It was just really bad luck. That’s what I told my buddy, after he showed me his fancy dragon fly imitation, and I gently rolled it around in my hand to admire it. And the eyes just fell off. Just like that.
He had bought it. It was an artwork. And now it was an eyeless artwork. His glare met with my shrug. What do you say? It was just bad luck.
We had bad luck that week-end too. Well, I did anyway. I landed just one small Rainbow, and that was on hallowed waters, where trophies and numbers are supposed to be the order of the day. I thought I had fished well. By that I mean I had gone off across the dam to interesting spots, and there I had tried inching tiny imitations just under the surface, and dredging the depths with something that was not much smaller than the canoe I was fishing from, and most things in between. I dropped tippet diameter for the clear water. I varied my retrieve and depth. I tried a pattern in different sizes, and I stayed out later than anyone, navigating the canoe trip back with the aid of the evening star and the silhouette of the boathouse roof against the moonlit night sky. But I must have just had bad luck.
You don’t read about that much in the literature anymore. It seems we haven’t left much space in the lexicon for lady luck. We have ousted the concept of chance in favour of complex analysis, in which we assume that every “fishing problem” has a scientifically valid solution. Reports of a day out from your fishing pal reflect that he slayed the fish on that new buzzer pattern. The fish just couldn’t leave it alone. (In reality he was out for five hours and he caught 4 fish on it.)
I can’t say I have had a pattern that they “couldn’t leave alone”. Not recently anyway. Maybe way-back-when there might have been an incident or two, where the cobwebs of memory are thick enough that I might be allowed to claim that it was “radical man…just radical”. And even then, the stretched story, even when diluted back down to reality, was in all likelihood just a visit by the banished Lady luck. But with Lady Luck being about as PC as an apartheid icon, we just don’t mention her anymore. She would be a little embarrassing. She would only serve to undermine the clear understanding that there is now good science that can explain both good fishing days and bad. Explain with comforting logic, which is heavily laden with the concept that we are in control, that with a bit of clear thought and a little observation, coupled with concentration on what the sage on the stage said, we could have cracked it. We will next time, we tell ourselves. We will fish better.
The next morning something in my soft scramble egg went crunch as I bit down on it, and it hit the sensitive spot on a left tooth, and hurt. I don’t know how something hard got in there. It must have just been bad luck.
Or maybe it was two dragonfly eyes planted in there by some mean spirited bastard.