Getting Away From Everything You Know
Posted by Pete Robbins on Feb 10th 2021
On our last day of fishing in Alaska, as we waited for the float plane to pick us up after a day of jacking on rainbow trout, grayling and Dolly Vardens, Hanna looked me dead in the eye and said, “Let’s sell the bass boat and do this all the time.”
I reminded her that we had no job options up there, and that she hates the cold – which is the prevailing temperature there for most of the year, except for the long period when “below freezing” replaces just regular old frigid. We returned home. We were in the bass boat the following week, enjoying ourselves.
As we headed home from Guatemala on Sunday, I had a similar thought: “Why can’t we do this every day?” I asked myself, after our group of four landed 44 sailfish (and a handful of mahi) over the course of three days on the water. Two-pound bass are fun. They’re challenging. I definitely haven’t come close to completely figuring them out. But they’re not the king of the water like a billfish. My brain may harbor fantasies about moving to Central America and exclusively plying the salt, but my wallet says otherwise. That’s ok. The way that I judge the success of a fishing trip is whether I want to have the same experience again. If I don’t, it’s typically a failure. If I do, then I know that I spent my time and money well. When we went to Guatemala last year for the first time, it was to be a “once in a lifetime” experience. Clearly that plan went into the crapper as we returned slightly less than a year later, and now we’re trying to figure out how to engage in round three.
It’s one of those places I need to get back to – like Venice, and the California Delta and the Zambezi. I know some of you out there fish the same water again and again, 52 weeks a year for however many years your boat floats, but that ain’t me. My biggest problem is that a single trip rarely tides me over – but I still have no plans to sell the bass boat (except when it’s time to get a new one).
