Family, friend, fisherman.

[Squaretail]

My cousin Rusty here is a spinfisherman in general and like Ohio O likes to eat some of his catch from time to time. This nights menu was going to be fish cakes courtesy of this pickerel from Stony. We made a little holding pocket to keep him fresh while we put his spinning gear away and headed for Clarks.

As you can see, he has spinners where his flies should be but was willing to give flyfishing a shot that day and caught his 1st one in many, many years on a fly. Hopper was the fly for most of the day.

Always the good judge of character, it didnt take Chickie long to warm up to him as he did to her. The day just kept getting a better feeling to it as it went along. After all those years it seemed as though our bond didnt miss a beat and by the end of the day Rusty took 5 on a flyrod and really seemed to enjoy it. Between his 1st cast and his very last cast there was immense improvement.

Near the end of the day after a brief rain the fog settled in on Clarks like few times before.
A word of note about the man making the sillohette in this picture. After I went into drugs/booze and proceeded to alienate my family for over a decade he had a very ugly divorce situation and was sent with the first wave to Iraq. When he found out my mother was terminal with cancer he tried one last ditch chance at finding me, (probably illegal) and he did. If I can get through these amends I've been trying to make to my family, theres a good chance I'll never drink/drug again because the weights are slowly being lifted off of me. Though even 4 yrs clean and sober still isnt a gaurantee.
I'll never be able to thank him enough, and I'll probably never be able to look at a stringer of trout with the same remorse I used to. Its not always someone wanting to go home with a stringer full of fish while pounding his chest. Sometimes it really is a guy that just wants to eat his catch.