Willi wrote:


A couple years ago I was fishing a section of river with no one as far
as the eye could see either upstream or down. This young man sees me
fishing, pulls over and after suiting up, wades in the river about
twenty feet upstream of me and starts fishing.

at least out there you can usually detect easily and at a good distance
when someone drops in on you. in most of the places we hunt trout in nc,
because of the vegetation and configuration of the streams, it's tough
to know where or when folks drop in. we generally figure it out by the
sudden end in catching fish and by spotting wet footprints on the
streamside rocks and boulders. rarely do we see anyone actually drop in.

once, wally and i planned on an all day assault fishing trek up a
lengthy stretch of water we thought we could control almost to the end
if we started early enough. the creek ran through a deep ravine tough to
enter anywhere except where we started and where we were going to exit.
we got in the water at first light... at about 3 pm, we stopped catching
fish. we hiked upstream at a rapid pace, started seeing wet footprints,
and finally discovered two guys who had bushwacked from the ridge down
into the stream so they could fish back upstream to their car... same
thing we were doing, only we were making it a full day project. it was
tough to be upset with those younguns because we knew what they had to
get through in order to start where they did - we had done it once
before. they probably didn't know any better, but they also probably
didn't know we were below them on the water...and we had a good day
before they started catching "our fish" g. we were ****ed only because
we didn't succeed in our grand and painful scheme of fishing the entire
2-3 miles of the stream. we climbed out of the stream, sat by the truck
in very pleasant surroundings for more than an hour, drank cold, cold
beer, talked about silly stuff like harry crews and wally's years of
managing a band, and silently acknowledged our good fortune for having
those hours on a carolina mountain stream.

jeff