My apologies for taking the thread farther into the weeds, but I told Jim a story that held him spellbound once too. It involved me standing on a rock after dark at the head of a pool in Spring Creek in north central PA on a night so dark I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. (The same pool out of which Joe Humphries had taken the then state record brown trout.) After playing out the fly line, practiced and memorized previously in daylight, something big and frightening took my Muddler Minnow fly and went tearing away in the darkness. I gave the fish its head while the reel screamed, and then "bink", the line went slack. Trembling, I staggered to shore, walked to the cabin, and cracked a cold beer. My favorite trout story, and it involved a fish I never saw or touched let alone landed. Jim sat there with his glass raised halfway to his mouth and just kept nodding.
