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Lady and her young son come into the store. She asks our cashier if we have “spawn sacs.” Cashier has no idea what that even is.
I’m overhearing all this from over in the fishing department, where I’m hanging products on display: spinners, spoons, crankbaits, bobbers, hooks, sinkers, jigheads, soft plastics.
She comes over to look for herself and I try to help.
“Whatcha need?”
Spawn, she says, or worms.
It was too early in the season yet; we didn’t have them.
But I want to help them fish.
Three men originally taught me to fish. You know who they are. Two guides taught me about fly-fishing. Two guides taught me how to fish steelhead in the spring. Pay it forward.
“Let me see if I’ve got any solution.” Any stuff that was the same. We’ve had soft plastic spawn and hard plastic eggs in the past.
I think I’ve tried caviar once. I can’t remember. I may remember that it was fishy and salty. Whatever it was I’m thinking of, it couldn’t have been from sturgeon, could it? I can’t imagine there’s anywhere left in the world that could sustain a wild sturgeon harvest. That’s a rare, hundred year-old fish. And I can’t see how they can do sturgeon farming.
I don’t know much about it, I guess. About caviar and sturgeon roe. It might be interesting to research. I guess I’m not interested in caviar; maybe for class reasons. And I’m really not interested in sturgeon. It’s like grizzlies: they may be interesting for other people, but I’d rather research beaver or skunks. I’m interested in salmon and trout.
Roe refers to the many tiny fish eggs in the belly of the female fish. The female fish deposits the eggs in a nest – a “redd” – on the floor of the stream, and this is called spawn. The spawn settles under the current in the slack water of the depression of the redd, and the male swims over the redd and lays down his milt – the liquid that contains the sperm.
It’s funny about salmonids – the salmon-like fish (salmon, trout, char, whitefish, grayling). They can be very aggressive. Territorial. Cannibalistic. They are known to gobble up the eggs of their kin as the eggs occasionally drift downstream.
I tell my clients it is the way of natural selection for a mating pair to eat up the spawn of a competing pair. A way of guaranteeing the line of one DNA over another.
And so, the fisherman in the spring (steelhead spawning season) and the fall (all – I think – other salmonids) turn to the use of spawn in clumps or eggs singly to drift the rivers and streams to entice the steelhead.
Up in the way top shelf was a small box – last year’s leftover – and inside were little netting and thread in orange, pink and chartreuse for tying up real spawn sacs, even some floater beads (tied inside the spawn sac with the natural eggs for the purpose of floating the sac just off the bottom of the river). But no plastic spawn or eggs.
“Hmmm…” I like trying to solve other people’s problems. I have another possibility.” I went over to our small clear plastic fly cabinet – with hundreds of compartments and a thousand flies tied by old Dave Asproth and some dozens tied by me.
From the bottom compartment I took out four tiny furry balls.
“Here, put these in your hand [“Oh, wow”]. They’re very light. They’re flies. Made of yarn. Called yarn flies, in a tiny ball on a small hook made to look like fish eggs. $3.49 each. I tied them myself.
“What you can do is 18 inches up the line you can put a sinker – do you have sinkers? – Then a bobber above that, and drift it down the river.”
Oh, she was so satisfied with this.
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