I’ll swear to anyone that it’s not about the fish to me when I go out, that it’s about the places. And the farm lake above any other place on the planet is more about the place than the fish to me, but there are great fish in it too. JP and his wife Bobbi were in the second Jeep and I really wanted them to get the full experience out of the trip. For all I know, any trip out to the farm these days could be the last. I expect to pull up to a For Sale sign one of these days, or worse, to the news that it’s already been sold. If this was their one and only trip to the farm, I wanted it to live up to the hype I gave it every time it became the subject of conversation. I realize that no one will ever love your favorite fishing spot as much as you, but like all fisherman, I try to impress its importance to me upon others. Because like all other fishermen, I just can’t help it.
I just started this too late. I wish I’d found fly fishing much sooner in life. It could’ve saved me a lot of heart ache. A lot of anger. A lot of depression. What you’ve got to understand is that even though I’ve always fished, there were a great number of years in between being a long haired head banger in high school stricken by the need to hunt bass in farm ponds with spinning rods and these years now, that I find time fleeting and calendars shrinking as I dream of chasing fish to the ends of the earth with a fly rod. The years in between were a distracted time the way I see it. There was always a fishing rod leaning in a corner of a closet or the garage that came out a couple times a year, but there were too many things taking my full attention, leaving almost none for the fish and the places they could be found.
I’ll never admit defeat because of the seasons or the weather. But I will concede to the fact that come fall, the fishing does slow down a bit up here. It’s a fact of life living in the north east. We all deal with it in our own personal ways, but the one way most of us use the time to take our minds off the details that the sun has gone down before we even eat dinner and that we aren’t on the water is to tie flies. You might tie during the slow fishing season to refill fly boxes that slowly gained empty spaces during the busy fishing season. You might tie just because it still connects you to fly fishing. The idea that you might not be casting a fly rod everyday now but that you’re still supporting the act in other ways has its own way of keeping one’s sanity in check. Or, if you’re JP, you suggest tying with a group at a local establishment that has room for a few people to set up vices in an area off to the side somewhere… and serves beer.
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