Capt. Andrew Derr, one of the great Long Island angling guides, wrapped up the 2024 season with a nice Albie—Derr photo.
The paradoxes of fly fishing
The memory of the fish you land or lose is only a highlight in a broad-ranging view. The joy of an instant of perfect angling skill and the fit-to-be-tied feeling of a fumble, when you lose a tarpon, salmon, trout, or striper, lessen their effect in the omnipresence of the stunning beauty surrounding the angler.
The fields of purple flowers plastered on the hills of Alaska bloomed only for a week, and the Cree guide piloted us down steep, and bending falls from Lake Kasba into a lower lake in search of lake trout and grayling.
The sun coming up on a Bahamas flat with hundreds of bonefish tailing
The enormous brown bear startled at a bend in a trail only to stand and roar before making a grumbling but hasty departure. A pair of eagles with chicks attacked, stealing my ranch hat and taking turns dive-bombing me for a quarter mile. A pack of wolves on an elevated trail watched the landing of a fifty-four-inch-long northern pike that was their preferred food on my retreat. The hundreds of spinner sharks pinning mullet to the shore just after I made it to the sand north of Boca Raton, Florida, and breaking through an overhang of mangrove to an open expanse of shallow water after a long cold snap to find hundreds of snook basking in the sun and very hungry in Boca Grande, Florida.
Morning flights of Everglades rookeries passed against the sunrise sky in a chorus of songs that echoed from an unknowable number of yesterdays
As planned, we were dropped off at the Yukon Lakeshore at midnight in July to fish for lake trout rising from the deep, ready to spawn, and feeding at the mouths of streams flowing into the lake. You could feel them through your feet, hear them, see them, and smell the caribou herd, at least a mile away, all night long in the land of the midnight sun.
Virginia Rainbow Trout by Thom Glace.
A red fox asking for help was in a trap and released with barely a bark of resistance
The osprey on the beach with a crippled wing calling out for help and brought to a sanctuary. Standing above a still wet-from-birth faun as the mother only yards away attempted to distract—Slate Run in Pennsylvania. Grabbing a friend heading over the falls near Lake Muskoka, Canada, and hanging high in a tree the deceased body of a fellow angler for protection from carnivores while on a six-day canoe trip in Quebec.
The majesty of ancient trees in British Columbia forests, running all out to get to the tree line to avoid the moose that meant business in Idaho, owls staring warning looks from their perches in Montana after sunset, fireflies by the millions on South Island, New Zealand, where a magpie who shared my sandwich, flew away and came back with a dozen friends and ate everything, then followed me. The ten-point buck stared at me for longer than imaginable, chewing his cud just ten feet away. The cast fly that stuck in a cow’s ass—angling for Atlantic salmon in Iceland.
We forget the fish caught or lost but not the fishing
A person with rod and reel in hand sees more and feels more in the woods, on a beach, in a skiff, or on the salt flats than if empty-handed.
Our senses are barely used in the modern-day. Those senses are regenerated in moments of tense excitement, watching for fish or game, and measuring our surroundings. Our field of vision becomes more expansive, and both sight and hearing are more sensitive than in any attitude of passive receptivity to nature.
The brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) is a freshwater fish species in the salmon family Salmonidae. Initially assigned trout status, Salvelinus is now a char. They are native to northeastern America. The watercolor (Study of Eastern Brook Trout) was provided courtesy of artist Thom Glace.
Never is the dawn more miraculous than when the fog first lifts along the reaches of the river—tying on a favorite fly with chilled, numb fingers and stepping, shivering, into the frigid water.
Never is the divine and terrifying mystery of the dark so close to you as when you stumble along an unknown trail in the twilight. The outdoor person who cannot understand how a man can be panic-stricken by the dark is not an outdoor person. They lack a sense of the thin line separating warmth, food, and shelter from the desperate horror of being lost in pitch black.
I was one of these people once
It was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan angling for trout in the spring that turned out to be the steelhead version. Three fish kept me in an irresponsible state of mind. The drizzling spring day turned colder, and a shortcut to a friend’s cabin at dusk landed in a bog. A long, sleepless night ensued, alert to every sound. At dawn, I heard voices. I was ten feet from the dirt road and two football fields from the cabin. My angling experience had been two miles from my overnight.
Salmo trutta [brown trout] illustration is by award-winning watercolorist Thom Glace. Used with permission.
A week later, our return was with heavily armed Indigenous people and met by weaponized military personnel who already had several bloodied and cuffed men in custody.
Between dawn and dark on any given day
There can be infinite variations of air, light, color, and wind—all playing upon the fisher’s mind like a puzzle with a reward.
The wind can be a friend one moment and a tormentor the next. Casting the fly into the trees or losing the hook solidly anchored against a rock is inevitable, but the water holds the authentic reward.
Thom Glace, the award-winning watercolorist’s commissioned striper, is one of the best illustrations of Morone saxatilis.
In the upper reaches of streams worldwide, springtime water flows from a hundred different sources, ranging from dark browns to flecked with other colors. The water clears as it pours over boulders, gravel, dead trees, and ledges until it changes to something strangely pure.
No hour like the last to the fly fisher, the river, stream, creek, arroyo, and brook often changes its form and color. The planning of the first cast was affected by every yard of moving water gliding over the ever-changing stream. The angler is a predator—not preoccupied with pure beauty but rather with the effect of wind and light, of deeper colored water, shallow riffled runs, and boulders splitting flows. Choosing the right cast to meet the situation increases success.
The paradox is that the very preoccupation with angling makes the fly fisher more sensitive to the flow of ever-enfolding beauty of the landscape
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