug, I can't really read about places like that without finding myself doing more than a little daydreaming.

Although I've been planning this trip for a while, and the whole route has been of my own design (with valuable input from friends who have fished some of the same waters) I don't think it has quite sunk in how many "bucket list" places Asher and I are going to get to sample in a few weeks. The river names are legendary. Madison, Big Hole, North Platte, Deschutes, Sacramento, Owens, Provo... Just to name a few.

Of course, I don't expect my bucket list to get shorter. It'll actually get longer because of the regions we'll see only quick samples of and the waters we'll pass near enough to learn about but not have time to fish. That's not a complaint. In fact it's a good thing. Next time I'll know better what I want to see more of, and I'm guessing it will be a more targeted trip back to one or two of the areas Asher and I will visit this summer.

There I go again. I'm more than four months out from this summer's travel, and I'm already daydreaming about the next trip!

#RebelTroutTrek