I am back in the Neversink, where I slept in my tiny cabin last night. I fished the gorge for an hour, but didn’t go very far upstream in order to save my knee for the photo shoot this afternoon. I ran into the legendary Phil Chase, an environmental activist that has been an important factor in the present health of the river and its wonderful flow of 100 cfs (not too long ago it was 15). I hooked a big trout right by the old bridge, but he broke off instantly. I got two other hits but brought nothing in. That was fine with me; it was wonderful to be back in the gorge.
On last Saturday morning I headed into town to have coffee at Dunkin Donuts and to work on a couple of projects, the main ones being my new poem about Kelly having another baby and about the river rescue on the Stillwater. I cut all of the earlier stuff about my kayaking experience and I fiddled with the baby poem. Both are getting there.
I did some shopping and did a very necessary laundry (I was down to my last shirt). After that I went to the “New” Nugget tavern and had lunch and watched Tiger play poorly again. If his putter was working he would have been in it.
I called Joey but his phone wasn’t working so I decided to drive out earlier to beat my friend Phil Chase to the best spot and Joey and Rebeka were ready to go.
The shoot itself went very well and Joey/Justin got one ten inch brook trout. We are planning to get together tomorrow. I met Joey’s mother Katharine, and she was attractive and interesting.
Jump forward to my return to Virginia and things started to fall apart. There was a tree fallen across the road so I had to walk up and get the chainsaw. After cutting it up and clearing the road, I found that my water was very dirty and letting it flow didn’t clear it. I went up to my cabin to clear it at the faucet there and to my surprise the top of my cabin had been taken over by swarming hornets who was very upset by my coming up and turning on the faucet. I waited a few minutes for the hornets to calm down and for the water to clear but the water in the house was still dirty, potentially a big and expensive problem. Then I started to scrape the flooded out road with the tractor and half way down one of the three point hitch pins broke and I had to get a new one at Wimmer later in the afternoon. I have to get Mike to help me put it in on Monday or Tuesday. The satellite TV also wasn’t working since it had been off for six weeks. Who knows what is coming next?