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We left the stupid A7 autoroute at Montelimar North, had just crossed our famous bridge with the sign that reads “Welcome to the Ardeche” and were moving along toward Alba la Romaine when we were slowed down by a truck pulling a huge trailer filled with what smelled like animal manure or to put another way: “a truckload of shit”.
No doubt about it the fumes that stunk up our car could only be S.H.I.T. Of course we had to pass the truck, but on these wiggly, steep, local roads? Impossible! The road was too narrow and sinuous. A mortel danger. But even more mortel was to breath in that odor. What an odor!!! Hell on four wheels.
Suddenly my wife snapped out of her torpor (obligatory jet-lag) and said to me: Can you imagine if that load of shit turned over on a car? The poor driver would be suffocated in his car by this putrid Niagara. What an atrocious death!
After a few seconds of visualizing the horrible drama that my wife invented, I replied: And now my dear, imagine if the bin turned over on a car, not with 30 tonnes of shit, but 30 tons of octopus. Don’t you think that the death of the poor driver would be even more atrocious?
At this point I can see a number of our readers nodding their heads in displeasure: “What has this got to do with fly fishing?” Ah, there I can respond without skipping a beat: “Your impatience and your lack of confidence has no place in our aesthetic inner circle, for this short introduction, brilliantly written, is only to get us to the subject that today causes a lot of ink to flow: How to fly fish for octopus?”
A number of writers have given this subject great consideration. Charles Peguy (1812-1899) had already written: “Oh sleeping octopus, where then have passed the soft caresses of your tentacules?” After months of research, hours spent in the great libraries, today we are in a position to make our contribution to this mystery.
Yet again the great Jules Verne shows us the solution that is of such simplicity, it is beautiful. I’m sure that everyone in the world remembers the famous book “20,000 Leagues under the Sea” where a giant octopus (a veritable monster) attacks Captain Neno’s submarine. Well, there you have it. Octopuses, evidently, feed on submarines, pointless to search any further.
So, all we have to do is tie a fly that imitates a submarine.. in deer hair (an infant could do that) and that’s all there is to it. As for the efficiency of it, it is without question. Not more than a week ago our young collaborator, Cyril, in order to test the prototype went to Dieppe where he caught, with the aid of this fly, an adorable female cephalopoda that he christened Genevieve; he immediately set to training her and today walks her on leash down the Boulevard Saint-Germaine to the general admiration of the parisiens who, a tear in their eyes, murmur: “Oh, how beautiful… Thank you the Mouching”.