Page 61 - ELITE PLUS MAGAZINE VOL11

Sadly, I had not prepared any tiny artificial bait. I had only large spools and spinners together with the live fry bought earlier. Due to the size of a trout, which had to be at least 15 inches, or 38cm, long to be caught legally, who could have imagined that the fish would not take the bait.I chatted with the squat old man for a while. He had dressed as raggedly as me. In addition, his rod had been roughly taped where it had broken. When I asked where he came from, he told me he was from Elmira, a small town 50km from Cornell. As he was this old, I asked him why he drove so far for fishing. He laughed heartedly.“My wife likes to shop in Ithaca. I’m too lazy to wait for her so fishing helps kill the time.”The sky was quickly getting dark, as was normal for the current season. From now until the end of winter, the sun would set early, at 4pm. I looked up at the sky with a feeling of blame, then drove my old Chevette back home. Along the 11km journey, I was absorbing the bitter taste of defeat.I pondered during the night whether to put all the gear away and come to the end of my fishing season. I kept asking myself what I was doing wrong – why I could not catch any fish. What was missing? We had been fishing at the same spot. The lures were almost the same. I even had live bait. The others got fish ... but not me. If no one could catch the fish, maybe the fish did not like the bait. But on a day when the rest had caught fish in front of me, did it mean that I was stupid or unfortunate?It was something I could not explain, feeling a mixture of embarrassment, pain and anger. I felt like a scrap of food in the bin. Finally I arrived at the conclusion that I would not surrender. Everything that had happened was not a result of my incompetence but continuous misfortune. It was a challenge, and I would not give up. If we never fought, we would never succeed. I had to persist in my hunt for the trout no matter how cruel the cold.Amid this restlessness I suddenly sensed my vitality returning to me again.On the next day, the 7th of November, I got up at a little past 6am and rushed to buy seafood from a truck coming from Maine that opened up shop every Friday. My wife had noted down a list of what she wanted and what our neighbours had asked us to buy for them. At 8 o’clock I scraped off the ice covering the windscreen, as I had to drive out of the city.The weather forecast announced that it would rain in the late evening. The hand of the barometer had fallen and remained there for days. The sky was dark and covered with black clouds that eclipsed the sun. I had prepared a few small spinners. While driving, I kept telling myself not to return home without catching some fish today.A man was fishing in a corner of the pond. I said a few words in greeting, as was part of the local fishing etiquette. After that I coiled the spinner and cast away. On the second cast, the spinner caught on a rock as I tried to drag the line slowly across the bottom and stir up as much sediment as possible. The 4-pound (1.8kg) line snapped as I tried to pull the spinner out. I reset the line with new bait and cast again. Less than three casts later, it caught on the rocks and snapped again. In almost three hours I lost half a dozen spinners and spools without catching any fish. Most of the good lures were lying under the water.While I was smoking to ease stress, the man cast his rod with all his strength and called out that he got a big fish. I grabbed the net and within a few seconds helped him scoop out a huge trout. It was 11 o’clock already so I hurriedlyElite+ 59