About this blog

Wow. Another fly fishing blog. I think there are only about 8 billion already. They range in style from pure fish porn to political rants with the occasional trip report or musing. This one hopes to be different. It started when I was curating my late father-in-law's fishing tackle. He owned a book- it was something like "fly fishing: top secrets of the pro's" or something like that. It was published when Eisenhower was president. I sat down with it one evening hoping to review it to see how fly fishing had changed since that time. To my surprise, it hadn't changed much. The same stuff we read about today in all the slick fishing mags was being written about then. How to find the biggest trout (wow! Fish woody cover next to deep runs and pools!). You too can match the hatch. Nymphing is hard but you can catch a bunch of fish. Fly rods are long, but sometimes short ones can be useful in certain situations. Match your line to your rod. If natural colors aren't producing, try something gaudy. OK, there were a few things then that you don't read about today. Especially the delightful recipes for dry fly floatant that involved carbon tetrachloride (banned for years due to its toxic nature). But almost all of it was the same, with a few technological improvements. Substitute the words graphite, flourocarbon, and DT-5-F in the right places and you could have something right out of any of the current publications. I want to change that.

The beauty of fly fishing is that it works on any level. It can be as simple or complicated as you want, and even simple catches fish. I chose complicated. I like the intricacy, it takes my mind off the bad things I see in the world and helps me focus on the good and the beautiful. I tie strange flies that usually don't work. I mess with bamboo rods and have a shop devoted solely to them (how that happened is a wonderful story for the future). I fish graphite when I feel like conditions require it, or even if I imagine they do. I have a Fenwick fiberglass rod that is one of the few things remaining from my youthful sporting life, and I may try to own another.It caught a fish on its first cast. I have an entire shelf full of books about fly fishing. I have more materials than I can remember (fly shop proprietor: Hey, you bought three packs of this stuff last week. What are you tying with it? Me: damn!) I made it as complicated as fly fishing can be, and it is all fun. And my day job is studying fish- my life is sort of like Jacques Cousteau and "The Deadliest Catch" collide head on. Complicated is good, especially when you want it that way.

This blog is about the obscure corners of the sport, the unknown, and most of all the unknowable.You may find some fish stories, fly patterns, tying tips, weird observations, natural history, political rants having to do with conservation, humor (at least three people have told me that some of my discussion group posts were funny, and the rest were too polite to say otherwise), and mindless philosophical rants. There may be product reviews, but this will never be a tool of the fishing industry. There may be fish babes, but only as a last resort to increase readership.Most of the things you learn will be useless. I will raise more questions than answers. I may take reader questions, but only if they are truly weird and obscure. There will be one and only one hunting story each year, and it will provide incontrovertible evidence that I should stick to fly fishing. Stay tuned.