Some of your most important fly fishing gadgets have little to do with the act of fly fishing.

Your hat. The cold beer back at the truck. Underwear that don’t creep. Your camera.

In my case, add a pocket notebook to the pile.

Field Notes notebook

Does carrying a notebook tell you much about me as a fly fisherman? I'm betting it does...

Notebooks are an artifact of the fishing journals I used to keep; I carried a notebook so I’d have someplace to jot down trip details before they disappeared from my brain.

Temperatures, flies, ideas – even the odd paragraph of an essay.

I stopped writing a fishing journal years ago (probably too busy writing here), but the notebook still goes most everywhere I do, probably because I’m what a marketing colleague called a “background thinker.”

Stuff churns around in the back of my head, and eventually – when I’m not really aware of it – something pops up.

That it often happens in the middle of the river is revealing, and probably offers concrete proof of something fly fishermen have long suspected: Knocking off work and going fly fishing is actually good for the economy.

(When do I collect my Nobel Prize?)

Wet Tech

For a while, I experimented with a digital voice recorder and even my cell phone, but I can offer sad, waterlogged proof that mixing water-soluble electronic devices with a river offers some very real (and expensive) drawbacks.

Which neatly circles us back to the cheap, no-batteries-needed notebook.

Early on, I carried those miniature marbled “Composition” books, and while they were cheap and offered plenty of paper, the covers rarely survived a second trip.

Lately I’ve tumbled for these plain, hugely nostalgic “Field Notes” notebooks.

They’re not waterproof, but they’re durable (the covers survive everyday life). Inside the back cover you’ll find production notes – alongside a tongue-in-cheek list of “practical applications.”

These include “Half-Ass Calculations,” “Roadtrip Mileage,” “Tall Orders” and “Last Will/Testament” – all of which seem oddly applicable to most fly fishing trips.

In an age of hyperventilated marketing, I’m a sucker for a quiet, subversive sense of humor, and when I see it in a company, I’m probably going to buy the product.

Some of the real commandos out there might prefer a waterproof notepad, but I always figure my job is to *not* drop the thing in the water, and besides, any thoughts I have in the rain are probably dark, and don’t need to be recorded.

What Does Your Gear Say About You?

Waylay a fly fisherman mid-stream, force him to pull out his gear, and you’ll inevitably find a few items unconnected to fly fishing, but deeply connected to the fly fisherman.

Sometimes that connection borders on the superstitious (lucky hat), but gather up all the pieces, and you’ve likely drawn a portrait of the fisherman in question.

For example, cameras and notebooks suggest I’m almost as interested in the stuff surrounding the fishing as the fish – a concept supported by a preference for small streams and soft fly rods.

It’s also evidence of what one frustrated fishing partner called “a lack of killer instinct.”

That was brought on by my willingness to wait for an impending hatch (to dry fly types, a hatch is always “impending”) instead of nymphing the runs.

Most of the Undergrounders carry similar stuff, the little bits and pieces of which can be assembled into a psychological profile (eerily similar to those used to catch serial killers, but let’s not dwell on that for now).

If you emptied your vest on the tailgate, what assumptions would we make about you?

See you at the psych evaluation, Tom Chandler.

Posted in Underground Entertainment, Writing and tagged , .