Our last foray into Idaho this year? Quite possibly.

It didn’t start too well. I swung by Dan’s house as I was heading home. He was putting siding on his shed and I honked. He swung toward me and grazed a finger across the chip board (wafer board), thereby skewering the middle knuckle of his middle finger on his right hand with a large chunk of wood. The wood entered slightly above his knuckle, disappeared, then protruded below his knuckle. The “sliver” was approximately 1mm thick, 3mm wide and 2cm long. About 1.8cm was under the skin. Dan, the fishing wacko that he is, was not about to forgo fishing to visit a doctor.

Dan provided me with a pair of needle-nose pliers and I attempted to yank the sliver out from the exit point. I succeeded in merely demolishing the 1mm tip of sliver poking out. I worked at it from the entry point, but there was even less wood to work with there.

Enter the good doctors cutthroat stalkers.

Dan found a utility knife in the garage. He proceeded to work at the sliver. Not like most of us, which would be to work under or around the entry or exit point, but rather cutting through the skin on top of the sliver. He was concerned about the blade, so he found another one (titanium, he said) and swapped blades. He then haded the knife to me.

I continued the delicate procedure. I slowly flayed the skin starting at the entry point and working my way to the exit point. I continued to gently incise the epidermis until I made my way to the dermis. The patient was doing extremely well under non-local anesthesia (amazing the amount of pain one can handle when planning to fish in Idaho, not our local Utah waters).

Having greatly reduced the pressure on the sliver, it was time to work at it with the pliers. Unfortunately I was still unable to get a good purchase on the wood. Surprisingly, Dan had a small kit in the cab of his truck containing a pair of tweezers (for sculpting the uni-brow between casts?). I was able to get a corner of the tweezers into the entry wound, grip the wood, and with a quick tug, extract the offending wood.

The whole procedure occupied about seven minutes of our precious fishing time. Luckily we didn’t waste any of it inside the house or informing his wife (such trivialities would have wasted more minutes, what with antiseptic, etc.). The entire operation was performed in the garage and driveway, figuring the closer the proximity to the vehicles, the quicker we could get to the important things.

We duly arrived at the “West Fork” of the Bear River (please note the quotation marks, thereby signifying that said creek is not it’s actual name–this is Dan’s special place and I have agreed to leave it unnamed). We decided to fish the upper stretch which we had tried earlier in the summer.

In this first hole

I caught this little beauty

I missed a couple of smaller fish in that hole.

Dan proceeded upriver, but the next 30 minutes didn’t produce much else.

We drove back down to the middle section of the creek

but didn’t see any signs of fish. So we headed to our favorite location along the lower stretch

Dan was first up in the hole I earlier caught 8 fish in (see that report here). He proceeded to catch four fish and miss a couple more.

Notice the bandaged finger.

We continued upriver catching another ten fish or so in the last waning hour of the day. Dan never complained about the finger, so I’m assuming the surgery was a success. Then again, maybe he’s in the hospital.

 

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