The Troutbitten Podcast, Episode 10, is now available everywhere that you find and listen to your podcasts.

** Note **  The Podcast Player is below. The full story of “The Kid ”  is also published below.

Way back in 2014, I started Troutbitten as a way to document all of this for my two sons. I wanted a record of the fishing stories and the things that I’d learned about trout fishing over the years. Really, that was the goal. Those were the roots of Troutbitten.

My boys have been part of my fishing life since their beginnings. They’ve been out there with me since they were born. I was a daytime Dad, and I worked at night. So the boys and I spent many, many days hiking beside rivers, eating lunch streamside and casting into moving water. My goal has always been to give them a base of appreciation for the outdoors and to feel comfortable in nature. Of course I hope they keep fishing with me as they grow older, but if nothing else, they will always have the sounds of a river embedded deep in their memories.

In this tenth podcast, we’re changing things up. I read a story that I first published with Hatch Magazine in 2016. It’s titled, The Kid, and it’s one of my favorites.

Question and Answer Round

• Joey, what’s your favorite way to catch trout?
• Aiden, what do you like best out there, besides the fishing?
• Joey, what’s the best way to get a kid into fishing?

From Podcast Listeners:

• Does the clinch knot for connecting the leader to the fly line loop cut into the fly line?
• Has their ever been a time when you wanted to quit fishing? How’d you get through it?
• What’s the next step for Troutbitten? Have you ever thought about starting a fly shop?

Listen with the player above, or . . .

Find the Troutbitten podcast on all of your favorite services: Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc.

Resources

READ: Troutbitten | Category | Fishing With Kids
READ: Troutbitten | Born to Fish Big
READ: Troutbitten | Legendary
READ: Troutbitten | The Twenty Dollar Cast
READ: Troutbitten | Fishing With Kids — The Independence Marker
READ: Troutbitten | Loop to Loop is Bad — Try Attaching Your Leader This Way

The Kid

The kid was ten years old and small for his age, but his legs were strong and he waded without fear. He fished hard. We shared a passion and a singular focus, so I enjoyed having him on the water. He stood just tall enough not to lose him in a field of goldenrod, and he weighed less than the family dog. But like the shepherd, he was sturdy, tough and determined, with unwavering perseverance keeping him focused during the inevitable slow days with a fly rod.

He only talked of fishing. It was safe to assume that his conversations carried more variety with others, but the kid and I rarely strayed from the devotion. Trout and how to catch them. We chased wild browns and stocked bows across every lick and run in the county — every piece of water that was cold enough to hold trout and small enough for the kid to remain upright in a moderate side current.

In truth, he fell in or went over his hip boots nearly every time we fished. Ambition tended to outweigh reason, and the pocket water off the far bank often seemed fishier than what was on the near side of the midcurrent. After many falls, I’d watch him climb back out of the river to find a suitable log, take a seat with a chuckle and proceed to dump the water from his boots before ringing out his socks and redressing. But the kid was efficient, and I admired that.

Brook trout streams were our favorite. It was the size of water he could manage. And I found, in the kid, a friend that would walk for miles for small fish and abundant scenery. He intuitively understood that the fishing was somehow secondary — that the walk would make the memory.

He tied flies that looked like hell, but I never mentioned it, because they caught fish, and it made him smile. So that was enough. The kid’s ideas about how to catch a trout were amusing to me at first, but I soon learned restraint in offering any advice. Instead, I was instructed by watching his instincts with a fly rod — which often outperformed all the things that are supposed to work.

He was the most dependable fishing partner I’ve ever had. With the unbound freedom of a ten-year-old’s short list of responsibilities, he was always available, would always fish and never folded plans. Conditions didn’t matter. On one rainy, cold, November day, with holes in his patched rubber boots, with frozen hands, a wet hat and no raincoat, he slung his cheap rod with the old and cracked fly line. And I watched as he lit up the stream, netting one trout after another. On days that he didn’t, he kept fishing anyway.

I don’t know where his natural way with trout came from. His father was not a fisherman, and the kid was mostly self taught — honest-to-goodness self taught, without YouTube videos or even much influence from any decent fishing literature. He was just an innately fishy kid with instinct and the desire to be on the water.

One horribly windy day, with storms rolling through, we decided to fish anyway. The kid’s Mom told me he could go, as long as I could, “make sure a tree didn’t fall on him.” No problem, I assured her, and I heroically rescued the kid from all the falling timber that a single day could bring (which is to say, the kid and I went fishing together).

After a couple years of sharing the water, we knew each other well and worked the river as a team. I took the bigger waters and deeper chutes, while the kid jumped above to pick off fish in the skinny riffles. It was a good friendship.

One early summer weekend we took a long drive. Winding the backroads before dawn, we slowed progressively as we traveled northward, fighting fog in the cool valleys and dodging deer that we frightened with the headlights. Finally, as the yellow sun rose over a line of spruce trees, we parked in the ferns, gathered our gear and walked into the silence.

We followed the sound of trickling water, upstream into the dense forest with the objective to walk until we broke out of the floodplain. We walked the lower stretch of the stream among the roots and fallen oaks with massive broken limbs pushing earth and widening the valley — miles of curving streambed redirected from one season into the next. The kid fell repeatedly into the leftover trenches overgrown with deep green plants. I turned once to see his hands pushing himself upright against the mossy ground. We shared a grin, and then we pushed forward. We walked for hours. When the dominant undergrowth finally gave way to adult hemlocks, the forest shaded the mid-morning sun, and we stopped walking.

The fishing was as it should be in such a remote place. We threw dry flies into the black and brown corners of falling water, hooking native brook trout gems as small as the kid’s fingers and no larger than my hand. The water flowed down the mountain as we moved up and through it. We climbed a watery trail that narrowed as the hours passed. We rarely spoke, as we worked in tandem among the evergreens, among cold water and through a gentle rain that had set in, releasing one fish after another.

We fished until sunset and then hiked east on an old logging road. It was dark when we found the truck in the ferns again. And with satisfied exhaustion we drove dirt roads, then hard roads that widened like the stream itself, as we traveled south down the mountain.

The kid fought off sleep the whole way home. We talked of trout and winding rivers.

You can find the dedicated Troutbitten Podcast page at . . .

podcast.troutbitten.com

Thank You!

The Troutbitten Podcast continues to grow quickly. I sincerely appreciate the support. Your downloads, subscriptions to the podcast and five star reviews are the key metrics in the podcast world. These kinds of stats help garner financial support from the industry and keep these podcasts coming. So thank you for being part of it all.

Fish hard, friends.

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Enjoy the day.
Domenick Swentosky
T R O U T B I T T E N
domenick@troutbitten.com