Strange twist on the one that got away

The first Friday of school's-out-for-summer deserves a good fish tale.

The story starts last Saturday about noon when Jeff Schmitt ambled from his
camper-trailer and into the cold, driving current of the Guadalupe River below
Canyon Dam.

Rainbow trout fishing was good Saturday afternoon: "It was the best weekend of
the year, warm and sunny, lots of tubers in the water."

The Guadalupe River is full of tubers, warm-weather partyers who float the
river each day in their innertubes.

Schmitt will leave the river to them for now, but in the offseason,
October-May, he and his wife, Cyndie, park their camper next to the river and
the Austin residents spend every weekend fly fishing for trout.

The story picks up at 3 p.m. Saturday, with the last cast of this year's
7-month-long fishing campaign.

Schmitt, a past president of the Guadalupe River chapter of Trout Unlimited,
was casting a No. 10 San Juan worm with a tandem No. 16 prince nymph tied 18
inches up the 4-pound-test tippet, or leader. For non-fly fishers, those are
very small flies tied on very light line. Both flies will fit on the face of a
penny.

"I had just sat down and retied (the knots) and let some tubers go by," Schmitt
said. "That was fortunate."

A few casts later he had a strike on the San Juan worm. The impact told him it
was a big fish.


Read the rest at

http://www.mysanantonio.com/sports/o...04.5D.strait.1
0b42b319.html