I’d like to take guide credit. After all, I had told my daughter Sarah where to stand and cast when her first rainbow trout bit. That’s not the whole story, though.
The truth is that I’d been picking promising looking runs and suggesting casts for a few hours, and had basically given up hope on connecting her with a trout that day. We were fishing a heavily stocked section of the Tallulah River, so I’d begun the morning with high hopes, but the trout didn’t seem as plentiful or willing as they sometimes are.
Sarah didn’t mind. She was having a grand time exploring the river gorge and was at least as interested in wildflowers and ferns as she was in catching fish. And as much as I wanted her to experience a trout catch, I tried not to dwell on that because I didn’t want to take away from her experience.
The cast that finally produced was an afterthought, and a fish was not the objective. We were about to call it a day when I noticed that the run beside us was pretty. As an outdoor writer, I wanted a photo of Sarah casting there. So I pointed to the cast that would be good for my photo and stepped up onto a higher rock for a better vantage.
Sarah cast a Rebel Crawfish right where I’d pointed and started reeling and immediately hooked up! A moment later she was lifting a rainbow trout out of the river and swinging it over the rock she was standing on.
The trout flopped out of my hands and back into the river when I unhooked it, so we didn’t get a good photo, and I completely forgot about the photo I had in mind.
She caught her first trout, though, and I did at least get an unspectacular photo of her fighting it. After that, we really did pack it up for the day. That day was more than 20 years ago, but I think I remember it all fairly accurately!
Fishing on Foot 