I fell in love with fishing sometime growing up. My Mom loved to fish and started taking us to creeks and rivers to get us out of the house. A few times we brought home a stringer of fish to fry up but eating them wasn’t really the thing we cared about. We’d sit on the banks of Beaver Creek and pull spinners or toss worms until a white bass, trout or something else tugged on the line. There was a pond we frequented as well and I remember renting a boat at a larger lake where we caught crappie on bobber rigs and my sister took a huge catfish trolling a spoon.

Around this time my Mom got a book about fly-fishing. It was one of those books, popular before the internet, written as a kind of general how-to. There were glossy pictures detailing how to cast, where to find trout in a stream and they somehow got stuck in my imagination. At the time fly-fishing seemed attractive because there was no extra weight (usually used for casting) between you and the fish. I was also obsessed with the catalogs of lures with their stories of amazing trips and lunker fish, obviously curated to sell their gear. I’m convinced that the golden age of the catalog was the late 80s. All of the above fed my imagination with dreams of catching big fish.

We moved across the country and much of that was set aside. Over time I remembered fly-fishing and a noodly fiberglass rod appeared for Christmas. I tried teaching myself casting and didn’t do very well for a long time until I took a class with my Mom one day. I journaled for a while and can remember losing my first fish, a big cutthroat in a small river jumping twice after it broke me off. My casting started to get better and I got a proper rod one year. I started tying very simple flies and catching fish on them. I started chasing steelhead and got skunked over and over and over.

For almost ten years I tried to catch a sea-going rainbow. I remember the first one I lost, throwing a long cast across the Cowlitz river and swinging a Lady Caroline fly. Tug tug and snap. It took two more years before I put one on the bank. A smaller fish on a Dragon’s Tooth Spey fly. In thirteen years of fishing I’ve caught six of these fish. They are famously difficult and I know there are people far better than I am at it and it heartens me to know I”m not the only one so stubborn in this world.

I’ve amassed a library of authors, especially from the PNW, reading as much as I can and I’ve learned that things are very different now than they were back then by and large. But I’ve also learned that they are very different now than they were only five or ten years ago. There are times when it’s better and worse and the general trends tend to depend on how aggressively us humans protect the habitat and the fish. All up the more protection the better. It’s from these readings that I heard about Roderick Haig-Brown. Roderick was an Englishman who moved to Campbell River BC, married the love of his life and raised a family. He wrote some of my favorite books about fishing and was a consummate conservationist. HIs views were informed by watching a province in flux from the height of extraction industries like logging, fishing and mining. His voice left a mark, and that mark was a good one.

As a gift from my wife, this last June I found myself traveling to Roderick’s home. I fished the waters he wrote about and that Ernest Schweibert tells of in his book a River for Christmas and my friend G and I spent two days in the salt and three on rivers catching an absolutely silly amount of fish. One day we fished an estuary and I caught my biggest cutthroat ever. A queen of the estuary who stopped my fly with not just a tug but a THUD and who I had to get on the reel quickly before she could break me off. That’s when I started to understand. Gman and I were talking about fly-fishing and how it’s problem solving a bunch of little problems until it all comes together and he’s right about that but I told him that’s not it for me. Fly fishing is poetry. ee cummings once said “ poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.” I think that fishing, especially fly-fishing, has become that for me. I don’t know how to describe it but all the planning aside, and I do plan carefully, when I’m there and I’m doing it right, and I’m not always doing it right, that’s how it is.

A week ago I found myself on a beach fishing for salmon for the third time this year. I did it with my trout fly rod just to see if I could and I could and I did. That fish fought hard. It fought hard enough to be written about in a Mepps spinner catalog from the late 1980s. I finished up and took my prize to the cooler in my truck and decided to explore. There was a place I’d heard about in whispers that I wanted to try and so I took my rod and walked through the pretty woods until I came down to a broad beach sprinkled with small boulders. I walked out onto a sandy and wide flat and cast, expecting nothing at the low tide and two casts in I felt a thud.

I still feel astonished at this fish. I touched nothing else that morning except a few pesky sculpin but the feeling of absolute surprise when my rod started to pulse with the fight of a good fish still blows my mind. It was the feeling of discovery, of invention or the joy of finding something new. It felt like being young again.

flyingfish