Removing flies from our ointment

This morning's blue, clear, sky held a rising sun in the East and a setting, full moon in the West. It felt almost as if the universe were starting to right itself after near capsizing. It was also pretty enough to make us feel good about being alive.

During the past few days, we've been sneaking in a few moments of something we've been threatening to do for the past several years. We've actually begun to organize our fly fishing boxes and may even try to identify the names of many of the trout flies we have at hand. For the moment, we're just putting nymphs with nymphs; dry flies with dry flies; wet flies, which we almost never fish (personal bias) have been sorted and set aside for some years now. We're still thinking about a separate box for terrestrials (hoppers, crickets and ants) and/or "attractors." In the process, we've discovered we have many more trout flies than we realized, sort of like our situation with books.

a variety of "prince" nymphs (top & bottom) plus misc.

Photo by J. Harrington

In the process of playing with, er, working on organizing, our toys, er, fishing tools, we've made a startling discovery. Much more progress is evident when we actually do the sorting work than when we spent much of our time sitting around thinking about how things should be done. Not that we're about to join the "chuck and chance it" school of fishing (catch what we did there?, heh, heh), but there's an outside possibility we may be overthinking things and, as we do so, turning pleasure into pain. A large part of our revised approach was prompted by the idea below, that we came across as we were skimming through our copy of Tom Rosenbauer's Fly Fishing for Trout, The Next Level.

... There are always tons of hatch-matching patterns available, and better ones come out each year. Get a bunch of popular flies that imitate mayflies in the dun, emerger, and spinner stages; caddisflies in mergers and adults; and stonefly adults (you don't need emergers for stoneflies, just egg-laying adults) in a few sizes and shades and have at it.

In the next paragraph Rosenbauer writes "In practice, you'll learn your local hatches and which flies and what stages are important." If it turns out we never do learn the name of the fly we're fishing at any given moment, then we can, in all honesty, reply "Dunno" if asked by a fellow angler "What are they taking?" If we take a photo of the fly being fished at any given time, that can substitute for a name and if we actually start keeping a fishing journal, instead of intending to, we may have fun as we make progress. It's almost as if we've been given an early Christmas present this year.

Things keep sorting themselves.

By Jane Hirshfield

Does the butterfat know it is butterfat,

milk know it’s milk?

No.

Something just goes and something remains.

Like a boardinghouse table:

men on one side, women on the other.

Nobody planned it.

Plaid shirts next to one another,

talking in accents from the Midwest.

Nobody plans to be a ghost.

Later on, the young people sit in the kitchen.

Soon enough, they’ll be the ones 

to stumble Excuse me and quickly withdraw.

But they don’t know that.

No one can ever know that.

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