You’re awake. The beeping alarm clock stops just before your wife wakes up and glares at you. Your clothes are next to the bed for you to silently slip into. Lunch is packed on the counter near your keys and wallet. You’re so practiced at the art of getting out of the house that the dog doesn’t even notice as you close the front door. Some watchdog he is. Your normal friends all joke that weekends are for sleeping in and being lazy. You nod at this and say, “Yup” the same way you do when they tell you all about whatever professional sports game they watched the night before that you pretend to care about. Doing nothing is what winters are for and if you’re really honest with yourself, you’ll do enough of that when your joints give out in old age and you’re forced to sit and stare out a window at life going by. There are places you should be and bed is not one of them. A half hour later you’re ass deep in a creek mumbling to yourself about what to tie on. There’s a hatch on the water but you ignore it. This is Indiana and these are smallmouth you’re after. You look up from your box of streamers and poppers and scan the water knowing you’re right. They’re not sipping bugs on the surface like those goofy trout do.
The sun is slowly making its presence known on the water. The morning fog is quickly burning off the creek creating tiny little tornados. Let the world sleep; you live for this stuff. A few hundred feet upstream you hear a splash followed by a few more splashes in rapid succession. Bingo. Looking back at the box you grab a white popper and quickly tie it on while thrusting the box into your pack in the same practiced motion. You’re catching the tail end of the big ones feeding and this isn’t going to last long. They’ll move to deeper water as the sun rises. Checking the leader for rough spots you throw the popper just onto the rocks above a slack pool. This isn’t a bad cast, this is on purpose. A long time ago a friend was teaching you how to throw a popper into anything and get it out without snagging. He had years of experience fishing tarpon in mangroves. “You gotta be in it to win it, dammit!” was what he’d say over and over. “Cast into that grass on the other side of the stream. Wiggle the popper with slight movements, it’ll come loose. Trust in the popper to come loose and it’ll come loose.” “Cast under those trees... You gotta skip that fly up under them trees”, like it was the easiest thing in the world. It wasn’t, but it became easier with practice. You lost a lot of flies and blew out a lot of holes but eventually you felt it and when you did it was like a door opened up. Those sneaky fish that hide in the thick weren’t safe anymore. Now it’s habit to purposely hit things with your flies. Hit that rock and let the fly fall into the water naturally. Flip that fly off that branch and let it drop in the water like some weird looking baby bird falling from its nest. Skip that fly under that branch like you’re one of those shiny suited sparkly boat guys who look more like Nascar drivers than fishermen. It works and that’s all that matters, but you’ll be damned if you’re going to start caring about hole shots and weigh ins.