God I'm low on the list. I could probablly regurgitate a Penthouse Forum letter and no one would notice this far down!
Anyhow, I was fishing Cliff Lake off SW Montana's Madison River several years ago. Cliff Lake is legendary for its big browns and rainbows (held the Montana State record with a 28lb. brown for a few years) so my partner and I were jacked for the possibility of getting a tow by one of these brutes in our tubes. However, Cliff is a deep, deep lake and we we using everything we had to get our flies down 30-40 feet into the "zone". With anticipation still riding high, we kicked past an anchored jon boat grossly overloaded with several cowboy hatted adults, 5-6 rugrats, a couple of mangy dogs, numerous coolers, a veritable briar patch of spinning rods AND a stringer of fish that looked like something out of my granpa's photo album of salmon fishing off Point No Point in the 1920's!
Trying to sound nonchalant, while also drooling a tad, I cast out the proverbial "How's fishing?" to the mob. Actually I was ready to ply these local worm dunkers for all the information I could wring out of them...depth, bait etc... Being an "purist,snobby,flyfisheran" I wasn't going to allow those worm chuckers the satifaction of knowing that their Powerbait encrusted snelled baithooks from the local True Value were kicking the crap out of my Orvis, Sage, Scientific Angler blah, blah, blah, setup towing the perfectly tied hellioandropomorphic sculpin pattern indiginous to that environment. How's that for fly lingo?
Anyhow, I was rewarded with a reply of "Great fishing! Daddy hold up my fish!" from a beaming little girl about age 8. Well, "Daddy" with true friendly Montana hospitality, smiled and pulled up an obnioxios vine of trout none under 18-inches and one (which I supposed was the happy little girl's catch) looked to push the 30-inch mark. It was truly a thing of beauty and Kodak moment. Except that right when Grandma was snapping a picture of little Debbie and her monster, one of the overloaded chain links next to Daddy's hand decided that the steel in the 99-cent K-Mart stringer need to pop loose to relieve 20-some pounds of rainbow trout induced stress on it.
When those fish fell in the water, a numb silence fell across the boat for a second and then with looks of horror, pure pandemoneum busted loose. Dogs and cowboy hats flew in the water, Granpma and Daddy were lunging for the prized stringer, the allready overloaded boat was wildly rocking and shipping ungodly amounts of water, Mom and Grandma were screaming at everyone to sit down, Grandma's camera went swimming....PURE HELL for 10-seconds. It all subsided and silence prevailed in the boat until the Dad metioned to the now thoughouly devestated little girl that "It's all right honey, well catch another fish."
"NO ITS NOT!" she wailed back. "WE'LL NEVER CATCH ANOTHER ONE AND IT'S ALL HIS FAULT!!!" Of course she was pointing directly at me. I was trying my best to shrink into some small unnoticable aquatic bug that could travel great distances and speeds over water in short amounts of time. And, of course in my tube I couldn't get too far too quick so I had the unpleasant task of watching the little girl bore holes in my float tube with her angry eyes while her family retrieved their pooches and bailed the old jon boat.
As they pulled anchor and fired up their old outboard to head back to what would probablly be a somber camp, my partner was laughing his head off. I felt horrible for inadvertantly ruining a little girls fishing day (probablly scarring her for life and turning her into a man-hating, float-tube despising, angry assasin of anything toting a damned flyrod woman).
Anyhow, there is something to be said for karma since I spent 6 more days in the fly-fishing paradise of Montana and could only hook a whitefish or two. The fish gods had their revenge. Every drop of water I touched from the Clark Fork, to the Henry's Fork, to Clark Canyon Resevior went utterly dead (for everyone) upon my arrival. I finally flew out of Bozeman to return my job in disgust. Of course two hours after I was airborn, my friend was driving (he stayed another week)a favorite stretch of the Missouri and saw with a smile that rods were bent for a mile stretch of river. He claims he was never so happy to see a fishing buddy go home. I can't blame him. Since that day whenever the Queets, Naselle, Dry Falls, or any other water fails to give up a thing, he blames me and the Cliff Lake debaucle.
My partner that day never fails to revive that story when he puts on a slide show for a fly club or hosts his booth at a sportsman's expo. I still feel like an ass about it.

[This message has been edited by Chuckn'Duck (edited 04-13-2000).]