Taken on the worst of fishing gear...with my Dad, my brother, Nathan, and my friend, Mario Miller.

I had given Mario my reel and pole to use. I was using a shabby little bait-casting outfit left at our house by some relatives. The reel was so cheap and fouled up that I could not cast with it. The bait-caster was strung with a black, braided line which would hardly go through the eyes of the pole when it was wet.

Mario and I were fishing together, alongside the waterfall at Royal Lake, where the irrigation water spilled over the bluff. In those days, it was a fair drop to the water. Nowadays the basalt edge of the bluff is all broken down.

Mario was casting out into the water with my fishing equipment. I was limited to dropping my baited hook into a returning swirl of water which ran right along the bank at my feet.

In about 20 minutes, I had hooked 5 carp and landed a couple of them. Mario was giving me a hard time about catching fish on the hideous little fishing pole and then he decided to drop his worms right into the "hole" where I was fishing.

The tips of our poles were about a foot apart and the water was swirling around at our feet when suddenly the tip of my fishing pole dipped. About the second or third time it went down, with Mario yelling in my ear about me catching another fish, I set the hook.

This time it didn't do what it had when the carp had taken the bait. My line went zinging out across the lake like a rocket was tied to the end of it. My Dad looked up and said something, I don't remember what it was, cause at that time about 40 yards out into the lake, this rainbow trout broke water and danced across the surface walking on his tail.

This trout was the largest and most active fish I had ever hooked at that point in my life. Dad yelled, Mario started cussin', my little brother watched and I was began jumping around like an idiot, whooping and holding onto the pole with both hands.

The rainbow ran up and down the shoreline, out into the lake several times taking nearly all of the ugly black line off the reel. Dad yelled encouraging things at me like, "Don't horse him" and "Keep the line tight..." and a bunch of other stuff. The fish made several attempts to escape and tried tangling the line up in a big pile of sunken tumbleweeds and stickerbushes which had blown into the lake down the shore from us.

The fish was strong and much more experienced than the boy who hooked him, but I had hooked him good and after what seemed to be a very long time, the runs began to slow down and little by little I began to get him in closer to the shore. One major problem was that we had no net and I had to let the fish play himself out to a point of complete exhaustion so that Dad could get his fingers up into his gills and get him securely out of the water.

Dad made a couple of attempts and finally rewarded me by lifting my fish up high out of the water and bring him up onto the bank where he couldn't get away. He was beautiful!

That was in 1968. Mario never really got over it and continued to raze me about it for many years afterwards. That's ok. It was worth the razing!