The Big Fish

Jack and Emily were little kids and Ben wasn't here yet when I caught my big fish. I must give credit to Emily. Without her I would have never caught the fish. Here is how it happened.

We were on vacation in the mountains and were fishing on the Pecos River by the lakes at Cowles. Jack was playing in the dirt under a huge tree by the river. Emily wanted to walk with me and watch me fish. Jack was about 3 and Emily about 6.

Fishing had been lousy. We hadn't even gotten a strike from the bridge at Cowles down to the lower lake. I continued to fish and Emily continued to follow with me around the bend in the river around the lakes. Hole after hole, still nothing.

We finally got to a place where the bank on our side of the river becomes a cliff. The grass and the trail were wet so I told Emily to stay where she was and not to follow me while I tried to climb up the trail and see if there was any holes that I could get to from the side of the cliff.

If Emily ever wonders why Abby doesn't do what she tells her to do, she just needs to think back to her own childhood. Just like Abby would do, Emily ignored what I said and followed me up on the side of the cliff. It was a 10-15 foot drop to the river and she would have been swept away if she fell. Kay Ellen would have killed us both. I had decided I wasn't going to bother fishing the hole because I'd had no luck so far and didn't want to leave Emily by herself. When she came through the brush up the trail, crying because I'd left her I decided to go ahead and try to fish the hole down below.

Directly below us on our little ledge was another ledge that was a foot or tw0 below the water line. It was about and foot wide and 6 feet long and then dropped off into a deep hole. I dropped my line in with the salmon egg bait on the ledge and watched it float down the ledge and into the hole. When it dropped into the hole, "Wham!" A fish hit the bait hard. I set the hook and pulled up. I could tell it was a big fish.

I told Emily we had a fish and it was a big one. We'd have to get it up or no one would believe us. After a few moments I had the fish up onto our little ledge. It was HUGE! It was the biggest rainbow trout I had ever cuaght and the biggest one I had ever seen. It had to be 2 feet long and 20 pounds. (Exagerations are allowed and even expected in fish stories.) I had nothing big enough to put it in. The little plastic bags we carried for the normal trout would barely hold its head.

I wanted to see if I could get another fish out of that hole so I tried putting a big rock on the fish to hold it dow but it just flipped it off. Finally, I had Emily sit on it. While she sat on it I tried the hole again but had no luck. I decided I better get Emily off the ledge and the fish back to the cabin.

Still, I had nothing to put it in, so I took off my shirt and tied a knot in the sleeve of my long-sleeve shirt. I then stuffed the fish down into the sleeve and it completely filled the arm. We carried it back to the cabin like that.

When we got back with it we measured it. As I recall it was 16 or 18 inches long and over two pounds. That's a big fish for the streams around our cabin. No one in our family (Gary, Gary Don et al) has caught one bigger up there, and it's all because Emily didn't do what I told her to do.