What did you get up to in the holidays? I hope you managed to enjoy a bit of extra time with friends and family. Our family managed to get away for a few days camping at sunny Menindee! Set nearly 800km west of Parkes near Broken Hill, Menindee is a long way from the beach and even further from good trout fishing water!
Being a keen fly fisher, October holidays means the opening of the trout fishing season which normally sees me heading straight for the beautiful clear waters of the Snowy Mountains to chase a few browns and rainbows. For this reason, I was a little confused as to why I ended up deciding to head in the opposite direction to the muddy waters of Menindee where the only fish you are likely to find is carp!
Now you will be relieved that I didn’t let the opportunity pass to try something new. As such, I committed myself to actually fly fishing for carp… I apologise to all the purists out there, but I was desperate, and the thought of pulling a dirty big 1m carp on the bank on a tiny fly actually sounded pretty amusing.
As with most river camping/fishing holidays with kids, there was a fair amount of time spent baiting kids hooks and enjoying seeing them haul in plenty of fish. Eventually, with fly rod in hand, I managed to head out on the tinny with a couple mates to a quiet spot by the weir to see if I could land my first ever carp on the fly. Now as a first time experience, and being surrounded by sceptics (as is the role of any good mate), I was feeling the pressure to produce something given the effort involved! It didn’t take long, and we spotted a couple large looking carp feeding the edge. I made a quick choice of fly and managed to put a cast right near the nose of a large looking fish. The fish I was aiming for didn’t budge, but something grabbed that tiny little fly under the surface, and the fight was on!
Now any fisherman worth their weight knows how to exaggerate a good story, but let me tell you, that fish dragged us around the river for the next 25 mins! Try as I might, I could not get him to the surface, and so the dance continued of moving the boat around to keep us positioned well, while this river monster did his best to avoid capture.
I must admit, at one point I may have been heard saying, ‘call the cover of Fly Life Magazine, I’m about to give them the picture for their next cover’! That’s right, I got cocky, I got caught up in the legend status I was about to earn, when my mates far and wide saw a picture of me holding a 1m cod or 3m carp, all captured on the fly in the muddy water of Menindee…
Proverbs 16:18 says, pride comes before a fall… It was at that point, in the fading light of the Darling river, I fell hard. Despite the advice of my mates to take it slow and ride it out, I forced things a little too hard, the hook straightened and the fish, along with fame and fortune, was gone forever.
In days that followed I did plenty of soul searching, reflecting and playing all the ‘what if’ scenarios round in my head, much to the amusement of others. The conclusion I have come to, is the pursuit of these great moments, the search of perfection, the challenge of achieving difficult goals is what keeps us going back for more.
At this point in time PCS is not a fishing school, and we are not about achieving perfection in the art of fishing! However we are a school that is involved in the endless pursuit of delivering the best quality Christian education we possibly can. We have not achieved it yet, but it is what drives me and my team to keep pressing on to get better and better and better. Like a photo on the cover of Fly Life, I don’t know if we will ever achieve perfection, but that isn’t going to stop us at PCS from getting as close to it as we possibly can.
To put it simply, our students and all those to come are worth the effort.
Have a great Term 4 PCS and thank you for partnering with us in the pursuit of being the best school we can possibly be. And, do yourself a favour and head to Minindee. While you’re there, if you happen to spot a river monster with a scar from a little olive fly, tell him I’m coming back to try again!
Have a great weekend.
Glen