One thought on “TBT: Those fish better give their soul to God…because their ass is mine

  1. Mel Krieger Memory (from a time before I met him)

    West Wales, then still big-time sea-trout and salmon country, mid-late 1980s, where I was doing yet another, move there to live and fish until everything falls apart, life sentence.

    I had seen a review of Mel’s book, the Essence of Flycasting, in a then hard to get in Britain, US flyfishing magazine, wanted a copy for myself very badly, found Mel’s little “Club Pacific” travel company’s Californian number in the same magazine, so picked up the phone and called it.

    I got a phone message service, so probably pretty nervously left my name, a Welsh postal address that had to be spelled out very very carefully as much of it would be distinctly alien to an English-speaker’s ear, plus a phone number, with a “Can you sell a copy of your book to a Englishman in Wales, Mr Krieger…?”, then left it at that.

    Late the same night, my phone rang.

    “Hi; Paul. It’s Mel Krieger. Sure you can buy a book. Let me have a have a credit card number and I’ll get a [signed] copy in the post to you tomorrow. … I see you’re in Wales … that’s sea-trout country…”

    We spent a few minutes enthusiastically talking sea-trout, and, briefly, about the very big ones that he had fished for on Tierra del Fuego and in southern Patagonia.

    A handful of years later, in the early 1990s, Mel and I just happened to bump into each other in a flyshop in Patagonia…

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