My introduction to and love for fishing came from another father figure in my life. Grandpa. My maternal grandfather was my hero. Grandpa lived in a double-wide on a half-acre just upstream of Pinantan Lake outside Kamloops.
He was a man’s man. He played hockey for the Portland hockey team and won an NHL arm wrestling contest. For a 10-year-old boy who loved sports and the outdoors, no one could compete with Grandpa as the arbiter of cool.
One morning at breakfast, Grandpa brought out a battered leather wallet populated with a half-dozen small, rusty lures. He pulled them out, one at a time, each reveal accompanied by a fish story about some monster he had landed with those tarnished miracles. I was hooked immediately.
With Grandpa as my gillie, I plunked the spoon into the holding water, as Grandpa explained where the fish might be hiding. I cast, a few feet. I reeled, also a few feet. And I hoped. Oh, how I hoped.
Though I didn’t know the expression at the time, the tug is the drug. The first rainbow I connected with was six inches of raw power. I can still feel that tug to this day.
Grandpa passed away shortly before his 85th birthday. He had gone for a morning walk, come home and done his daily 50 pushups, when an aortic aneurysm took him. He taught me to fish, and he shaped my life in ways for which I will always be grateful.
As an adult, fly fishing has become my passion. But my memory of one tiny, speckled rainbow, caught on a spoon in an unnamed creek outside Kamloops, with Grandpa crouched over my shoulder, will always be my favorite.
Thanks, Grandpa.
– Dwight J. | Vancouver, BC
