THE JUDGE

I received a little story from Peter Morse about a fishing client. Something to be learned from this :

His first message was one of frustration in trying to teach his client, a judge, to cast properly. This was followed by -

       Gordy With a lot of work I could get the judge casting ok, tighten up
his wrist, get some timing happening etc, but he would simply revert
to this flip flop slack line thrash the moment we encountered fish,
and then it remained like that. I think he was one of those guys who
loved the idea of being a "fly fisherman" - he had all the very best
tackle, a magnificent library and could talk a good game, puffed a
pipe and nodded his head wisely during fly fishing conversations. I
spent a lot of time working on his casting and I consider myself to be
a very patient and kind instructor with a good bag of tricks, but I
think in the end this guy just didn't want to get better, he was
actually happy how he was. But for some reason it drove me nuts that
someone could not be helped and did not want to improve his skills. I
run into it from time to time as I'm sure we all do - "I can cast
30-40 feet and that's plenty to catch fish".

The judge passed away last year. There's a little more to the story, we were 6 days into a 7 day mother shipping trip at the time, 6 clients, 3 guides and I'd end up with the judge most days - while the others caught fish we beat the water to froth, flop flop flop flop - it was a very frustrating week. I was the only guide with any real teaching experience and his friends wanted him to fish with me - OK for you to post it.

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Peter...

Sorry to hear about that. I take it he was a challenge to you even though often an exaspiration. We have all had teaching experiences which are difficult whether in this hemisphere or down under in yours.

By ending up with him, it tells me the others felt you could handle that situation well.

My old chief used to say: THE DIAMOND IS NOT POLISHED WITHOUT FRICTION; NOR IS THE MAN WITHOUT ADVERSITY.

We had an old Texas judge as a client at our fishing camp in Alaska. One evening he came back to the mess tent and rambled on about a huge salmon he'd hooked on his fly rod which ran down river and spooled him taking the entire fly line and breaking the backing knot. He went on and on about this.

All listened politely.

One of our guides was fishing a client down river from him and had witnessed a lot of hooting and screeching where the judge was fishing.

Minutes later, his client accidentally hooked something on his fly and upon retrieving it discovered that was a fly line attached to which was a large metal trolling spoon tied directly to the end of the line with no leader at all ! A small dead salmon was hooked to the spoon.

After the judge had finished his story that evening, the guide presented him with his fly line, spoon, and small dead salmon.

Surprisingly, the judge took it well and joined in the fun.

We hung that big ugly spoon up on the side of the mess tent with a sign which read:

TEXAS WET-FLY

Gordy