Mad over Grayling? Fly Fishing Rabbi? It’s Underground Monday…

Monday is rarely anybody’s favorite day of the week, and for reasons most working stiffs would consider obvious.

Philosophers have speculated that human beings are unique in that we look beyond the immediate future, though no one who has seen the fast-mending Wally the Wonderdog would doubt that he’s already planning his afternoon walk.

Monday is typically more about the work week ahead than the weekend behind, and if you’re a writer wondering if a winning lottery ticket is really your best bet for the future, then Mondays are never good.

Still, if you happen to live on a trout river and there’s potential for some killer BWO weather, then it’s not as if all is lost.

Plus, there’s always the spent October Caddis bite, something that often fires up in earnest about the same time the leaves start falling heavily enough to carpet the lawn and jam the rain gutters, something that started last week.

Maybe it’s time to let the BWO eaters rest and look for some sport on the big dry.

It’s Time: Monday’s Underground Grayling Entertainment

The always literate Mad Fishicist blog posts a short-but-sweet paen to the Grayling - an Underground fish if ever I saw one. Someday I will catch one, but until I do, this post is the next best thing.

Divine Inspiration = Divine Intervention?

And from the “Why Not?” category comes… a Fly Fishing Rabbi blog. I mean, it’s hardly shocking that a man of faith fly fishes (fly fishing being largely a faith-based activity to begin with), but I find myself wondering if divine intervention doesn’t afford Rabbi Eric Eisenkramer just a teensy bit of an edge on the stream?

Plenty of times I’ve prayed for the wind to stop, or for another six inches of drag-free drift, or for the hatch to hold on another 15 minutes, and it occurs to me that Rabbi Eisenkramer might actually have those prayers answered.

Perhaps he’ll weigh in here, but the Rabbi would likely suggest that we’re all God’s creatures, and that I was being unnecessarily paranoid (which wouldn’t be the first time). Here’s a quote from his blog:

Little did I know, but I had discovered a soul mate in the Reverend Maclean. There was much about us that was different. He was Christian, I am Jewish. He grew up in the 1920s. I grew up in the 1980s. (I am 31 years old.) Yet we both dedicated much of our adult lives to searching for trout and for God. And both prove equally elusive.

Last Day of the Season in Yellowstone.

That thar’s snow. Courtesy the Fly Fishing in Yellowstone blog

It’s always nice to fish along with someone with an Underground approach to fly fishing, and while I’ve never fished with the dark, shadowy person behind the Fly Fishing in Yellowstone National Park blog, he seems like someone I’d be happy to fish with.

He describes the final day of fishing in Yellowstone Park, describing it in terms not of regret, but of patience. He even owns up to catching an 18″ brown in a crummy drift, an event most of us would be tempted to describe in more heroic terms.

A short read, but a worthwhile one.

Finally, if You’re Ready For More Reading.

The public servant at Ranger Gords found this little gem for us: a list of the winners of the 2006 National Outdoor Book Awards.

While we realize the quality of the Underground’s prose has likely spoiled you for any other literature, it’s my duty to throw those other writers a bone every once in a while.

The first book in the list details the disappearance of a wilderness ranger, and has made it onto my “read this, dummy” list.

Until later, Undergrounders.

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