Photography and Fishing Go Hand in Hand

I truly love fly fishing, but to tell you the truth there are times when I'd just as soon take a good picture. What an awesome number of opportunities come along during a day on the water, fish (hopefully), water features, landscapes, bugs, you name it. If you wanted to you could spend a great day on a trout stream and never wet a line. But fortunately I won't get that carried away, just almost.

Its sort of a joke with some customers /guide clients who know me that I must drop at least one camera a season in the water. In a watery grave has nearly every camera I have every owned finally found its resting place. Not just the water either, I can lose it anywhere and in any fashion.

And the year 2007 was no different. I had an old friend of a camera, it was a 1987 model Ricoh digital, a gem in its day but a dinosaur compared to the megapixel giants of today. It was one of the first digital cameras, terrible at landscape shots but boy could it take some macro shots. Many customers would marvel at some of the close ups I could get with that camera. I loved it, but as I said before it wouldn't be long before it went down to a watery grave as well. And so it happened.

I had met longtime friend/customer Mike Workman and his son Kyle for a trip to the South Holston. We had spent several hours into some fine rainbows. Some of the 20" fish, so you can imagine how giddy I was in trying to get some photos. Mike's son Kyle, who is learning to fly fish, had hooked two giant rainbows earlier in a pool below where we were fishing. We carefully sneaked up to the next pool, waded carefully out into the water, and Kyle laid a near perfect cast slightly to the right of a very large, what appeared to be a 25" rainbow. The fish turned, cruised over, and ate Kyle's fly like it was the exact thing that it was looking for. Kyle fought the rish, I reached with net in hand, and as I went to scoop the fish.......kerploosh..........Mr Ricoh was in the drink. We landed the fish, admired it, I also had landed the camera at the same time. Full of water, soaking wet, I knew it was toast. And it was! But at least we landed Kyle's nice rainbow. Funny, I took it in stride and invested in a new Canon, which is fantastic. But before my new toy arrived I was out of curiosity looking on eBay just to see if by chance there might be an old Ricoh like the one I had, and if it was for sale. I did one search and click...there it was. It was up for auction, located in Great Britain, and just for kicks I put a small bid on it. Two days later it was mine. I never expected to win it on auction for such a low price. Sure enough, when it came it was an identical camera to what I had.

Too make things even more strange, I was up on the South Holston again with another client/customer Lynn Roloff, and she had a nice brown on, I bent over to net it, and kerploosh......my new Canon camera was in the drink. You would think I would learn! In any case, I took the batteries out, let the camera dry for a week, and it was good as new. A miracle! I just knew that I had ruined that new camera.

Did all that stop me from still taking nice cameras on the water? Nope. Funny, I get onto my kids for doing things like that all the time...................go figure.