This is a soul soothing blend excellent for calming your inner fly fishing child, especially after he (or she) has been traumatized by the exorbitant prices found in whatever gear catalog you may have recently received in the mail. Six hundred and twenty-five dollars for a nine-foot plastic buggy whip, just because it's produced with the new "Nano-Titanium" process--are these people completely insane? Fishermen are getting financially shafted by every single equipment manufacturer under the sun. But, apparently, they don't mind the feeling too much because they keep believing the hype and paying the big bucks. If you totaled the entire lot of old glass and graphite rods I currently own, together they wouldn't add up to that kind of money. Yet somehow I manage to limp along perfectly fine, catching those silly trout more impressed by seductive presentation than sexy technology.
Unlike the fly fishing industry, Cornell & Diehl's isn't trying to fill your waders with advertising smoke. You actually could enjoy their blend all day, every day, if you had the inclination to do so. In fact, at this very moment I'm pleasurably puffing away on a bowl of BLACK DAWG in a Nachwalter Canadian I picked up last October at the suggestion of my wife. (Ah, the bliss of marrying the right woman!) There's no bite beyond what's common to any quality Latakia blend. The tobacco smells reminiscent of burnt wood--maybe like cold cinders from an extinguished camp fire--both before and during incineration. It's aromatic only in the peculiar sense that a Perique/Latakia aficionado would be likely to appreciate. The flavor, of course, is woodsy as well. Frankly, I love the stuff. I don't want to say this is my favorite Latakia mixture because I have a tendency to be too enthusiastic at times, but I really am smitten with the BLACK DAWG.
I know one thing, if I keep looking through this stupid catalogue I'll burn through a two-ounce canister before I reach the last page. A rotary vise, $429; a large-arbor disk drag reel, $450; twenty-four hundred smackaroos for a bamboo rod marketed by a corporation whose name makes it sound like the company is selling cigarettes: I'll tell you, ten greenbacks for a tin of BLACK DOG is beginning to sound like the deal of the century to me, that's for sure.
John 14:6
Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."
�copyright 2001, Perry S. Fuller
