How Fishermen Can Tell Whether They’ve Married Well

I don’t know what you received for Valentine’s Day, but this is what I got (not the boat itself; I got that last year, with my wife’s blessing).

Earlier this month, I got to travel to Chile and hammer wild, two-foot brown trout on dry flies for 10 days. As I was checking the weather report in the Santiago airport on my way home, however, I saw that the Colorado Front Range near Denver, not far from where we live, was supposed to get 80-mph winds this week (today, actually). Oh jeez, I thought, that’s going to tear the cover off my boat.

I always wrap my boats in tarps for the winter, because up here in the high country, it isn’t the wind and the snow that eats up a canvas top as much as it is the sun. I’d rather spend $30 on a new tarp each year than shell out several hundred for a new custom canvas cover. But my old tarp was about done for, and I knew that it wasn’t going to make it through another storm.

Much to my pleasant surprise, not only did Mrs. D pick me up at the airport when I returned from Chile, but when we pulled into the driveway, I noticed that she’d also bought a new super-duty tarp and rewrapped the boat, on her own, with new bungee cords—while I was away in South America fishing—without my asking or saying a single word to her about it. Happy Valentine’s Day.

If she doesn’t win the ultimate-cool-fishing-spouse-of-the-year award for 2016, I’m certainly interested in hearing other nominations.