Water Works

by Bob Luck
“Sometimes I find it hard to pick a topic for my monthly TCTU column”, I told my wife Sahya.  “But this time is easy. I am going to write about how my fishing rods got lost in Turkey.”  “They didn’t get lost in Turkey”, she replied.  “They got lost in Minneapolis”.  She was right.
I spend most of my year either fishing or traveling, but I rarely combine the two.  I do my fishing from April to November, mostly in the Driftless Area with an occasional outing to the Mississippi, or the St. Croix, and a rare trip to the Rockies.  I do my traveling from December through March.  I leave my fishing rods at home and focus on culture, history, food and marriage maintenance.
But last Fall, when Sahya told me she wanted to visit Turkey, I started plotting.  Turkey has plenty of warm, sunny places along with great food, culture and a fascinating history, but it also has high mountains and all kinds of interesting subspecies of brown trout.  I negotiated with Sahya to give me a few days off at the beginning of April, and tracked down a local fly fishing guide who was willing to take me on a fishing/camping excursion into the Taurus mountains just north of the Mediterranean city of Antalya.  My guide, Tuncay, advised me to bring rods, waders and gear because fly fishing gear is expensive or unavailable in Turkey, and his supply is limited.

We left for Turkey on March 16, the day after the Snowmageddon that closed down the Great Waters show. My checked suitcase was half filled with fishing gear, and I carried on two aluminum tubes taped together, one with a couple of four-weights and one with two Tenkara rods.  Overkill?  Not if you ask me; what if I broke a rod?  It wasn’t Snowmageddon in Istanbul, but it was cold and rainy.  “No problem”, I thought, Antalya is a lot farther south and I still have two weeks until the fishing trip.  We had a lovely time in Istanbul, albeit eating too much Baklava, and a week later we went to the airport to fly to our next stop, Cappadocia, on the Anatolian plateau.  As I put my rod cases onto the metal detector belt, the security guard made an X with his arms and said “Proheebited”.  After fruitlessly trying to explain that it was just fishing rods, I trudged back to the counter and checked the tubes.  Cappadocia has an amazing eroded volcanic landscape, plus caves, early Christian ruins and even better Baklava than Istanbul, but I started to get nervous as the poor weather continued.  When we flew back to the Mediterranean coast on March 26th, I contacted Tuncay, who advised me that he had never seen such a long stretch of continuous rain and cold this late in the year, and recommended we cancel our trip.  I reluctantly agreed, and was happy I had done so when we drove through two feet of snow in the Taurus Mountains en route to Antalya.  Antalya is a lovely city (with great Baklava), and Sahya and I found plenty to keep us occupied until April 5th when we flew back to the US.  I tried to convince the security folks that, since we would only spend a few minutes in Turkish airspace, I should be able to carry on my rod case from Istanbul to Minneapolis. I got a hard no. 
Twenty hours later, we arrived at MSP, cleared customs and retrieved our bags from the luggage conveyor.  Two bags, that is.  Delta lost my rods.  I spent the next seven days talking with a very persistent AI agent who kept trying to convince me it would solve all my problems before I threatened to call its supervisor and it reluctantly connected me to a human.  After a week,  I declared defeat and spent a half-hour retrieving old receipts and filling out a 9-bage lost baggage claim.  That did the trick…Delta called me that very night to proudly announce they had found my bag.
I have plenty of spare rods, and the fishing was great last week in the Driftless.  I still haven’t given up on fishing in Turkey, though, and Sahya has promised to buy me a suitcase big enough to hold my rods.