FISHING STORIES: Last week we asked readers to share their favorite fishing stories, and we’ve gotten a few. This one is from Bill Robertson, who lives in Duke Center and has written novels about the Bucktail Regiment and local ghost stories along with short stories, poems and magazine articles.
The story goes back a few decades and features his cousin, Wade Robertson, who also grew up to be a writer of hunting and fishing stories.
Here is Bill’s yarn, titled “Lucky.”
When my cousin, Wade Robertson, and I were in high school in 1965, we stayed at his grandfather’s camp out Pine Run for a weekend of trout fishing.
On Saturday, we fished up Lynn Valley that flows into Sugar Run, and I caught my first limit of eight native brookies, a real milestone in a young angler’s life. My luck ran good the second day, too, but in an unexpected way!
On Sunday, we decided to try the Pine Run stream within walking distance of camp. The creek was full of oil in those days, and all the rocks were slick with it. The trout were plentiful, though, and fun to catch, even if we couldn’t eat them. Mostly, native brook trout inhabited the stream, but I was fortunate enough to hook into an 11-inch brown that thrashed and ran deep, bending my fly rod double. When I finally hauled the monster up on a sandbar, my eyes bugged out of my head like hardboiled eggs.
The mosquitoes were also plentiful in the hemlock woods surrounding Pine Run, and I splashed a liberal dose of OFF! repellent on my neck and hands before putting the bottle in my back pocket. Then, I headed off downstream in pursuit of more brownies.
After hooking a white worm through the collar, I cast it upstream and let it float enticingly down a deep rock hole. A black streak flashed out from beneath an undercut bank, and I was fast to another nice trout.
To better land the fish, I leaped onto a bankside rock. That turned out to be a bad decision when I slipped on its oily surface and fell flat on my be-hind. Immediately, there was a loud crack as the bottle of OFF! broke into a million pieces!
Yelling for Wade, I stood up and loosened my belt. Reaching inside my pants, I expected my hand to come back covered with blood. When no blood dripped from my fingers, I let out a whoop that rattled the coffins in Lafayette Cemetery. Wade examined the back of my jeans and said that the bottle had ripped outward, completely shredding the pocket.
Then, he flashed me a wry smile and chortled, “Sometimes, Bill, it pays to be a lucky leather butt.”
