The Sportsman's Corner

I like to play 60-and-over basketball at the Garver Y most Tuesdays. At nearly 70, I am no longer one of the "junior" players and find it increasingly difficult to keep up with the younger players.

A couple weeks ago, we played five competitive games in two hours. (This is the equivalent of five quarters of basketball.) At the end of the fifth game, I was beat. I was glad I was not the one driving home.

After showering and washing my basketball clothes, I planned to hit the glider on the front porch and continue reading a novel I had started. However, it was a lovely October afternoon, the kind when I sometimes experience a "trout goofy day" when fish will bite on nearly anything. "I think I might go fishing," I told Donna.

She smiled sadly. "You know how tired you'll be tonight," she said. "Maybe you ought to wait till tomorrow."

But, I am not one to heed good advice. I gathered my gear and headed out to the creek. I began fishing at 1:30. During the next two-and-a-half hours, I covered more than a mile of stream. The action was neither fast nor furious. Using an Adams dry fly, I ended the outing with a respectable though unspectacular tally of more than a dozen trout. That one of them was a 17-inch rainbow was quite a surprise, since the creek is not stocked and is populated by wild brown trout. The mile walk back to my aging Ranger didn't seem too bad.

After supper, I again told Donna that I might go fishing. "Maybe I can find some flies hatching."

"That's probably not going to happen. You told me those October caddis flies were killed off by some unknown pollutant," she reminded me.

I went anyway. On my first stop along the road, I noticed a trout rising. I rigged up, using a brown dry fly that had worked well on this stream in previous autumns.

However, there were almost no flies hatching, and I spent most of the next hour or so wandering up and down the streambank looking for trout. I could find only a few, and I managed to fool only three of them.

After I had gone home and had taken another shower, I sank back in the Lazy Boy in our TV room for the rest of the night and then could hardly move on Wednesday.

Now, to show you how far my "elevator" is from the top, I did the same exact things the following Tuesday.