A LONG TIME AGO IN A PLACE FAR WAY...
As a professional fly fisherman, my life style has provoked a lot of envy from my friends. “Gosh,” they say, it must be wonderful to spend your time fishing, hanging around tackle shops, speaking to fly fishing clubs and things like that! I wish I could give up my job and be like you. I’ll bet you have a great time, how did you get into it?”
Yes, it is a lot of fun, but it hasn’t always been easy and contrary to popular belief, I wasn’t born with a fly rod in my hand that came later, perhaps at about ten.
I still remember that day, returning from a camping vacation in Maine with my parents. It was crisp and cool and the autumn leaves were turning and starting to fall. As we drove down the narrow, twisting road that paralleled the rocky brook, we came to a rest stop with a lone picnic table where the meandering waterway emptied into a small, clear mountain lake.
As my mother unpacked the picnic lunch, fishing rod in hand, I explored the shoreline with my dog, looking for frogs, snakes, other creepy crawlers, and of course, fish!
Perhaps fifty feet or so from shore, an old couple was fishing from a wooden row boat (or at least they seemed old to a ten year old kid, perhaps about 40). Between puffs on his pipe, the old man would take several strokes with his oars, carefully, silently, then use them to brake the rowboat’s progress.
Rhythmically and smoothly, his wife would extend the heavy fly line, false casting with that delicate brown bamboo wand. Four, five, perhaps six casts she would make, each a few feet longer than the previous until at last the fly hovered above the point where she thought a fish might lurk. Then she would stop and the fly would light like a thistle down on the placid mirror image of Mt. Kathadin.
Two, maybe three casts she would make to that spot, then her husband would row a few more strokes and ship the oars. She would repeat the scenario. As I watched that little tuft of feathers float lazily on the still waters, a small dimple appeared on the surface and the fly was gone! A millisecond delay, the lady lifted her rod tip to set the hook and the delicate wisp of bamboo arched and danced gracefully. The brook trout dodged to the right, to the left and splashed about on the surface, scattering the reflection of the mountain and clouds. The struggle continued for a couple of minutes as the angler gave and took line, then her husband deftly slid the landing net under the delicately hued fish and lifted it into the boat. Excitedly, I ran back to the picnic table and began babbling to my dad as only a ten year old boy could do over a twelve inch fish. I spent the better part of the next hour in a fruitless attempt to imitate the fly casting of that lady angler with my tubular steel telescoping bait casting rod. My dad, a non fisherman at the time, tried to explain as best he could how a fly rod worked. As was the little twelve inch brook trout at the end of the lady’s line, I was hooked on fly fishing.
On the way to our home in Rhode Island, I continued my excited babble about what I had seen. Finally, I could contain myself no longer. “Dad,” I blurted out, “I need a fly rod!”
My father didn’t even take his eyes off the black top road ahead of the fifty five Nash Ambassador as he replied. “You already have a fishing rod!”
Undaunted, I turned to my mom and repeated the statement. “Mom, I need a fly rod!” As usual, such attempts to circumvent the decisions of my dad were met with the logical answer of, “You already have a fishing rod!”
Even at the tender age of ten, I was mature enough to know that responses such as, “But Dad, you already have A power saw”, or :Mom, you already have A pair of shoes,” would not elicit the sympathy needed. For the rest of the ride home, I contented myself with playing with tufts of my collie’s hair, some loose threads of the car’s upholstery and some feathers which I had found in the woods and thinking about how they could be made into something really useful, like a fishing lure. I dreamed on as my Dad drove.
The rest of the summer was filled with my collecting anything which remotely looked like it could be used for tying flies. No dog or cat in the neighborhood was safe from my scissors until school started that fall, nor were my parents safe from that relentless declaration, “I need a fly rod!”
As the summer progressed, I began to make some flies which probably would have fooled some intellectually challenged finny denizen of the brook. (actually, we weren’t politically correct yet and called them dumb fish) Still, I was like a third world nation having a nuclear weapon and no missile to deliver it.
Was it my relentless hounding of my parents or their realization that I was really serious which made them re think their blanket response of “You already have A fishing rod!” I’ll never know. True to parent’s typical resistance to admit being wrong about something like this, my Dad finally made a minor concession and said something of this sort:
“Okay, if you earn half of the money for a fly rod, we’ll pay for the rest of it.” I can just imagine what he was thinking at the time, “There, that should put an end to this nonsense.” You’ve heard of not tempting fate?
So, my time was now divided between school, fishing, tying flies and anything I had to do to get a few pennies to put into my fly rod fund: collecting deposit bottles, a paper drive, cutting lawns, shoveling sidewalks, even picking flowers from my mother’s garden and selling bouquets door to door to the old ladies in the neighborhood.
I took to walking home from school instead of taking the bus so that I could stop and drool over the fly rods at the G & M Sports Center, even though that made the walk an extra half mile. Anyway, it was good training for later hike in fishing trips.
In the spring, I surprised my Dad one Saturday morning when I announced that at last I had the money for half of that thirty nine, ninety five fly rod I had seen at the G & M Sports Center.
As stubborn as my Dad could be about sticking to something as ridiculous as “You already have A fly rod,” he was equally strict about sticking to his word and later that day I found myself on the front lawn trying to figure out how to use the darn thing. I quickly found it wasn’t as easy as that old lady had made it look.
One of my Dad’s friends who dabbled in fishing (at the time, I probably thought he taught Ted Trueblood how to fish) gave me a few pointers on fly casting, but it didn’t help much. I went to the East Providence Public Library, but the only book on fly fishing was Vince Marinaro’s “A Modern Dry Fly Code: a book of fly patterns and nothing to do with casting.
Those walks home from school, stopping by the sports shop paid off and here and there, I got a few casting lessons from some of the “old men” who hung around the tackle shop in the afternoons.
One of these was an ancient man, an insurance salesman of perhaps twenty five named Bruce Johnson. Bruce took me under his wing and introduced me to some of the tactics of trout fishing. (Up until this time, my fly fishing had been confined to flipping a crude fly in front of a bluegill or yellow perch some fifteen or twenty feet away and letting it sink.)
Bruce explained the importance of approaching a fish from down stream as the fish always faced up current and thus they couldn’t see you, the importance of a drag free float, matching the hatch and other important fly fishing trivia.
That was the beginning. I think back now and then to that old couple in the rowboat. I wish that I had known more about them.
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