Steelhead Swimming

Steelhead Swimming   By Capt. Tony Petrella              Morning fog was still lifting off the Pere Marquette River when I heard a hideous scream that sounded like the chattering falsetto of a wounded gobbler. It was high-pitched and pathetic. A combination of shock, anguish and humiliation. And it apparently was coming from me. The human bobber, in a river already laden with leaden chunks of ice on this stygian steelhead excursion, had spoken. Of a fashion.As the water rushed me toward the next downstream bend, I looked back, almost accusingly, at Harry Barnes. He stood on the edge of The Whirlpool and waved his fly rod like the calm conductor of a mad watery symphony. Easy for him to stand there grinning like the Cheshire Cat, I thought, he’s not the one being swept downstream! So, just to seem even more pitiful, I let out another yell…“Aaaaaaaaaaaagggggggghhhhh that’s COLD”   (or something perhaps a bit harsher) rose from the depths of my very soul as the ice cubes rattled around inside my brand new,  nylon lightweight waders, instantly freezing my chest hairs, defibrillating my heart and more or less playing the bongo drums with…well, I guess you understand. And there was good old Harry standing upstream, smiling and waving for me to simply stand up on the sand bar and walk out of the river. As if nothing whatever had happened. As if I hadn’t turned into a specimen from an arctic expedition. Cook and Peary probably would have considered my predicament a minor inconvenience. But I was freezing.Regretfully, I do have to admit that being a whole lot younger at the time and full of bravura if not brains, I fleetingly harbored the thought, after removing several gallons of water from my nether reaches, of staying there above the Basswood Run to look for steelhead.“How much colder can I get than I already am,” I reasoned. Until I stepped back into the PM and the water reached my, uh, waist. “Oh, THAT much colder!”              So, I did a sort of Frankenstein lurch to the water’s edge and wondered what came next, since my knees were pretty much frozen in the open position and simply wouldn’t bend. I looked upstream at Harry, hoping for some help, but he was romancing a hen and wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to my situation.“Think! You were a Boy Scout! One more merit badge and you’d have been an Eagle. So quit acting like a turkey!”  I guess I did a pretty good imitation of a drunken man trying to grope his way around a corner as I struggled to turn myself around. Then I flung my fly rod into the weeds and simply fell down onto the riverbank.          It actually was sort of pleasant, lying there looking up at the blue sky and puffy white clouds. The sun had burned through the morning’s overcast, and the temperature probably had skyrocketed all the way up to 35. Of course, my legs still weren’t working, which made it a bit inconvenient, but hey—what a great day to be on/in the river!          Eventually, my knees thawed enough to let them hinge, so I found my rod and Pinocchio-walked my way through the sloppy black muck that traced the river toward the Green Cottage access site. Being a wise and experienced steelheader, Jim Jarrett had expected that somebody would go swimming that morning and had thoughtfully left a spare key behind the right front tire of his van.          The heater was working overtime, and I was peeling off my sopping skivvies when I heard a thump. John Ecklund was leaning against the side panel with his face smeared across the window. “Llll-lll-lll-lllemmme in,” I thought he shuddered. His bottle-bottom glasses were fogged over, and water dripped from every crease in his coat. He looked so miserable I fleetingly thought he’d been shot.           “Not till you get out of those clothes!” I yelled over the roar of the heater, and slapped down the door latch into the “lock” position. “I’ve already been as wet as I plan to be. Strip down, then I’ll open the door!”           “I ha-ha-have whi-whi-whisky,” he said, almost pleadingly. Ahh!          Maybe it was the nip of Scotch. Or, maybe, to paraphrase that line from the movie Top Gun “we regret to inform you that your son is soaking wet—again—because he was stupid.           It’s like this. The bunch of us had finally decided it was time to leave the river and head to the lodge we’d rented in Walhalla. We were making the last river-crossing single-file when Howard Woodbury started floating downstream to a deep hole at the head of a small island.          Howard somehow got turned around and was facing me with a sort-of pleading look on his face. So, I inched downstream and stretched out my hand. At which point we did a pirouette that would have made a couple of  Bolshoi ballerinas proud and now I was the one heading for the hole.          Howard wasn’t about to be out-manned, though. “C’mere, dangit,” he yelled. I stretched out my arm. He stretched out his. Our fingers locked, and he pulled me upstream.          “Thanks, buddy,” I said, and promptly tripped over a log and fell face-first into the river, five steps from dry land. It got real quiet then. Real quiet. In fact, it was mostly quiet for the next 30 minutes during the drive to Barothy’s Lodge. Except for the suppressed titters of laughter, of course. <;((((((((((><Capt. Tony formerly covered the National Football League and National Hockey League for the Palm Beach Post and Atlanta Constitution. He now splits his time as a hunting and fishing guide in Michigan and southwest Florida. His web address is www.tightloopsflyfishing.com