As much as I try to keep things simple for myself, I’m too often lured in by the latest, greatest, next-best-thing-ever streamer pattern to come around. And I while I do believe that reasonably sized, natural streamers catch more good trout than huge streamers, I catch myself looking at a simple #8 Bugger these days and thinking, “Oh, that’s not nearly good enough.”
I hold on to winter longer than anyone else I know. I love winter for what it is, for what it makes me feel, for what it turns me into — for how it forces family to huddle closer, and for how exquisitely alone I feel outside.
Winter is the season of absence.
My friend, Steve, texted me yesterday to ask if I knew that my name was in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette sports section. Since my mediocre Little League baseball career ended at twelve years old, I’d figured that my chances at making the sports section of any paper were shot. But to my surprise, there it was, both online and printed in the Sunday paper.
And I have to admit that it makes me smile. I grew up reading the PPG, and I still do. As a home grown western Pennsylvania boy, I follow my Steelers, Penguins and Pirates with devotion.
When a particularly large pair of dark phantoms abandoned the bank and skirted the perimeter of my position, I’d had enough. I turned my back to the main flow where I was catching trout.
Fly fishing done well is a mental game, a series of tips and tricks. Those tricks are like a deck of cards, all stacked up and ready to play, ready to pull out and utilize the one that best fits the moment. Sometimes we know what card to play, and other times we stand in the river befuddled and confused. In those perplexing moments, we shuffle the deck and then choose: Pick a card — any card.
Adding cards to the deck of tricks is half the fun of this whole thing. All the good anglers I know are constantly searching for the next trick, the next clue, because a larger deck provides more options and more solutions.
Fly fishing seems complicated. And that creates an artificial barrier to both new anglers and the casual fly fisher who just wants to get a little better at something. “Where do I start?” They ask. “Fly fishing is so complex.”
No it’s not. It certainly doesn’t have to be.
As a young troutbitten kid, I learned to fish live minnows strung on a small double hook with a barrel swivel and split shot. My uncle taught me to cast upstream and dead drift the unlucky creature, adding a slight lift when necessary to keep it off the bottom. When the fathead minnow was across from my position, I allowed the line to tighten and swing as the minnow was carried downstream. That transition between dead drifting and swinging was the sweet spot of the drift, and I learned to understand where it would happen. By considering the speed and direction of the various currents, I tried to position myself adjacent to the prime holding water for the best trout. Even at ten years of age, fishing was a beautifully complicated game and every cast was full of possibility. It was captivating.