dragonslayer (CA)

 While most successfull anglers spend a fair amount of time extricating hooks from the maws of fish, the less fortuitous onces such as myself, find themselves in the embarassing position where we wind up taking more hooks out of ourselves than we do from fish.

While personally unashamed to admit that this scenario has been repeated with consistency throughout my dalliance with the long rod, my body wears the scars, like badges of honour, of many an ill directed cast that made its painful point felt in no uncertain terms.

As if predestined for self-impalement, the very first time I picked up a fly rod, at the tender age of eight, I summarily put a hook into myself. I was at my friend Calvin Peck's farmhouse and we found the rod fully rigged up in the barn alongside a Heddon bamboo spinning rod. Calvin grabbed the spinning rod and I was relegated to using this warped bamboo contrivance whose physical properties, when coupled with a moving line, I had yet to grasp.

There I was, under no adult supervision or guidance, madly waving this mysterious wand in the air trying to get the line out on a farm pond rumored to hold giant bluegill and bream. On the third or fourth cast the tiny fly flew upwards and alit deep into my eyebrow.

At first, the usual panic ensued and then, after the cussing and bawling stopped and an uneasy calm returned, we tried to remove it ourselves. Calvin, showing an precocious aptitude for torture at an early age, tried pulling it out from the shank but my skin stretched like an elastic band and gave me the impression that my eye was going to pop out of its orbital socket. I screamed but Calvin kept pulling and pulling until I punched him on the shoulder, pleading for him to stop. After a few minutes, the eye stopped hurting and we decided that the best course of action was to continue fishing, as nothing else could be done for the moment.

Calvin made me swear a spit oath not to tell his parents upon our return to the house, for fear that this would surely cut our weekend short, as we both wanted to wake up early the following day to try our luck again. We snuck into the farmhouse after supper, slipped by his parents who were watching television in the den, and repaired to his room. The fly embeddded in my eyebrow, a number 12 grizzly wullf, was only mildly disconcerting that night as I slept but it was swollen with infection the following day when my parents picked me up at Calvin`s house.

My mother was mortified and brought me straight to the family doctor who, after a quick local anaesthetic, cut it out with a scalpel, gave me a painful tetanus shot and then followed with a stern admonishment to always seek medical help immediately after sustaining an injury. To this day, I still have a gash in my left eyebrow to remind me of that weekend at Calvin`s over thirty-five years ago.

On another ignominious occasion, about ten years later, we were on a canoe trip on a trout lake high up in the Laurentians, near St-Jovite. There was a hexagenia hatch on and there were so many fish rising around us, gently dimpling the placid surface, that someone looking at the lake from inside their cottage would have thought that it had begun to rain.

We managed to land a few speckled trout and we were greedy and in a hurry to catch more before the end of the hatch. At one point, while trying to cast to a riseform a little further away than my comfortable casting distance, I forced the fly into my wrist on the forward cast and literally heard the hook sink into the bone. Thwack!!!

My hemostats struggled with the fly but to no avail and then tried yanking it out by applying reverse pressure using the fly line wrapped around the point of entry, all the while muttering self-imprecations for having done something so stupid and for wasting so much time during the heaviest part of the hatch, when the bigger fish were beginning to show themselves.

The fine wire hook had pierced a vein and withh every manipulation of the fly, it squirted tiny red rivulets of blood, just like you would see from a tiny leak in a garden hose. My friend, blood covering his face and shirt, almost fainted while I implored him to hold the hook taut against the surface of my skin while I cut it out with a pocketknife.

By the time it came loose the hatch was over and there were only a few remaining riseforms, which to this day am inclined to believe that they only came up to laugh at me. To this day, my right wrist bears a slight scar and the same family doctor, then older and grayer, stitched it up and scolded me for my persistantly ignorant attempts at personal surgery (``But Doc, you told me to get immediate medical attention!``)

One of the most interesting gaffes in my history of self-impalement occurred recently while pursuing muskies on the St-Lawrence seaway near Montreal. It was turning out to be a good day with one legal size fish landed, when a sudden gust of wind re-directed the double-hauled Dahlberg, on a fast action ten weight, no less, into the nape of my head.

While not quite buried in beyond the barb, the sharp hook was nevertheless firmly implanted in the base of the skull and required some gentle manipulation to loosen it before it could be removed. It came out quite easily after a few minutes and, surprisingly, there was less bleeding than on other occassions.

Now, when my doctor, as well as other who know me quite well tell me that I have a hole in my head, I can politely agree with them and prove their point beyond a shadow of a doubt.