The Water Calls – fishing and advevnture stories from Douglas Paton
“Having any luck?” the man asked. “I’ve managed to get into some trout,” I replied. “How about yourself, any luck?” “A few fly poops,” he said. “Nothing much more than that.” I had been watching the man sift through the dirt at the side of the river for a while now. I’d been chasing a […]
George Graw and I started fishing together about two months after his death. Although neither of us knew it at the time, George and I met towards the end of his life. We met through our local fly fishing club and got to know each other better once I joined the club’s executive. At the […]
Sometime around the time the shooting started, I realized I lost my net. Everything happened so fast and my only thoughts were around trying to avoid getting shot, not picking up all my gear. As intense as that was in the moment, it passed quickly. A few blasts from my air horn announced my presence […]
Sometime around my last post, things got busy. I was getting more writing work than ever, and it was great. But, it meant that the time and energy I had to spend on writing for the blog dipped, which wasn’t so great. Time passed. I wrote… …and wrote… …and wrote… Don’t get me wrong. I’m […]
Life has a funny way of repeating itself. This summer, as I was getting ready to visit Southern Alberta for a fews days off fishing with my brother, my wife turned to me and said, “Do you know what you were doing on this day 9 years ago?” After a moment, I remembered that I […]
A few years ago, a friend and I got together for what would become the first of many fishing trips together. We did some research, found a place to stay and booked our trip. Both of us were pretty excited about the trip and in the moths and weeks that lead up to the trip, […]
As I slowly become a better angler and better at things like reading the water and paying attention to what’s going on around me, I’ve started to develop an appreciation for some of the flies that I’ve had in my box for a long time, but never used. Few flies encapsulate this more than a […]
I have been in need of an anchor lately. It was something that I hadn’t really realized until I read this post by my buddy Walt over at Rivertop Rambles, but as soon as I started I realized that’s what I had been experiencing. Winter does that to anglers. The game changes, the fishing changes, […]
When I was about 12 years old, my best friend’s dad bought a house on the opposite end of the island we were living on at the time. When I asked him why his dad had bought the place–they already had three places that I knew about–he told me that the creek that ran through […]
The fishing season is winding down and, as tends to happen, my thoughts are drawn to the year’s fishing. As I’ve talked about in the past, it was a bit of a funny year. Forest fires, courses, backcountry closures, smoke and everything you can think of made getting out on the water hard. But, despite […]