Four years ago in June

Location: New River, near Radford Va.(which is actually the second oldest river in the world next to da Nile)

My buddy and I just got done fighting off a massive hangover from the night before, I got out to the river later than I had planned due to said hangover. After having a fairly stellar first couple hours of raking rainbows and browns I decided it was about time to call it day.

Well, my buddy wanted to stay out for a couple more minutes so I decided to cast a few more times downstream from him. It wasn't more than two seconds after my fly hit the tip of the water that it was devoured by a monster rainbow. It was to say the least the most intense ten minutes handling a fly rod in my life. My buddy ran downstream with the net, I wasn't trying to fight so much as I was afraid it was gonna break the line. As soon as my buddy got within three feet of king lunker he slipped on a rock and caught my my line on his waiters, causing the line to snap somewhere, (still don't know exactly what happened).

So we sat there, him looking at me and me looking at him. Us both knowing that there was more than likely a record rainbow on the end of my line. My buddy kept apologizing all the way back to the truck, I don't think he had felt so bad over anything his whole life. As for me, I felt worse for him than for me. There will always be another day, but he has to live with that the rest of his life. I told him I wouldn't tell anyone. He said, "i appreciate that man, let's go get tore up". And that's exactly what we did, and he paid for everything all night.. beer, food, bud and everything in between.

All in all it was a great weekend, I don't really look at it as the one that got away nowadays. I look back at it being a fairly awesome weekend and a story I may tell our kids one day if he ever decides to piss me off.