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Ice fishing for the day has ended two hours prior. I’m in the great room, fireplace is blazing away, over a dozen other folks I don’t know are seated about conversing. Dinner was as always superb. I’m in wool socks and pajamas, some other lodge guests are as well, it’s time to relax, be warm, and let my shoulders rest from holding my neck over the hole.
He asks where I’m from, and he is surprised I live as close as I do as he and his wife have flown from the East Coast to be here. Do you fish often? I ask, well what’s often to you? Several times a year is his response.
I say yes, then I fish often, raising my glass, swirling the beverage, I mention I like to fish three times per week, weather-depending, and in the summer, depending on my wife’s schedule even more. Without the least bit of reservation, I can tell he thinks I’m full of it.
I mention we own nine boats, we brook trout fish, pan fish, of course walleyes, salmon, when the winds on the big lake aren’t too bad and sometimes we drive quite a distance to fish with good friends, who reciprocate when they can. I take out my phone, show him all kinds of fishing photos, more of my wife holding fish than I, someday maybe that’ll change I joke.
He is amused.
He leans back in his overstuffed chair, says wow, you must really like fishing. I nod yes, then I say I like the fishing, I like the people I get to fish with, the ones I meet on the water, maybe but that one time, times like this, feeling kinda spoiled with one of the hosts amazing dinners, then sitting back, getting lost in the fireplace flames, thinking of fishing days gone by, and ones I long for. Yeah, I really - The Trout Whisperer
