Time To Get Back Home To the Home Waters

I'm home after our family road trip. That trip wasn't a fishing trip, and I haven't been fishing yet since I got home, and all the time I was gone I was thinking of my home waters and that last trip to the lake before we hit the road.

It was back when the heat wave was building, and the evening was a hot one...

I was fishing the damselator. It took awhile, but I found a fine rainbow that liked it. We had a lovely moment.

At dusk I switched to a muddler and fished the shoreline under an eagle staying cool in the heat.

I caught a fish.

And a fish caught itself. It took the unattended muddler as I was taking shots of the eagle. There was no movement of the line after the take, so I figured the fish was off. But when I picked up the rod again it was still on.

Alas, the fly was deep in its gorge. It was too deep to extricate, so I clipped the line and did my best to revive the fish. But unsuccessfully. So I retrieved the fly and took the fish home with me for supper.

When I couldn't see the eagle anymore I drifted the muddler back to the truck. I caught one more fish. It revived quickly and swam off into the night.

So I'm back home. Time now to get back home to the home waters.

Home Again

Thomas Wolfe wrote, "You can't go home again." Well, today I took the turtle home.

Jeremiah found him, just a hatchling, on one of our fishing trips last June, and we brought him home in half a pop bottle. We tentatively named him "Fi'ty Cent" because he was about the size of a fifty-cent piece, but we usually just called him "The Turtle." As in, "Have you fed The Turtle today?"

He's had a few adventures, as on the day he was set out on the deck in his pan to sun and he got out, took a dive off the deck--a good ten feet--and wandered around until I found him hours later under a bush, hot and dusty.

Now he's as big as a silver dollar, and old enough to take care of himself. So today I took him back to the lake of his birth and set him free right where we had found him. My hope is that instinct will tell him what to do, and that soon he will burrow into the mud and hibernate the winter away, emerging next Spring to the beginning of a long, happy life. I'm sure we'll look for him then, and that from now on, whenever we see a turtle at that lake we'll ask, "Do you think that's our turtle?"

He looked around for awhile, then toddled into the water, took one look back at me and went on his way.

Robert Frost wrote, "Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in." I think the lake will do that. Welcome home, Turtle.