After my nervous excitement had helped me take an hour to rig up, I finally worked through the dense brush surrounding the Robinson River and waded under the overhanging foliage into my first bona fide put and take trout stream. The water was cold and clear in the riffle in which I stood, but I was still sweating from my struggle through the brush. A few deep breaths, five false casts, and my #12 Adams on the 3x tippet landed 20 ft. upstream with a relatively gentle "Splat!". Nothing happened as the fly floated towards me. As I untangled the line and leader from around my legs, I realized that this was going to be a bit more difficult than some of the books had promised.

Well, I wasn't going to be defeated. I false cast once, twice, three times, and had 10 ft. of line out. Knowing how spooky trout were from the books, I decided I needed more line and reared back for the forth false cast. Damn! My arm was stopped halfway into the forecast. Turning around, I saw my leader in a complex knot around a low hanging branch with my fly hanging uselessly down on a couple of feet of leader.

But I was prepared for this eventuality, since the books told me this happened to the best fly fishers. I waded patiently down the short distance to the tangle, reached for the fly, placed it gently into my mouth, grabbed the obtrusive branch furiously, and promptly set the hook in my lower lip. A bit embarrassed, I disentangled the leader from the branch quietly enough not to alert my fishing partner--who also happened to be my spouse--to my predicament. Once the line and leader were loose and in the water where they belonged, the feel of the hook in my lip suggested that I ought to reel in the line. Having reeled in, I tried to get the hook out, but it was in deep and the barb held it firmly in place. After a fruitless and painful struggle on my own, I called my partner for help. Though she came quickly to my aid, she had no better luck than I'd had at disengaging the hook.

As I struggled out of the stream, I cursed profoundly and fantasized showing up at the emergency room hooked to my own line. Gently leaning the rod against the car, I stripped some line and sat carefully in the driver's seat to use the rear view mirror to help me in the extraction. No doubt my chagrin and miserliness kept me from cutting the fly from the leader. I tried pushing the hook farther through to expose the barb so I could cut it off, as I'd done before with bass hooks in fingers and clothes. But the hook was in at such an angle that my clever attempt only drove it deeper into my swollen and throbbing flesh. The pain had me sweating so much I could no longer get a grip on the hook. It finally occurred to me that my hemostats might help here. Wrenching them from the 37th pocket I felt in, I fixed them firmly to the hook and pulled. No luck, but a nice streak of pain in the lip. After several progressively harder pulls, the hook hadn't moved, but my eyes were so teary I couldn't see what I was doing. The emergency room fantasy struck again as I rested from the pain, and I knew I had to get the damned Adams out myself. Steeling myself to the coming pain and squeezing my eyes shut against the tears, I gave a mighty yank on the hemostats. Before my very eyes finally was the Adams, free of my lip and trailing a small bit of flesh on its barb as memento of its 160 lb. catch.

Having experienced being hooked on a barbed fly, and in spite of reputable scientific studies that show barbless hooks have no significant effect of the mortality of landed fish, I early became a fanatic adherent of the barbless mode of fishing.

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