tim "the man" lawrence

So Tim and I went to the Kern river this weekend. Tim was on a 5 man team from his fly fishing club, participating in a competition put on every year there. The morning was cold, clear, and windy in the canyon. Cold - fine, clear- good, windy - not good. We met everyone at the local fly shop at 7:30am and I volunteered to be a

controller.

The river is divided up into 45 sections, some 200 yards long, some only 50 feet. Some fishable, some not so good (read: 12 inches of water over sand). Everyone drew two sections, one beat for the morning, one beat for the afternoon. You get 2 hours in the am, break for lunch, 2 hours in the afternoon. They mix it up, so you get different types of water, and everyone has a chance at some good spots. Each spot is assigned a controller, who keeps track of time, measures the fish, and keeps record.

So I lost track of Tim, because I was taken up to the river and shown a section of river to "control". I was introduced to a high powered business woman from LA, who was on an all-woman team. I watched as she "geared up" (which takes quite a while), we climbed down the bank to the river, and found our flags, marking our beat. At 10am straight up, I yelled out to her (she was in the river) "GO!" and she started fishing. For the first 20 min or so, I watched, my measuring tube and pencil in hand, ready to jump to her side. After an hour, it became apparent, that nothing was happening, nor was likely to happen. So I read my book. Once she called out, scaring the daylights out of me, but it was just a bite. Nothing ever broke the surface. At 2 hours exactly I called time, and she waded out. "well, I got that one bite!" she said. Huh. Ok, you be excited about that.

Then we went for lunch. Tim only had 1 measurable (they have to be at least 25cm) fish. Everyone else was the same or less. It was pretty slow. Most guys had none. So then we went back out there for the afternoon section. I had another older woman who was so happy to be away from her telecommunications job in LA and standing in a river. She moved slow, and was very, um, consistent. Fished the same paths in the river over and over. This time I went straight for a comfy rock and told her to call if she needed me. After freezing and reading for 2 hours, we hiked back. She got absolutely nothing. But she didn't seem to mind.

So I drove back to the shop to meet up with Tim and turn in my papers. There was a lot of talk - "I got skunked!" and "I got 2 but they were too small". Of the 4 other guys on Tim's team, only 2 caught fish that were barely measurable. Everyone was saying it was a crazy hard fishing day. There was one rumor that an older guy on another team had caught a really big trout, but nobody knew for sure. Then Tim showed up. So how did you do?

"um... 4."

Everyone went crazy. It was way more than anyone else. And then, as we keep digging, it comes out that he actually caught 9 (NINE!), but only 4 were long enough. The rest of his team dropped to their knees, literally, and bowed to his fishing awesomeness.

Then it comes out, with much prying, that his controller was too lazy to come down to the river, so with each fish, he had to wade out of the water (not easy), and climb the bank up to the road where she was sitting in her chair with her bullhorn (no joke), for her to measure and record, then hurry and climb back down to release the fish and go again. Those 2 hours fly by for a fisherman, so that was a lot of lost time.

Well out of 45 fishermen, he got second place! And the only reason he didn't get first, was because of that one old guy who caught one whopper. Tim beat him by total inches, but he won because of extra points for the fish being so large. Because of Tim, his team got second in the team competition.

But the best part of the whole thing was watching how happy Tim was. He knew everyone, and they all were SO happy to talk to him. "Tim! TIM! How are you, man!" "Oh your TIM's wife! We love him. What a nice guy!" He was really well known, and would talk for a long time to lots of different (and sometimes strange) people. He walked right up to a couple just walking out of the fly shop and shook their hands. I came up in time to figure out that he didn't know them at all, he was just introducing himself and asking them questions about where they were from.

He got his major award (a bag of marshmallows), everyone got plastered (which was actually really funny), and we drove home.