Saturday morning. After getting to sleep at about 03:00, I was woken up by Dave a little after 11:00. It took me a few minutes to get up and get myself sort of presentable, then I joined Dave, his wife Julie, and Julie's Dad Fred at the Union Creek Resort General Store, where I got a 1-day fishing license and a bottle of Snapple.

We then took Fred's SUV and drove about 10 miles to their usual fishing spot, where they come each year to fish in. It's 8 miles along highway 62 towards Crater Lake, and then a couple of miles along some gravel and dirt one-lane roads. After that, it's a 10 minute hike downhill to get to the river.

This was my first time fishing, so Fred taught me some basics. I was using one of his spare fishing rods, and he showed me how to cast the line, let it drift, and reel it in. Conceptually, fishing is quite simple. The hard part is in fishing in the right spots and your technique. You need to know how fish see the world, which I'll get to in a little bit.

Julie and I start fishing in Julie's Spot, but we don't catch any fish. I'm sort of casting the line randomly, letting it reel out downstream, and then lazily reeling the line back in. Julie has more experience so she takes care of where the line is going, although we do get our lines tangled once. Meanwhile, Murray, Dave and Julie's dog, is excitedly running from Julie to me and back again, looking at the water and waiting for a trout to pop out.

Dave has gone off on his own, sort of. He crosses the river and finds a nice spot on the opposite bank from us. Dave is much more methodical, taking a minute to put some Salmon eggs on his hook, then he carefully casts his line and makes like a piece of fish food. But he does catch two trout in about half an hour.

Fred's fishing rod is broken, so he spends the afternoon in turn trying to fix it and helping Julie fish. I start moving farther away to give Julie a chance to catch a trout in her Spot. But for me it's still random casting and reeling, so I don't get even a nibble.

By now it's been a couple of hours. Dave has caught his limit of five trout, Julie has caught one trout. Dave comes over to give me some fishing advice. For once, he's quite law-abiding by not catching any more fish or trying to do all my work. Actually, Dave's a pretty good guy, so I exaggerate his lawlessness.

Dave says that the trout like laying in slow-moving, dark water, usually near rocks. The trout look out into the faster-moving water lit by the sun, so they can get a good look at their prey. If some food floats along, a trout lunges out to eat it, then it goes back to its spot. So I need to cast my line upstream and let my bait float downstream past a dark area.

So I practice a bit. It's not trivial to cast your line and then get it to go where you want it. Takes some patience. But after a half hour or so I do get a trout to bite. Unfortunately I panicked and just tried to lift it out of the water. The trout dropped off the hook.

When you feel a bite. Jerk up with your line to get the hook firmly embedded in the fish's mouth. Usually, a fish is too big to hold up out of the water by the hook. So you need to slowly reel the fish in, and then when it's close to the shore you yank it up onto the ground.

Anyway, Dave had me try a couple of spots but I didn't get another bite. By now it was getting close to 16:00 so we packed up and headed back to the car. Final score: Dave - 5, Julie - 2, Fred - 0, Kevin - 0. It is fun and relaxing, although it can be frustrating if you really want to catch fish. It's a bit tiring since you're always standing and you hold your arms out to keep the rod out to keep the line out farther. A good experience and we'll fish some more tomorrow.