By Any Other Name
In the fading Deschutes canyonlight I'm sitting in my canoe chair, puffing on my end-of-the-day cigar, waiting for my fishing companions to return from their respective evening fishing experiences. My son Matt, now just 11 and taking one of his first fishing solos, appears as a rod tip poking air above the tall
river-fed sagebrush, then as a floppy brown Seal-dri (latex waders) baggy. The adult size waders are cinched right up under his chin, and belted tightly around his waist. When his face finally appears, I see he is smiling. He leans his rod upright againt a tree and flops into a chair beside me.
"Well, how'd you do", I ask.
"I got four good fish, two hogs, and broke off a really big one."
What did he say?
Fishermen, of course, are known more for their willingness to communicate than for their consistency or even veracity. From another person, on any other river than the Deschutes, I might
have more questions or uncertainty, but I know exactly what Matt has said.
Inevitably, we all develop code words to refer to commonly experienced phenomena, and fish are hopefully what we all have the most in common. How do we communicate to others (even other
fishermen) what we experienced in the way of fishing? And, better yet, how do we get them to believe it!
There are many ways to refer to the size of fish. One old school of thought was to classify fish by weight. When one reads Gordon in the late 1800's, or even Bergman in the 1930's, fish are consistently classified by poundage, a "two pounder", or a "creel of five fish weighing 12 pounds, the largest 4 1/2". It is a workable system, and has largely been retained for bass, salmon, steelhead, and other, mostly saltwater, fish. But somewhere in the last 50 years, trout fishermen began to relate the size of trout by their length, in inches, possibly as trout large enough to impress by poundage became so rare. Mostly in
print and conversation we now refer to the trout we catch as "a pretty 15 inch rainbow", and so on. The shift from length to weight occurs somewhere between 20 and about 26 inches, although there is an increasing tendency to refer to steelhead by length as well even above 30 inches. Why the shift there I'm not sure, other than one's insecurity about guessing the weight of large fish, especially if just caught. What is the difference in your mind, when listening to a story about a steelhead being landed,
in a "13 pound" fish and a "33 incher". The implication, of course, is that the fisherman actually
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