Fall 2002 - 1,200 Tiny Nymphs On The Floor

For the last few weeks whenever I visited my pal Gil Finn at Alpine Angling in Carbondale I joked around by removing a drawer full of the smallest flies and pretended to sneeze on it - you know - similar to the famous Woody Allen scene. Well karma may have caught up to that drawer of flies.

On Sunday October 13, 2002  I entered Alpine Angling and found Gil Finn in a white-faced shocked condition. On the floor in front of him were over a thousand of his smallest flies, scattered after a customer had dropped the entire drawer. The customer apparently had pulled the drawer out to it's furthest position to reach the back row of flies, and pulled just a little too  far. Gil said the drawer fell in slow motion.  He almost caught it but missed because his hand got stopped by something that cut him badly. With blood on his hand and trying hard to stay cool , Gil made the stammering fellow stand still for 5 minutes while he removed the flies from his body with a small magnet. When he finally allowed him to move there were footprints left behind in the mass of flies remaining on the floor. It took Gil 4 hours to re-organize the flies with a  tweezers. This is darned impressive considering he had to know all the fly names, color variations and the variations in hook sizes.

I didn't stay long cause I really couldn't help and Gil was obviously distraught. He's almost over it now but I probably won't joke around about the drawer - at least for a while.      

Gearman

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