Columnist reflects on a lifetime of memories after death of longtime friend
We were walking along the Black River, Bob Lewis, my brother Jerry, and I.
Jerry and I were carrying spinning rods. Bob had been flyfishing for about a year and had been nagging me to get into it as well. I always resisted. It is too complicated for me.
As we walked, a trout rose about 30 feet out in the river.
“I’m going to catch that fish,” Bob said.
A couple of false casts, and the fly was over the trout. Then it disappeared with a splash. Shortly afterward Bob had a nice, fat, brassy rainbow in his hands.
My eyes popped open wide.
“I want to do that,” is what I remember thinking at that very moment.
The next spring, after Bob and Jerry bought me a Cortland outfit from local guru Del Mazza, that’s just what I did.
Bob and I had become friends a couple of years before when I began teaching with him at Perry Junior High in New Hartford. Our fishing adventures, hundreds and hundreds of them, deepened the relationship because you know, fishing, especially fly fishing, isn’t a hobby. It’s life. Catching trout in Ireland, chasing them on rarely fished streams in the Big Horns, finding them in tiny brooks where few would ever imagine a trout might live, battling big bruisers on the Delaware, plucking fish after fish out of the pocket water near Wilmington Notch.
All that and a lot more was because of Bob, who was my partner and guide – I was his on a few occasions - for more than half a century.
I will be ever thankful to Bob for the gifts he gave me, but I can no longer do it in person. After a long battle with any number of ailments, he went on to the big trout stream in the sky on the last day of August.
His death was not totally unexpected given his problems, but it was still a shock.
When we parked his drift boat in my garage in November, just before he headed to Florida, he had some back pain but otherwise seemed fine. I spoke to him only a couple of times after that – Bob was well known for not answering calls, and I don’t think he knew how to text – once around his birthday in May, when he told me he never thought he’d die in Florida.
I didn’t want to believe he would, but he declined rapidly, and that was it. I still have trouble believing it.
But there are the memories.
Bob dove into fly fishing whole heartedly. He became a great caster, worked really hard at it, and I sometimes thought he’d rather cast than catch. He was a very good teacher and guide, and spent many years doing both, first out in West Yellowstone, and then for many years with the Delaware River Club.
Among our adventures:
We were on the West Branch of the Delaware just below the Route 17 bridge in Deposit. Bob had worked to a trout up against the bank for the better part of an hour, then gave up. I moved down to the spot, and took a look at the fish, which was rising repeatedly to something I could not see, although thousands of Sulphur mayflies were parading downstream
“Hey, Bob,” I yelled. “This is a good fish.”
“Yeah, but I can’t get it,” he said.
So, then I spent the next I don’t know how long giving it a try, changing flies a half dozen times. The fish sometimes would take a look, but it never committed. Finally, in frustration, I tied on a big Joe’s Hopper. On the second cast, the trout turned off the bank, followed the fly for a foot or two, then grabbed it solidly.
It fought hard, and Bob came up and landed it for me. It was a modest 16 inches, but thick as a brick. It was my first Delaware trout.
Slough Creek in Yellowstone Park is a legendary fishery now, but a half century ago not many anglers were ambitious enough to hike way back into the meadows heading up toward the border with Montana.
Bob and his wife Barbara and I did. We were rewarded with scores of beautiful cutthroats, 12 to 16 inches, rising three and four feet through the crystal water to take anything we threw out there. We stopped counting at 50 fish apiece. We were there all day and didn’t see another person until we were walking out in the dark and met a guy with a wagon and team hauling gear into some outpost.
We had big days in a lot of places, including on the Mohawk River, with Bob and Frankie Audino throwing streamers and me generally using an ultralight spinning outfit with hot orange Rapalas and Rebel crabs. Man, we caught a lot of bass.
Bob was an adventurous wader. Too much so at times. We were fishing West Canada Creek just below Brown Island. Bob was about 50 yards downstream, and he kept edging further and further into a big hole.
“Getting deep there, Bob,” I called. He kept going. “Getting deep!”
A moment later he was off his feet, over his head, and flailing his way downstream. I started running, realized I wasn’t going to be able to change the outcome, and did the next best thing.
“Throw the rod on the bank,” I yelled. It was a very good rod. He managed to swim to the opposite bank, rod in hand, wrang everything out, and kept on fishing.
There was the moonlit night on the Chenango River when we caught many fish on Hendrickson spinners, striking at sounds and flicks of light until the trout finally quit as midnight approached.
