If you’ve been fly fishing for any amount of time, I hope you’ve come to the realization that most outings aren’t going to look like the centerfold of Gray’s Sporting Journal. There’s a few reasons for this: the fish, the river, and you.
Take a good look at this brook trout and decide for yourself, could it live in an ugly place?
Let’s start with you. Never, ever do you fantasize about untangling the nymph rig that has somehow spiderwebbed itself into a cat’s cradle. Yet there you are. You had a few long, picturesque casts. But the last one had a little something off. Maybe it was your wrist. Maybe you were distracted by a fish rising upstream. Maybe your phone buzzed in your front wader pocket. Regardless, you’re no longer shadow casting like Brad Pitt. You’re spending four times as long unweaving your bespoke furled leader as you would if you’d just admit defeat and tie on the streamer you’ll end up using.
Now, the river. There are a lot of wild places out there. But wild places are also far away. People who have the initiative to truly be in wild places don’t live in suburbia. The highway median strip version of wild places close to most of us aren’t bad. They hold fish. They have clean, cold water. They also have shopping carts and the occasional shoe (always just one…). They feature cadres of innertube flotillas on holidays and weekends. Local flavor at its finest.
But the fish; the fish make it all worthwhile.
Beautiful fish live in ugly places. They live in culverts, under dilapidated bridges, and even within the twisted tines of submerged and mangled shopping carts. Big, colored-up brown trout spawn in little spring creeks that run behind strip malls and auto repair shops. Tarpon jump under power lines and within earshot of cacophonous boardwalks. Somehow, fish seem to thrive in and amidst jet ski traffic or a constant stream of approaching aircraft. In the right light, some of those scenes can be charming.
And beautiful fish tolerate a lot of our ugliness. Bad casts still yield good presentations. Gnarled knots sometimes hold just until the fish comes to hand. Flies, tied with our best efforts yet still not remotely anything that has swum or ever will swim, manage to fool animals that spend the majority of their lives thinking about food. We miss fish. We spook fish. At the end of the day, we do catch fish. We try the same thing over and over again expecting different results and the fish oblige our incessant insanity.
For most of us fly fishing is going to be a little ugly. But those breakthrough moments of beauty are what keep us coming back.
Read more of “The Pursuit of Fish” blog HERE