Mudslide

Photo by Chad Shmukler, Hatch Magazine.

Sweat was beading up on my forehead as I tussled with the shoulder straps of my waders. Then the zipper. Then the goddamned wading belt. I uttered every iteration of the mother of all swear words, beginning it with the usual prefixes and ending it with all sorts of creative suffixes as I hurried to de-wader on the banks of Chile's pastoral Palena River.

I groaned in agony. My gut seized. As emergencies go, this was about as urgent as it gets on the river without life and limb at stake.

"Son of a ..." I swore. The waders finally fell to my ankles and I hurriedly dropped over the log.

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La Bomba

Photo by Chad Shmukler, Hatch Magazine.

Antonio is a tiny man. He might scratch 5 feet 4 inches. And he's not the shortest fly fishing guide working the flats of Ascension Bay. That honor belongs to Fabian. If Fabian mousses his hair, he'll tickle 5 feet. Tony's senior guide, Jonathan, might be an inch taller.

So, as I stood in the green water up to my armpits listening to Tony trying to calm my nerves as a pair of cruising permit approached from 12 o'clock, my mind inadvertently switched from panicked pleas urging myself not to screw up the pending permit shot to wondering how Tony was keeping his head above water.

"Just keep your line clean," Tony whispered, almost soothingly in his heavily accented English. My bare feet were buried in a foot of soft mud at the bottom of the bay, leaving me to assume Tony was treading water. "Don't worry. Just cast. Don't think about it." I cast.

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