Bob also was an adventurous boatman, and a good one. He proved it one day when we floated from Hancock to Calicoon on the Delaware, 20 or so miles in the wind and rain and occasional sunshine with the river pounding and bank full. He had to steer around huge boulders and deadheaded logs, and we had some close calls. I don’t remember if we caught any fish. It was a hair-raising trip.
Bob feared and hated snakes, and if he even saw a photo of one in a magazine he would cringe, throw the book across the room, and sometimes run out of the house. We were carrying a half dozen salmon on a stick one time up the bank from the Salmon River when Bob suddenly jumped into the air, dropped his end, and ran up the hill.
I looked down and there was a piece of rope curled on the ground. It looked like a small garter snake if you tried really hard to picture it that way.
We were up on Orwell Brook with Frank Szkotak and Ralph Polito. We weren’t doing much with the salmon, but Ralph spotted a field full of puffballs. We filled three shopping bags with them, took them to Bob’s house, broiled them in butter, and had a feast. It was hard to believe how good they were.
Another time on the Delaware, we caught a couple of trout, then made lunch on my camp stove – hamburgers, onions, mushrooms, potatoes – accompanied by a couple of beers. Every guy on the river was looking up on the bank, kind of wishing for an invite. It was one of the best lunches I ever had, for sure.
Bob was particular about his fishing, but often not much else. He drove away with hundreds of dollars’ worth of tackle left in some parking lot, broke the stock on his shotgun when he took off with it on the roof of his car, and could be careless with money if he wasn’t hiding it so well, he couldn’t ever find it again.
Bob had his ways, and he was a stubborn man. In recent times he was given to somewhat outrageous statements and attitudes. I felt compelled to chastise him more than once, but maybe he thought I made some outrageous statements, too.
Still, in the 53 years we spent together - fishing, playing basketball, a trip to Italy, helping each other out in many different ways – I believe we had but one serious argument, and maybe we didn’t, because right now I have no idea what it might have been about.
What I will value is Bob’s pulling me a bit into his newly-discovered flyfishing world, which opened up so much else about the natural world for both of us, sparked a greater interest in wildlife than I already had, led me to meet so many interesting people I never would have met, and propelled us on many great adventures. That and, of course, his great generosity to me.
Here is one small example.
A few years ago, the fishing vest I had been wearing for 30 years or more was falling apart. Bob had three brand new Simms vests hanging in his closet. Real nice ones. As a professional guide, he’d gotten them at cost.
“Bob, what did you pay for those vests? Give me one. I’ll give you whatever you paid.”
“No,” he said.
“Geez, you’ve got three of them there,” I said, and that didn’t count as the one he actually used.
This happened several times, and I gave up. That Christmas, he came over to the house with that year’s gift, as always carelessly wrapped in newspaper. I knew what it was immediately and sat there shaking my head.
A small thing, maybe. It’s just a fishing vest, you know? But it meant so much.
I’m still wearing that vest. I don’t imagine I’ll ever wear another. I think of Bob and what he meant to me every time I put it on.
Girvan makes In-Fisherman list again
Veteran angler Bill Girvan has made In-Fisherman Magazine Master Angler Award list for the 43rd consecutive year.
Girvan, 70, of Yorkville, earned eight Master Angler Awards fishing in local waters in 2022, including two first place awards.
They include a first-place tie in the Catch & Release Division in Region 5 with a 32-inch steelhead caught on a blue salmon egg sack on the Salmon River, and a first place tied in Region 1 with a 26 ¾-inch pickerel caught on a 10 ¾-inch sucker on Lake Delta.
His other awards all came in the Region 1 Catch & Release Division. They were for a 26-inch pickerel caught on a spinner and worm at Lake Delta; a 15 ¼-inch crappie caught on a Hot Skit jig at Lake Delta; a 15-inch crappie caught on a Darting Shad Swimbait at Lake Delta; a 21-inch smallmouth bass caught on a pond crab at Fish Creek; a 20 ¼-inch smallmouth bass caught on a Zoom Finesse Worm at Lake Moraine, and a 44 1/8-inch tiger muskie caught on an M.T.O. spinnerbait at Otisco Lake.
Lures offered at new locations
M.T.O. Lures of Sylvan Beach now is offering its Xstended Life plastic baits at a couple of local bait shops.
The soft plastics, which have a unique structure designed to greatly increase their life, are being sold at All Seasons Sports on Commercial Drive in New Hartford and The Bait Shop on Leland Pond on Rte. 26 in Madison. Fish 307 in Lake George also is carrying the lures and makes them available online.
Bill Alexander of M.T.O. and his partner, Paul Williams, hope to sell through additional locations soon.
This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Outdoors: Columnist John Pitarresi remembers longtime friend Bob Lewis
