North 40 Fly Shop eMagazine August 2017 | Seite 54

Dropping out: Santella
breathes a sigh of relief and
gets set for the next rapid.
Dropping in: Chris Santella
takes his line and drops
into one of the Deschutes’
challenging rapids.
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Moments later Moscowitz is shouting,
“Right, right Chris, pull right!” But then
we’re in the hole, water breaking over the
bow, slamming into my chest, with more
rolling over the gunnels. An instant later
we’re banging into that rock. Finally we’re
spinning circles downstream, bouncing in
the white froth. Santella is chipper, even
laughing. Moskowitz looks like he’s been
locked in a freezer for three hours. I have
my hands in the cooler searching for relief. victim of rock, paper, scissor—I hand
Santella his rod and say, “Why do you do
that self-guided float down that super-
remote Alaskan river, in terrible weather,
every year, when you could get comped
at any posh lodge in the world (Santella
authored Fifty Places to Fly Fish Before
You Die and n now every lodge wants him
to visit)?” I continued, “Wouldn’t you rather
let someone else do the cooking and stand
guard at night for grizzlies?”
Moscowitz turns to me, wipes the river off
his face, and says, “That’s the first time
anyone’s ever gone into the hole and not
lost their boat.” Santella rubbed his beard, looked upstream
at Rattlesnake and said, “Nah. I like it wild.
I like to see what I can take, what I can do.
I like the challenge.”
At the takeout, while Moscowitz deals
with our accumulated toilet trash—the
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