Flyfishing the Guadeloupe: The Day the Fish Fought Back

Yesterday I took a trip to San Marcos, TX, to do some fly fishing on the Guadeloupe river. The river was clear, the light was that perfect late afternoon yellow, and there were thousands and thousands of drunk sunburnt tubers acting like assholes.

Then there were the Indians, who stood as living proof that while India is certainly a nation of fine engineers and doctors, they are not so much a nation of white water rafters.

They were, however, masters of scaring away fish.

I honestly couldn't count the number of times I heard, "Did you catch anything yet?" The same five words, a kagillion times. My response was the same every time, "Not yet." As it turned out, "yet" was the key word.

Right at about 5 o'clock the tubers left the river and all of the sudden, the fishing turned on.

This is the first picture of my trout and the last picture of my net. I took out the hooks, snapped this picture, and as I put my camera away, I lost my grip on the net and dropped it back in the water.

And the trout actually swam away with it. So this is like a $60 picture. At the peak of the trip I was hooking a fish about every other cast. The last trout I hooked into put up one of the best fights I've experienced. If you'd been hooked through the eye, you probably would have also.

My beautiful, 15" Rainbow.

As I took out my pliers and began extracting my hook from his eye (which he didn't like much) I got careless and one of the other hooks caught me under a fingernail. So there we were, both flopping around in agony on the side of the river, hooked to each other with six inches of leader. One of us may have screamed like a little girl, it gets hazy.