Divorced Angler Memories Of A Big Catch -2024- ...

It’s January 2025 now. The lake is frozen. My boat is shrink-wrapped in the cabin’s side yard, looking like a white cocoon. The loon flew south weeks ago.

First cast: nothing. Second cast: a soft tick, then a hard thunk as my jig bounced off a rock.

Looking back from the quiet of early 2025, I realize that the memory of that 7.2-pound bass isn’t about the fish. It’s about the moment before the catch. The thousands of casts into empty water. The mornings I went out when I wanted to stay in bed. The decision to keep fishing when every instinct said what’s the point? Divorced Angler Memories of a Big Catch -2024- ...

I took one photo—not to brag, but to remember the feeling of strength—and let it go. Watching that fish disappear back into the depths felt like a metaphor I desperately needed.

She (and it was a she, I would learn) went deep three times. She tried to wrap me around a anchor rope from a nearby duck decoy. Twice, I saw a flash of golden bronze and a tail as wide as a dinner plate. My heart was hammering harder than it had during the final custody conversation. It’s January 2025 now

I didn’t plan to become a statistic in 2024. I didn’t plan to become the man who talks to his outboard motor or who measures the success of a morning by the tug on a braided line rather than the warmth of a shared blanket. But here we are. And somewhere out there, in the deep channel near the western reed bed, a fish the size of a logger’s forearm was waiting to change all of it.

Psychologists have long noted that the newly divorced often throw themselves into hobbies with a near-aggressive intensity. It is a way to reclaim agency, to prove that the self still exists outside of the "we." The loon flew south weeks ago

— Hank January 2025