His first groggy words of the morning expressed his desire to fish the Letort. He knew what he was getting into. An avid reader, he had been picking random volumes out of my fly fishing library for years. He had seen the pictures of the weeds and read the dour words of those recalling the halcyon days. But he had also heard me talking about the hours I spent watching individual trout feed, the weeks of trial and error to make the right cast to a particular fish, and the place the little creek played in my life for a time. And, of course, there were the pictures of the startlingly large brown trout I was able to chance into.

Check out “Part I” here.

The second day of our father and son fly fishing trip in Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley had to be on the region’s spring creeks. Four days’ worth of heavy rain had turned the freestone and limestone-influenced creeks into churning chocolate milk. Those waters had been my primary goal. Thankfully there were other options and a flexible teenager at hand.

After a breakfast with enough calories for a party twice our size, we headed to the Letort Spring Run. I’m not sure if it was my anecdotes, the books he read, or simply his adventurous personality, but he was enraptured by the scene. If he said that it was cool once, he said it a hundred times. We walked slowly. I showed him how fish lay and how they feed in relation to weed beds. We discussed the unpredictable and undulating currents, and how no two casts would yield the same presentation. While all of this instruction was happening, a footlong bronze form propelled itself from under a clump of vegetation to slam his fly. None of the three of us expected it.

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