Why I Fish

Truth? I am not a terribly avid flyfisher. My wife is much more driven to it, and I introduced her to it. But I do enjoy it.

Like a lot of "guy" things, the equipment intensiveness of it is half of the fun. My wife enjoys that as much as I do. This last trip she discovered a new type of fly floatant. We each have a small collection of rods, and each have a favorite. Mine is a delicate one weight that makes me feel like a champion caster.

I don't suppose I am really expert, but after 25 years of it, I am competent. I'm fussy about when and where I fish. Fair weather, reasonable temperatures, a stony bottomed stream that isn't too hard to get to are all requirements. It's nice to have a hatch going that I can recognize enough to find something similar on one of my boxes of flies.

I tie on with arthritic fingers and eyes still good enough to thread the hook eye and tie the special knot that secures the fly—five turns, through the bight and then through the loop, wet it before pulling tight on end, hook, and standing line (you have to use teeth as a third hand)—and then I step into the water. I fish dry flies. You can't get those lovely looped casts with the junk you have to tie on to fish nymphs. But sometimes I'll make the concession of tying on another fly behind the dry—a dropper that trails 12 to 18 inches behind the main fly.

Standing in cool moving water up to your knees or even a little higher is soothing. It seems to drain the tension out of me better than the best of massages. Then the prayer wheel like motion begins. Back cast to one o'clock, forward to ten. the line moves out behind and then extends in front in a long flat loop leaving the fly at the end a few inches above the surface to settle with the slightest break in the moving water. That's if I have done it right. I seem to get it about one out of every two or three times, and if I am settled into the easy zone of it, several times in a row, each one placing the feathered lure into a slightly different location.

If a fish rises to that very first cast, I am not likely to be able to set the hook. I'm not ready. I'm still settling in to the river and its rhythms, but if one rises there will be another. Yet it doesn't matter that much if I catch or how many or how big. It's nice to be successful that way, but the value of the moment has more to do with where I am and how it feels than it does with the "catching." One morning this last trip I took a very small brown trout in the Big Hole near a spot we like. I held the river's life in my hand to gently remove the hook and then released him to swim away with a flick of his tail. It felt good to be in the river again.