It’s suddenly the third week of July and we’re all in a bit of a time warp here on the Missouri.
The relative slowness of August seems like a long time away.
The shop is open early and late (0500 to well past 2100h), which translates into some very short nights of sleep if you catch the shifts just right.
Life is short, and caffeine is something akin to a miracle.
Between the high temperatures in my little hotbox apartment (97 is a little much when I’m trying to do… anything in there) and a growing pile of Fire Girl work, I’m on the minimal sleep routine. I figure there will be time to rest in the fall and have discovered I work very well on high caffeine doses.
Stay pretty happy, too.
Days consist of manic mornings – yesterday morning there were twenty guide trips, all departing within an hour of each other. It’s a blur of licensing, fly sales, checking river lunches, guide interactions and logging clients into the outfitter worksheets.
The shuttle team is coming in earlier due to an increased trend of very early starts and split days on the guide’s parts, which in turn results in a quite a few “early outs.” The boys coffee up and hit the road. I jumped in the shuttle rig yesterday morning and very, very happily drove big rigs for five hours.
Hat tip to shop client Joe M., who owns a large, older Ford diesel reminiscent of the rig I learned to drive in. There is nothing like the crank of that old-fashioned Ford diesel. Makes me smile every time I drive that thing. It feels like an Abrams compared to the little Fire Girl Subaru. Thanks for owning a great rig, Joe.
The air is hot, the water is warming and it seems fishing is either strong or utterly challenging, depending on who one is talking to. The time of day fished also has quite a bit to do with it.
Nursing the hangover and heading out at 1100h? Not a great idea right now.
On all fronts, the shop staff is encouraging people to be careful as they handle fish; they are stressed right now (the fish… okay, some of the staff as well) and need to be kept in the water and handled as little as possible when releasing.
Thousands of dead carp washed ashore in Holter Lake early last week. While the rumor around the shop was that one of our collegiate staff with a penchant for carp had bathed in the lake and therefore killed the fish, it turns out the carp were spawning in low water and refused to move out as water temperatures rose. They were quite literally poached.
I’m prepping for an event shoot down in Big Sky for the Big Sky Fly Fishing Festival the first weekend in August, and then a month later travel to Idaho for a Patagonia fly fishing press trip. Looking forward to the travel… I think I’d be rather happy in a job that had me on the road nine months of the year. It’s some time in AC if nothing else.
So here’s to the coming fall, cooling temps, and maybe a wee bit of rain.
