Sale Pending

[Ernest]

We put our home up for sale, and we have accepted an offer. The sale is pending. It’s a nice home, but we can’t afford to stay anymore.

We have our eye on another place. The house is small, but there’s just the two of us now. There is good ground for the horses, and for a garden. It’s closer to family and to my day job in the city. After the move, I’ll have to build a run-in shed, and storage for our machinery and our horse tack, carts and sleighs. But the costs will be less for the mortgage, for energy, for taxes, for the commute.

We’ll be moving to a place a lot lower in the watershed. Who pays attention to that? I do.

On Saturday morning the sky was overcast, and it was warm. I went to Catscratch Creek to fish through a neighbor’s woods. I took a 3wt bamboo. By the time the wind started to blow it was too late to go back to the truck for the 5wt, so I made do. I caught several little trout on The Fly That Will Not Be Mentioned at the flyshop in town. Then a nice brown of about sixteen inches came from under a bank and followed the fly. He turned away without hitting it. I had several short strikes, and began to question The Fly That Will Not Be Mentioned. I traded for a Red Horse Soft Hackle tied on a size 12 Tiemco 200. I caught several more ten inch browns and some little brookies, and then one fine and fat wild brook trout of a foot in length. It’s nice to see the brook trout come back in the creek, after several years of decline. In one of the long pools I had a strike from a nice fish, and I thought I had him until he ran upstream and went around a corner. This wasn’t good. I put on a little more pressure, and the hook pulled free. The fish had straightened the hook. It’s nice to live near a creek where those things can happen any day. In the afternoon it rained and I spent the time in my fly tying room, getting organized for the move that might come next month.

I’m grieving a bit about the prospects of leaving Catscratch Creek and its tributaries Little Prickerbush Creek and Cream Creek. But I’ll still be able to fish them sometimes; it will be just over an hour by car. And it will be an hour and a half in another direction to three large spring creeks and a lot of trout.

The house we have our eye on? I’ve never thought about the streams around there. There’s Bart’s River, a brown trout stream, and Sharptooth Creek, a brook trout stream, both about fifteen minutes from the new house. And there’s Liar’s Creek, which I could ride a horse to if the farmer will let me cross his land.

It’s hard sometimes to start over. But a big part of small stream trout fishing is exploration and discovery, and I'm hoping these new creeks will keep me busy.

[adam]

Whoa, that's a lot of working Doc. I'm too old for that. I can't even stay at work for 8 hours, I have to go home for lunch.

But I go to work, then I go fishing...