unidentified fiberglass, the grain showing in the butt section, stipled with wear. His reel was vintage Pfleuger Medalist 1498. His line was simply green and worn. Bill himself was shorter than I had imagined, compact and hard. His face was leather tan weathered. I remember his hands mostly, calloused and bulky, with that look of hands that have been so continually wet and cold that they lost that particular sensation a long time back. Bill's casting was solid and workmanlike. He just got the fly where he wanted it, and sat down for his retrieve, drawing the line delicately between coarse fingers. Within minutes Bill was the center of conversation as people asked him where he had fished yesterday, the day before, how it had been, etc.. Then the talk ranged to other rivers, the Chetco, the Rogue, the Klamath, the water level, the state of the fall run. Then someone asked Bill whether Bill still had his old green truck, and there followed a hilarious conversation in which Bill explained how he had gotten 175,000 miles out of one set of spark plugs. All the while people periodically hooked fish, and usually lost them early. Don hooked another, eventually landed this one too, and tied it off to the gunwale of his pram. It was too big to comfortably get in the boat, about 35 pounds. Through the morning incoming tide the water level in the hole was rising, though the current never reversed to upriver, and the wind came up. As arms got tired, casts drifted lower, endangering neighbors. There is a fine art to throwing a head, especially a lead head, and an even finer art to doing it in a crowd. One could, by watching up and down the line, discern a number of different casting styles, some of them impressively efficient, never lowering to within 10 feet above the line of heads. The best of these could really be called unconventional, almost a fluttering steeple cast. My own technique was snappier, flatter, more a distance, wind defeating style, though distance was not a major issue here and there was no headwind. I was feeling pretty cocky about it until I buried my fly in the shoulder of Bill's jacket. "He doesn't take kindly to being hit by a fly," Don had specifically warned before Bill had arrived. "Opps, ahhhh... sorry about that." No harm was done, but the possibilities of 2/0 hooks, heavy shooting heads, and exposed human heads was obvious. Bill took it in stride, laughing it off, but did start sitting down whenever I began to cast. It was a modest vote of no-confidence, but I deserved it.
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