When your friends are mostly fly fishermen (some of whom fall squarely into the "obsessed fly fishermen" category), you tend to receive a few strange phone calls and even some oddly shaped packages.

The other day, bamboo rod maker Chris Raine called, and there was an edge in his voice suggesting a winning lottery ticket.

Instead, Raine flew into a fast-paced discussion about ferrules for his hollowbuilt quad bamboo fly rods, a subject which has caused him considerable angst over the years (bamboo rod builders do angst pretty well - almost as well as your average teenager).



Metal ferrules for bamboo fly rods are pulled from round tubing, and attaching the round ferrule to a square rod presents some problems to the quad builder.

Some builders simply knock down the corners of the blank and leave gaps across the flats of the rod, a method Raine views with some disdain.

Others try to square the round tubing by hand and fit it over the rod blank, which Raine used to do, but found so time-consuming that the search for a faster, high-precision method was launched (Raine's good at launching these kinds of searches).

Just the other day, he squished, formed and whatever-ed his first several pairs.

That's the kind of fly fishing-related moment that demands a phone call to a friend, even though that friend may or may not understand what the hell the bamboo rod builder is talking about.

The same applies to Dave Roberts (my Rogue guide friend who survived three combat tours in Vietnam yet recently had his ankle broken by an armload of firewood).

He's laid up in his fly tying room - ankle elevated - and he had that same edge in his voice when he called to talk about a new March Brown emerger pattern he'd whipped up. (No, I don't know how he ties while keeping his ankle elevated. Ask him.)

It's important to note that Roberts has already created a dozen different March Brown emerger patterns, all of which work perfectly fine, yet the idea of standing pat - and tying a dozen of one of his "old" patterns - doesn't exactly jump start him in the morning.

This holds true pretty much across the board.

Wayne Eng calls when he's stumbled on some bizarre new method for catching trout (the old ways simply aren't challenging enough).

Ian Rutter generally rings me to make the long-distance guide equivalent of a high five, and [name redacted] sends a celebratory email when he's found a new piece of river to fish illegally or one of a select list of old fly rods to fish it.

And that's ignoring the oddly shaped packages that arrive courtesy of fly tying materials superfreak freak Singlebarbed.

And I suppose that - at the far edge of improbability - there's a chance I've called and force-fed them news of a great day on a small stream or the completion of an especially worthwhile piece of writing.

In other words, we're all fly fishing geeks, and the damnedest things trigger high-octane phone calls or visits from the postman, and at times, you wonder what this might look like to normal people.

And while we're all fly fishermen, each of my friends seems to have specialized in their own obscure corner of an already obscure sport. I write, Raine builds, Roberts ties, Singlebarbed frightens the rest of us, Ian && Charity are making a living, Wayne's trying to stay awake...

You get the picture.

In another sense, it's a nice illustration of a group of organisms filling niches in a micro-ecosystem - much the same way bugs and trout and other goodies fill the available niches on a stream.

Of course, there's a major difference between us and them; fly fishermen are endlessly engaged in making the simple seem complex while bugs and fish are interested in things only at their most basic level.

And why not? We practice sport, but trout practice survival.

That suggests two things.

First, fly fishermen are weird.

And second, the path to real success as a fly fisherman doesn't necessarily involve increasing levels of complexity (more flies and gear). Instead, what we're really looking for is a predator's simple approach, balanced by the understanding that pouring a drum of Clorox into the water is a little too simple - and uninteresting.

See you on the river,
Tom Chandler