Tinker:
Last Thursday was the third time this year I've gone fishing. In or out of a kayak, three times, that's it. It's been Gale-A-Day windy down this way, non-stop, 24 hours a day, all year.
Obviously, the ocean was out of the question, but I was surprised when my mentor called and said there's a stretch of his favorite river (he's unnaturally fond of that river) where we could tuck in under the wind and fish for striped bass (his obsession with stripers is even more odd than his love for that river).
Neither of us had ever visited that part of the river, but from the highway, whenever I would pass by, it did look like one could slip in and find shelter from the wind, so I looked at the next day's forecast - marginal but do-able - and agreed we should give it a try.
A quarter mile downstream from the ramp is a deep pool. The river drops off to a depth equal to its width, and when we reached it, that's where I wanted to fish. I paddled down to the tail of the pool, reached for my rod, looked up and I was upstream from the pool.
"That's this?" I wondered, because the current sure looked like it was flowing downstream, towards the ocean, so I paddled down again, made a hurried cast, and before the fly landed I was fifty feet upstream from where I knew I'd find all the fish. Now I was more than puzzled. Sure, it was still a flood tide, but the difference between low tide and high tide was only a few feet and the wind was at my back. Surely the tide couldn't be causing all this chaos.
I paddled into mid-river, stopped, and looked at my GPS. I was going back upstream at 1.8 MPH. That's as fast as I prefer to paddle unless speed is needed.
We kept trying to fish the pool, but I can't call it fishing. Not really. In two hours I completed three casts. The rest were cut short while I dodged around trees and limbs, or back-paddled desperately trying to keep from ramming the bank.
Three hours into that misery, that other guy pulled up alongside and asked if I wanted to go further downstream. "Not really." But he made a good argument that, perhaps, the trick current was confined to this small section of the river, but even if it wasn't, we could paddle down a ways and drift back on the current.
It made sense at the time.
We paddled downstream, fighting the current, me regaining my senses and complaining about the idiocy of what we were doing, until we came abreast of a small tide gate. Aha! A side stream was entering the river, the water was deep - not as deep as the pool we'd left, but deep - and that could mean the fish were congregating in the area.
It didn't mean that at all.
Now, I like my tales to involve catching fish and absolutely no fish were caught last Thursday. I'd go so far as to say no fish were even mildly alarmed by our presence, so what's to report? Why write this?
Well, because a short distance from the tide gate, where the feeder creek entered the river, right there, were some pilings and I caught another one! It was a small piling, not up to my normal standards, but I caught the little devil nonetheless.
My streak continues!
Sadly, I failed to hook the tide gate, so my short, lucky tide gate streak was broken. It was an uncommonly small tide gate and I don't think hooking it would have been sporting. Still, continuing a successful streak is always gratifying.
I'll just have to settle for my mastery at catching pilings.