Camera, mind-set save magic moments

From our skiff, in a circle 50 yards across in front of us, it looked like the surface of the quiet sea was dimpled like a golf ball. A moment later, those dimples then twitched in tiny ripples as if alive. Shorebirds hovered and dived in giant splashes.

“It’s nervous water,” said my fishing pal, Charlie Meyers. “Look at that, I’ve heard of this and never seen it before in this size. It’s from a feeding frenzy pushing incredible numbers of baitfish to the surface.”

Ed Rice, in another small skiff, was directly across from us. We picked up our fly rods, cast into the school, and at the same time, all three of us hooked up bonito. In the next hour, we also caught jack crevalle and tuna that spooled us in about 10 seconds.

It was kind of like putting your lines down from an overpass and hooking a semitruck going by at 55 mph.

This was on an October day in the Caribbean, about 10 miles off the coast of Costa Rica near the outlet of the Rio Colorado and the Nicaraguan border. That morning, I’d seen the birds working offshore. We broke the lodge rules about going out to sea, boarded 14-foot skiffs, and went out on our own.

A few years went by, and one afternoon, I got a surprise call from Charlie. His voice sounded a little raspy, with an inflection of what sounded like forced joy.

“We had a good time that day off Costa Rica, didn’t we?” he said. “That was good, right? Were you OK with me?”

“That was the best,” I answered. “Never had another hour like it. You were great. Remember the tuna that spooled us?”

“It was a privilege to throw a line with you into that water,” he said. “That was good, wasn’t it?”

An hour after the call, I realized it sounded like he was searching for affirmation.

Magic in a moment

Like many of his friends, I didn’t even know Charlie was sick. To me, Charlie Meyers was invincible. He was brilliant, strong, fit, and one of the few outdoors writers — he worked out of Denver — who was technically skilled in the outdoors and who carried the highest sense of truth, ethics and fairness in everything he did.

Charlie died eight years ago and it still bothers me I never told him how much I admired him. I thought there would be other chances. But it turned out that phone call was the last chance.

That experience showed how the most important moments can pass in and out of your life without acknowledgment. It often happens when you share outdoor experiences with people you care for. And then one day, you look up and they are gone, often slipping away to something else, another area, dropping out of sight, or worse.

The chances for this are high when so many are overwhelmed with their jobs, traffic and lists. There’s no time. You can end up skimming the surface.

When it comes to the landmark personal moments in the outdoors, they are usually a surprise, that is, you don’t seem them coming. Galen Rowell, the great outdoors landscape photographer, called them “unrepeatable moments.”

Galen made it his passion to capture these moments in photos. With the high caliber of smartphones, the goal has become easier for many. But it goes to more of a state of mind than equipment: Make the moment count and have it forever.

Missed opportunity

Many can be chagrined for years by opportunities missed in the outdoors.

At the Golden Gate Bridge one time, I unexpectedly received on-the-spot permission to take the elevator in the South Tower to the top. You gaze down through the grated catwalk at your feet and to the water 750 feet below and across the bay and San Francisco. I felt this eerie sensation of weightlessness and spatial disorientation, like nothing I’ve ever felt. I have no photos that captured the experience.

Another time, we were hiking the John Muir Trail from Mount Whitney to Yosemite Valley, and near Frog Lake in Kings Canyon, a huge cinnamon-color black bear, on a food raid, rolled into camp. It would have taken one or two of us to scare him off. Instead, all three of us chased the bear off into the woods, and in the process, we all missed the photo.

For the most spectacular sunset in my life, I didn’t have my camera with me. One evening in early fall, I was flying out of the Bay Area, north over Carquinez Strait near Benicia, and took in the scene off my left wing: Over the Pacific Ocean, the sun was dipping into a broken layer of stratus at 10,000 feet, where the orange light refracted through the clouds for 50 miles. Through the breaks in the stratus, golden sunbeams bored through, and at about 5,000 feet, hit puffy cumulus and made them look like pink cotton candy. Below, a river of fog, tinted yellow and orange, was pouring through the Golden Gate, with the spires poking through the fog deck.

Photographer pal Brian Murphy was so disturbed that I missed the photo that he gave me a disposable camera. I kept it as a symbol to never miss another moment like that again.

Magic lost, captured

This kind of thing can hit anybody, at any age, at any time. You then look back at the event for years, and the best you can do is run the memory through your mind. That’s all you have.

This past week, Ed Rice, now in an assisted-living complex, phoned and wanted to talk about fly-fishing, and then said, as a special gift, he wanted me to have one of his prized pieces of outdoors equipment, an unfired collector’s rifle. Many consider Ed as the world’s “Grand Master of Fly-fishing,” who is believed to have caught more species on the fly than anybody in the world, and a firstballot winner in the charter year of the California Outdoors Hall of Fame.

A few years ago, with Ed legally blind and having difficulty walking, I took him to his favorite lake, Rufus Woods in northeastern Washington. He asked me to be his eyes, where he would ask for the locations of shoreline landmarks, and then he’d cast while sitting. It befuddled the locals that this blind guy showed up and was the top rod on the lake, and another tale was added to his legend. In the moment, I put down my fly rod, pulled out my phone and took photos of Ed, one casting and another with a big trout before we released it.

On that phone call, I told Ed that I felt blessed to have photos of those moments.

“What I wish I could get is not your rifle,” I told him. “I wish I had a photo of you that day in the Caribbean, on that skiff casting into that school of fish.”

“I know just how you feel, Tom-my-boy,” he answered. “That was so good with you and Charlie.”

Take the photo. Recognize the people you care for and the magic moments in the outdoors that you share. It can keep the best of times from slipping through the cracks of your life.

Tom Stienstra is The Chronicle’s outdoors writer. Email: tstienstra@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @StienstraTom

Tom Stienstra / The Chronicle Ed Rice, nearly blind, caught and released this large rainbow trout while fly-fishing at Rufus Woods Lake in Washington.

I should have called him back. That night he died. Cancer.