Go fly fishing

“My first time out, my girlfriend and I woke up at 5am to drive an hour to meet with a work friend who has been keeping “tight lines” and “catching hogs” for basically a decade. I threw on some quick dry clothing and drank 4 cups of coffee. I had the expectations set at “I am going to crush this and catch a fish” even though I had never even seen a trout up close. We got shown basic casting, (yeah that’s all) and then it was time to go give it a go for real. I settled into what I call “the danger zone,” the water around my nether region, and started swinging the rod back and forth and finally landing the fly on the slow, bubbly current. After about 10 minutes fishing the same little zone I came out of my trout tunnel vision and handed the rod to my girlfriend for her turn. I stepped back, looked around and realized this fly fishing thing was special. I’m standing in a remote mountain stream, with someone I love, trying to catch a fish in a weird sort of poetic dance of tangles, hooks that go into skin really easily, and fish that seem to be smarter than any human on earth. I loved it. A few hours later we were back in the car after covering a mile and a half of river. My girlfriend caught the only fish of the day, on a dry fly.”

“Frankly, I was intimidated by the whole business: the fly anglers with their polarized sunglasses that cost more than my first car, the array of waders for every temperament and temperature of water body found on Earth. (My idea of waders is last year’s sneakers and cut-off jeans.) Then there’s the fly-fishing gear. When I step into a fly shop, I feel like I don’t know the secret handshake. The shelves display enough imitation insects on hooks—in mysterious variations like pupae, larvae, dun, and spinner—to warrant returning to school for a PhD in entomology. And the rods! Fly rods must have the highest ratio of price-to-mass of any item ever traded in a human economy. They come matched with reels containing mechanisms so precise you’d think they were made by the Swiss to be worn on your wrist. What intimidated me more than anything else were the knots.”