The Second Step

So much for patience.

The day after the dock went in the call of the river proved to be too great. I loaded up my cataraft and headed up river for a nice six hour float ending at our dock at Beaver Creek.

Five minutes into my float I spied this Hawg Nose lure stuck on the bank. Hey, this is going to be a great day.

For the next hour I continued to find fishing lures and not much else. It wasn't until I walked a gravel bar that I found the Holy Grail of river salvaging. That, my friends, is a bona fide RL anchor. My good fortune is due to the previous owner not fastening the chain correctly, or tying an inferior knot. Either way, finders keepers, losers weepers.

With the anchor firmly secured to the back of my cataraft, my adventure continued. Just around the bend this shiny object caught my eye. That is an Abu Garcia 5500 reel attached to an 8 1/2 foot Berkeley rod. Not a bad follow up to the anchor.

This find made me a little sad. My guess is a child was fighting the largest pink ever and the rod was pulled out of their hand and fell to the bottom of the river. I base this theory on the fact that the line was snapped just above the reel (as the fish swam away with the gear, it eventually got hung up on the bottom and the line snapped). If there were a bunch of line out, the little angler would have either dropped the rod when casting, or it was caught on a snag and the child was unable to hold the rod and dropped it into the river. If any of you CSI types have a different theory, let me know in the comment section.

This is the final haul of what I kept. A first for me, and perhaps not that unusual, was finding a golf ball (just to the right of the anchor). I guess a person can have a hobby other than fishing...




Beaver Creek Cabins & Guide Service