So thoughts of my karma arose almost immediately yesterday when a writhing striper impaled the soft underbelly of my forearm with a nice, sharp, barbed treble hook. "That's what I get for using these freakin treble-hooked plugs," was my first thought. Usually I remove the front hooks on a two-hooked plug, not only because six hooks is overkill, but because I think it decreases the frequency of snags. But yesterday I was fishing the thick water around the Sisters with a new deep-diving rapala and I hadn't gotten around to removing the front hook. "You lazy bastard," is the follow-on thought to that.
At first it actually was a very lovely scene, with a seal swimming around in the growing tidal eddies and some deep bends in my spinning rod. The attacker was actually my second fish, and I was thinking greedily about the last hour or so on the outgoing, when the wind goes down and the fly rod comes out. But it was not to be. I brought the fish in too fast and he stabbed me! God save my karma, but I quickly realized that if I were to avoid further arm carnage, I had to immobilize the fish completely using just one hand -- no free hand to let go of the fish lip to grab a club or knife -- so I gave this 18 inch fish my hardest death grip around his gills and neck. Whoah. So much for the pretty scene.
OK, so now I'm bobbing in the current with a bug-eyed dead striper attached to my arm by a barbed treble hook. I fumble around with the nippers and finally get the line cut and the fish lip unhooked. A larger wave hits me this instant, and the strangled mangled fish plops into the current to feed the seal. "I must have done something really, really bad to deserve all this" is my growing conclusion.
But what to do now? A moment of fumbling around with the split rings that attach the hooks to the plug proves that there's no way I'm going to separate those from the plug with one free hand. Paddle two miles back home with five hooks swinging around wildly with each stroke? Not wise. Perhaps I could push the barb all the way out and crimp it down (though in fact I had no pliers nor hook file handy). I try to push the hook up through upward through the skin, but the angle's not right and the bends of the other two hooks press up on my arm. Ain't comin out that way.
And this is where a memory flashes through my mind and I realize what I did wrong, where all the bad karma really comes from: I have allowed myself to be amused, not once but many times, including in writing, by the misfortune of a fishing buddy with a barb in his flesh:
A half-dozen casts into the morning I heard a plaintive call for help coming over the wind. Upstream, my friend had waded out of the stream and was headed downstream in my direction. What could the problem be, I wondered? ‘I am not going to tie his knots for him,’ I thought. When he got close enough, I saw the problem clear as day, and winced: with the barbed hook of a medium-sized rubberlegs pattern driven deep into the upper part of his chin, he had very nearly fair-hooked himself with a wind-contorted backcast. Regarding the painful process of going back to the hotel and extracting this fly with a pair of pliers, I will spare the reader as well as the subject. My buddy forbade me to ever show a picture of him with the fly in his face, and I am probably not even supposed to write about it here.
Oh, how evil of me to enjoy that story so much. I had to pay at some point. And now here I am floating around a couple of stinky guano islands with a grand opportunity to punish myself even more by pulling this horrible hook backwards out of my arm. So it must be, and I give it a go. No pain, but no success either -- and there is something extremely unpleasant about pulling a barb so hard on your very own flesh and blood, notwithstanding the lack of pain. I give it another, harder, pull and it budges. Boy this is unpleasant. Could I pass out and drown because of this? No, I don't feel nauseous or light-headed, just very, very nonplussed. So I give an animal howl and pull the horrid thing all the way out.
If you're not already cringing at this tale of silly groserie, here are the remaining details. A vein must have been involved, because a lump the size of a golf ball immediately raised on my arm and spewed blood like a tiny volcano. I held my arm out over the water and tried to keep the bright red blood off my boat, which is flying with me to Alaskan grizzly country in a couple weeks. For a moment I was just kind of mesmerized by what was happening to my arm, and I considered taking a photo which would probably have ended up here on this page.
I didn't take the photo, and it occurred to me that I finally made a good decision after quite a string of questionable ones.
To end this long story, I'll report that with teeth and one free hand I got some gauze and big band aids out of my first aid kit, which always travels in my cockpit dry bag, and stanched the flow. The arm still worked fine for paddling, and after a bit I tested it on trolling and retrieving. No big deal. But getting back to the launch and really cleaning it and dressing it seemed the right move, so there went my evening tide.
At this point, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping against infections. That might take karma payback too far and mess with my Alaska activities. A doctor friend gives me two weeks to feel right again, but I think that's a bit drastic for a little karmic pin prick. I mean, it's not like I had to saw the dang arm off with a knife, after all! We shall see. Keep posted.
