OVER THE TOP

  A person catches a fish. Perhaps it’s a nice specimen. Perhaps it’s the first fish he ever caught or perhaps it’s the first musky, lake trout, name a species, he or she has ever angled from the depths. It could be the angler’s biggest fish ever or the largest musky, laker or whatever. What comes next is almost inevitable - the hero photo!
 

Dan Small's Facebook Post

You’ve seen them, I’ve seen them, I’ve been behind the camera and in front. For the most part, they are awful.  At best they are moderately interesting.

  A friend of mine posted a hero shot on Facebook recently. He’d caught a nice muskie on a fly rod and posed for the inevitable happy-snappy session to record the catch for posterity.

  The comments on Facebook were the normal, “Nice fish,” “Way to go,” “What did it weigh?”

  I don’t usually make comments like that. However, in the hero photo posted, he’d made one alteration to the usual grip and grin pose. He’d positioned his fly rod behind his neck, balancing it on his back over his shoulders.
 
 “Interesting pose,” I thought, and decided to make a decidedly different sort of comment on his Facebook post. “Nice balancing act with the fly rod,” I wrote.

  Few of the comments I make on Facebook go viral, regardless of how astute, asinine, insightful or germain they may be. This comment engendered a long list of follow-up comments.

  Who knew?  I’ve seen hero shots with fly-rodders holding their rod and reel in their teeth. Those are weird. The over the shoulder pose, less so and plenty of fly-flickers let me know the balance-on-the-back pose is now a widely accepted.

 

What’s good for one is good for all. So when Marc Garringer caught this steelhead on my boat recently, we went with the new-age pose for his hero photo.  How do you like it?