I've often said that everything I own carries a maintenance cost with it - a tax you basically pay just for owning something (in time, attention or money). It's why I want to whittle down my bamboo fly rod collection - and why at one point in my life I realized I needed to enact a moratorium on fly tying stuff.
Now, outdoor humor writer Patrick
McManus echoes that thought - and puts fly fishing in its rightful place in the time consumption food chain:
I had a gun safe crammed with rifles and shotguns and handguns, modern firearms and muzzle-loaders. Each one had a tiny mouth attached to it, unless, of course, I wanted to use it for hunting. Then it instantly grew a huge mouth. But firearms could not hold a candle to fishing paraphernalia. Every little artificial fly in my fly boxes, which were the size of trunks, came with a huge and insatiable mouth. My whole life could have been used simply to organize my collection of flies and the gathering of fly-tying material and tools.
True, I avoided organizing any of my fishing gear, and thereby saved some time from its thousands of time-gobbling mouths. But that made me feel guilty. It was years before I realized that fly fishing is a full-time endeavor that gobbles up whole lifetimes. Any kind of fishing does.
And frankly, minimalist types like myself (as if the word could be applied to any fly fisherman) can't hold a candle to
Obsessive-Compulsive avid fly tyers like Dave Roberts and
"King of Roadkill" Singlebarbed (whose materials dyeing practices just got his house listed as a Superfund site).
See you feeding all the little mouths, Tom Chandler.