Along the Way

ALONG THE WAY Fly Fishing Tips Beginners Won't Find in How-to Books

I sat in the middle of the mid-dling stream, a poorer man, but distinctly wiser.

Somewhere overhead in the waving leaves of the willow tree, my delicately handcrafted $2.75 caddis pattern fly clung to a branch. The tip of my ex-quisitely engineered 7.5-foot-long graphite composite fly rod bumped along the bottom somewhere downstream having separated itself from the rest of my $185 fly rod in the instant before I sat so unceremoniously in the middle of the middling stream.

With a gurgle and a seep and a slosh, the merrily burbling snowmelt swirled above my waist and filled my $95 wad-ers. And as I sat and pondered the way of the world, a chilling breeze riffled through my hair because I had also lost my $18 fisherman's hat complete with the four $2.25 (each) flies stuck in the foam fly-holder stitched into the brim.

The water wobbled. The wind whispered. The willows waved.

And I decided that I'd approached fly fishing with inadequate intellectual preparation.

Seized by some irrational middle-age yearning, I'd merely dabbled last year, brandishing a rented pole and a touching but naive enthusiasm for running water and grassy undercut banks. Inspired by the sheer, overwhelming Zennisity of it all and egged on by a single, singularly careless trout I'd invested heavily in the sport: I read books, maxed out two credit cards, pored over dia-grams, and bought up whole shelves of topo maps.

So I came to this second Rubicon, beautifully outfitted, intensively educated, and boundlessly enthusiastic. And came so soon to sit, mumbling mindlessly in the middle of this middling stream.

And I sat. And sat. Until I divined the cause of my failure.

Clearly I had not sufficiently distilled the wisdom of my research and insights of my hours of field experimentation. In short, I had not come up with a clear, concise, infallible set of rules by which one can systematize the fly fishing experience.

In that spirit, I now offer 13 simple rules to guarantee a successful fly fishing experience. These are not the intellectual, abstract nostrums you can find in any of the 4.5 million books on fly fishing filed away in the Library of Congress. These pearls have been wrested from the tightly clamped shell of experience. They're offered here for the inconsequential cost of this magazine: fishing enough to put up with the humiliating frustration of expert advice.

Then ask the guy in the sport-ing goods store what he thinks.