Water Colored Memories

 Memories get foggy.  Sometimes you don't remember a memory, you remember the video of your memory.  Sometimes your memory blends into another memory and looses it's context.  The reds below three bars and a bluff, not the one directly below the third bar, but the one below that, after the big sweeping turn with the view of Kashiak mountain.  Seems I remember it being a fair weather day, maybe not totally blue bird and hot, but not dark and rainy.  A decade of pictures and video and even high grade drone footage left us a bit reticent to capture every fish and yammer on an on about how much we loved this place, all that is left  of that day is the memory.  

There were chum weaving in and out, up and down off the far bank.  Large rainbows and Dolly Varden would be in the mix, gorging and trying to avoid being gored.  Twice a frantic jerk yanked the mouse away from a crazed male chum.  Hooking 30 lbs of spawning chum lost it's allure in 2010.   The third cast put Mr. Hanky skating and gurgling a few inches above the rhythmic chaos.  A male chum rose and gulped air directly above the mouse, before  it submerged, another large head rose and came over the back of the chum, just above it's dorsal.  In my mind it was another chum, but my hands didn't move, the mouse disappeared and my hands pulled the line taught and raised the rod up and away.  There was no explosion, just weight and movement.  In my mind I'd hooked a flipping chum, but my eyes saw orange and black and my hands pulled on the fish as it swam away from the fray and went into the typical head shakes and heavy pulls of a big trout. My hands remember the girth of the buck Dolly, my eyes remember it's nose stretching to the big eye on the rod as I "measured it" and my mind remembers thinking, although this is probably the biggest trout I've ever caught, I don't know where the camera is and I've got a hundred pics of big dolly's laying on a gravel bar, I'm living in the moment, I will never forget this fish.  Man I wish I had a picture of that buck right now!