Fishing with Chena - I

Fishing With Chena - I

Sunday evening I ate a little too much dinner. To settle my stomach I grabbed a flyrod (one of several that have mysteriously appeared over the past few months), walked out the front door about fifty feet to the river bank, and was off and wading up the river. It was just past sunset, with plenty of good light left.

We have a new pup, an outside dog named Chena. Chena (pronounced "Damnit Cheeena!") is a pit bull/great Pyrenees mix. She's around five months old and she weighs in about forty five pounds, so far. Chena is made up of ten pounds of head, twenty pounds of feet and ten pounds of tail. The other five pounds is her torso. She is tan and white with close short hair. Chena is a quite pretty dog, good lines etc. She is also a baby and is clumsy and happy to be around people and has 900lbs of exuberance and gets tangled up in your feet. She has tons of curiosity and likes to be up close to whatever you happen to be doing. If you crawl under a car to change the oil she crawls under there with you and gets her head in your way, like that.

She likes to get in the river, but generally only goes in with one of us. Rarely does she go in by herself and if alone she stays close to our bank. She went fly fishing with me yesterday. I tried hard to talk her out of it; all the way down the bank. I gave up when we got to the water though as she plainly wasn't listening. Fortunately she did not get a hook in her, at least not this time out. I suspect that's coming sooner or later though, but hopefully it won't make her want to quit fishing.

She started off by prowling around the bank downstream as I waded upstream. I only got two or three warm up casts in before I heard her coming. She was galumphing through the water with all the finesse of a Sherman tank in a china shop. She sounded like a horse hitting the water off of a high dive. She tries to move the water out of her way with her chest, bulling her way along with no finesse at all, but lots of energy.

She stopped a few feet downstream and watched with those brightly curious eyes as the fly line went back and forth. That is when I recalled that earlier that day she had been chasing a dragonfly, trying to bite it out of the air, and I got a little worried that she would try to catch the fly I was casting, and sure enough her eyes were focused right on the end of my line.

As soon as my fly landed in the water she went after it, galumphing straight to it. The good news is that the water slowed her down enough that I had plenty of time to remove the hook from the area before she could get to it. She never chased the back cast oddly enough, as though she understood that the back cast wasn't going to stay put.

This went on for a little while and then she got bored and started trying to pounce on minnows and floating leaves and what nots at random. I fished a little further up the river and she stayed down river doing whatever it was she was doing. I got to a spot where I was standing in water up around my waist and here she came, galumphing until the water was too deep, then swimming. This was the first time I had seen Chena swim. She is pretty good at it, probably because she has four giant feet.

She paddled over to me and treaded water for a minute or two while kind of leaning against my leg. This was the safest spot, as far as the hook was concerned, that she had been all evening. But once she figured out that I wasn't going to pick her up she swam off to shallower water.

I was casting towards the bank and of course that is where she went exploring next. No amount of talking could convince her to go elsewhere. She was ignoring my fly by now, but had the intuitive and unerring ability to move directly towards the area that I wanted to cast to next, causing me no end of grief. I did latch onto one decent fish and it put up a strong battle; splashing at the surface a lot, which got Chena's attention.

Chena, of course, decided to play fetch with the fish as I was bringing it in and luckily I got it to me and up out of the water just before she could get to it. I have never had a race between a fish and a dog before, it was interesting stuff, nothing I especially want to do again, but interesting all the same. I really didn't want her to get to the fish as she would have ended up with a mouth full of spiny fins and probably a hook; and since I normally release the fish I catch it would have been bad for the fish as well.

Chena played and I fished until it got too dark to see well, and I headed back towards the house. As soon as I headed that way Chena took off for home like a striped ape, tearing the water up as she went. She somehow knew I was finished and heading home. She beat me there by a a good ten minutes and it was full dark as I walked up to the porch.

I was moving along slow because wading in the river current and then climbing the steep river bank had worn out my legs, and I was fairly quiet too. Chena was sitting under the porch light looking inside the house through the sliding glass door (hoping for a handout from Susan) as I walked up and startled her. I think she was startled by my reflection in the glass. She spun around and let out two deep barks before she recognized me. What a voice! If she gets as big as I think she will, then we have the makings of a great watch dog. This was the first time I had heard her bark and that bark raised the hair on the back of my neck.

Fishing with Chena will make you completely nuts, or else it teaches you that fishing isn't serious business; just a good way to settle too much dinner. She reminds me not to take my self seriously, she sure doesn't.