The Bucket Part 2

At first glance a hogline of prams in a chinook hole would seem antithetical to what most of us cherish about fly fishing. In reality, however, a hogline is both a practical and aesthetic advantage. A hogline of fly fishermen claims the hole for fly fishing against hardware and bait fishermen who's methods would otherwise make flyfishing difficult or impossible. The greater advantage is the real emotional support the fishermen give each other in the long hours between strikes. Good or even excellent chinook fishing is the slowest fishing there is; one might hook four or five fish in a ten hour fishing day. That's a hookup every two hours or so, sometimes much longer. If one were fishing alone, one would have to fish four or five hours before the difference between a good day and a totally dry hole became obvious. When surrounded by twenty other fishermen, good is very obvious because someone has always got a hookup, keeping the interest up and the adrenaline flowing. If nothing is happening, it is not happening for everyone. Time to look elsewhere. Also, someone hooking fish using a different sinking line or fly spreads the word to everyone. The crowd itself maximizes everyone's chance of getting a fish. But the best of a hogline is simply the conversation. In the dense air and small space, one can tune in on any one of four or five conversations, like a big party line. Most of it is about fishing or fishermen, some of it is very instructive, and all of it eventually gets funny. I settled into the tempo after half an hour, casting into the "bucket", counting down to 30, then starting a slow, hand strip retrieve. Every twenty minutes or so, someone would hook up, tighten with the left hand, then try to shrug his rod high against an unyielding weight, trying to discern from the tempo of the throbbing resistance whether this was a fair hookup or foul. Fair hookups, so the banter went, were telegraphed by sharply spaced raps from one position; the fish shaking his head in place trying to spit out the stinging fly. A quivering, running pull, often with an immediate jump or roll, usually meant a tail snag, while a straight steady pull, again often with a jump meant a dorsal fin snag. It was important, in the first few seconds of the hookup, to decide, fair or foul? Trying to fight a foul hooked fish might waste hours or more of prime fishing time and force one to release, even if landed, a good, bright fish. The first few seconds gave the best clues, so the talk went up and down the line went. With each hookup the lucky fisherman would hold his rod high for general inspection and his neighbors would speculate on the type of hookup.

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