I wake early and cross cold wooden floorboards; my slippers are at my standing desk. The door to the fire escape, just left of my desk, doesn’t close all the way, so I’ve jammed towels and duct taped them in place in a losing battle to keep out the cold.
When I switch on the heater it says my apartment is 48 degrees. It’s a tiny studio on the West End of Portland, across from the 24-hour Cumberland Farms that emits green and orange light past the edges of my curtains.
There is nothing outside to remind me of water or fish, and yet at 6:45 a.m. on this particular weekday morning in late January, I return to my desk, switch on my lamp and clear a space amongst a cluster of feathers, flash, threads and hook packages. I clamp a 3/0 stinger hook in my vice.
I am not necessarily thinking of the pike pattern I’m about to tie, which is eight inches long, with pink tail feathers and hollow-tied bucktail around the collar. I am thinking, as usual, of fish. This particular fish, the one that is on my mind this morning, like most that stay in my memory, was lost. It probably is still out there, or, at least, I like to imagine that it is and that we might have another run-in.
It was mid-April. I was fishing with my good friend, Courtney, one of the few people I’ve ever met who enjoys fishing more than I do. She was on the front of my skiff, and I was poling through a shallow bay on one of the more popular Belgrade Lakes, the one a famous writer returned to and wrote about.
Pike tend to hate bright sun, so I was discouraged by our weather: cloudless, chilly northwest breeze, air temperature in the low 40s. High pressure. Still, it felt nice to be on the water, to push the skiff through areas where pike had recently finished spawning.
Courtney was sending long casts and retrieving her fly with erratic strips, working off winter’s rust, getting into a groove. She is a steady, consistent angler. The tail feathers pulsed and when she paused, the fly darted, lifted slightly in the water column — a perfect cadence to imitate a wounded baitfish.
The fly that moved best that morning was a pink one. Unimaginatively, we named it Pinkie.
As in, “Get pinkie a little closer to shore next cast,” or, “Man oh man, something is gonna eat Pinkie. She looks too good to refuse.”
Pike fishing in shallow clear water is a bit like hunting. We cover areas with prime habitat, searching, both of us on high alert, our senses attuned, watching the fly and for some shadowy creature following it.
The bay we fished would be choked with weeds by summer, but the weeds hadn’t yet grown out of the muddy bottom. Around the edges of the bay, gnarled bushes leaned out. On the bottom, old stumps and bits of bark were everywhere.
After an hour or so, we hadn’t seen anything. That’s pike fishing, we reminded ourselves. Long windows of quiet with the hope that something large will eventually find and annihilate your offering.
Courtney and I have little in common outside of fishing, but we both love it so much that we have plenty to talk about. She is easy company. I know she will fish until I have to leave and will never ask to quit early. I know she’ll keep casting without breaks, that I’ll have to remind her to stop for a few minutes so she can hydrate or grab a snack.
The pike I’m thinking about appeared after a long period of quiet. Courtney cast next to the gnarled bushes, stripped her fly to life. We both saw the pike around the same time.
I think I said something like, “Good God.”
That a fish of such size could materialize out of nothing was both fascinating and scary. There was the vacant bay and then, suddenly, a 40-inch silhouette stalked Courtney’s fly, hovering, watching. Five feet behind the fly, four feet, three feet, gliding slowly.
“Let her close the gap,” I said. Courtney barely moved the fly, pink tail feathers undulating. The pike closed the distance, got beneath the fly, gazed up at it, but didn’t eat it.
“Strip fast!” I said.
Courtney tapped the fly, pulling it away from the pike, and that’s when it happened. The pike lunged and opened its mouth.
Imagine a head the proportion of a football and the mouth opening and seeing the whites at the edges of its teeth and a pink fly vanishing: all that color, gone — like the lights gone out, like a power outage.
As if it had gotten away with something, the pike glided toward us, almost arrogantly, Pinkie deep in its gullet.
This all happened in a split second. Courtney stripped the line tight, the pike felt the hook, turned, raced off. Courtney let loose flyline slide through her fingers as the pike charged for deep water.
I hollered my encouragement. It was the largest pike I’d ever seen eat a fly.
Then Pinkie popped loose. The line had been so taught that when the hook jostled free it flew back toward Courtney’s face and she ducked just in time.
I can’t write what Courtney said at that moment, as it’s not fit for print, but let’s just say she was disappointed. I was too.
“I thought I set the hook!” she said, after a few seconds had passed.
“I thought so too. Everything looked good. It happens. That thing followed your fly for a long time. What an incredible bite!”
For a while, Courtney was inconsolable.
I hopped down from the poling platform. I checked the leader and hook and noticed that I’d tied Pinkie, somehow, on a barbless hook. Courtney was good about it, didn’t blame me — barbless hooks often hold true, but luck had not been on our side.
We changed flies, and I made a mental note to tie more Pinkies on hooks with actual working barbs. We fished a while longer, with no results. In typical Courtney fashion, she wanted to keep fishing, so we drove to another lake, tried an entirely new fly, and just before dusk she caught a big pike.
Still, all we could think about was the giant she’d lost, the way it tracked and ate her fly.
At my work station in my apartment, I finish the hollow-tied body of Pinkie 2.0. I whip-finish the thread behind the hook eye. Apply some head cement. I open the vice and hold the hook bend and admire the fly.
The heater has warmed my apartment, at least for now. Only four months until pike fishing. In a little while I’ll text Courtney. I’ll send her a photo of the new fly, which will send her tumbling into her own cache of memories.
I step back from the vice. I need to get on with my day, after all. But I know I’ll return, again and again, before the ice goes out.
Ryan Brod is the author of “Tributaries: Essays from Woods and Waters.” A native of Smithfield, he guides and teaches at the University of New England. You can say hello at www.ryanbrod.com.
