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The most familiar of all fisherman's greetings came from the boat across the river:

"Catching anything?"

The answer was no, and Nathaniel and I weren't terribly confident about that changing. We were fishing new water and a river I new little about, except that trout were stocked in it during the winter - and it didn't look very "troutish" as far as we could see. We'd fished a half hour or so, both from the bank and by wading, and hadn't had a strike.

I told the friendly inquirer that we'd never been there before, so we were somewhat clueless.

He pointed downstream and directed us to follow the riverside path to the rapids. "You should catch them there," he said confidently. "They stocked three days ago."

Armed with that information and knowing our afternoon time was short, we immediately offered our thanks, stepped out of the stream and followed the footpath, peeking through the woods periodically until we spotted shoals instead of a flat river.''

The first fish came on Nathaniel's first cast into the more interesting looking section of river, and we ended up catching about 10 and missing about as many in maybe an hour or so of fishing.

I'm thankful for the other fisherman's help because the shoals were farther downstream than I probably would have ventured without knowing they were there, and that definitely was where the fish were concentrated.