Fly fishing is something we engage in for reasons of fun or sanity instead of revenue or food gathering, so in other words, it’s an emotional thing, which allows us significant latitude when we talk about it.

He lives miles away, but he's on his home waters.

For example, the concept of “home water” clearly isn’t geographic in nature, but a matter of the heart.

One fly fisherman can tell another his “home waters” are literally halfway around the globe, and the second fly fisherman won’t bat an eye.

That’s because his “home waters” are a five hour drive to the north (the last ten miles on dirt roads), and while humanity is generally poor at accepting alien perspectives, fly fishermen do sometimes make worthwhile exceptions.

That’s why I tend to seek out smaller, wilder waters even though I live on a beautiful freestoner. It’s not because blueline fishing is “easy” (for the record, nothing’s easy when you’re fishing from your knees or crawling through bushes).

It’s because the fishing is – to leverage a pair of overused words – intimate and predatory at the same time, a combination I find irresistible.

A Brown Trout just after he made a mistake.

The Latest Small Stream Experience

Which leads us to the actual small stream fishing report (not the fictional version posted here), where I invited Singlebarbed along to serve as bait for the hordes of mosquitoes while I fly fished.

It only partially worked.

In fact, it didn’t work at all; the mosquitoes were on us like makeup on a politician the second we opened the truck doors, and I’m not even going to try and describe the horrific events that followed when I whizzed in the woods prior to throwing on my waders.

I’m having a flashback just writing about it.

Singlebarbed quickly doused himself in gallons of his vintage Muskol repellent – a product made from 100% Deet. A highly effective mosquito repellent, it’s become clear that DEET works by altering your DNA to the point that mosquitoes no longer recognize you as a mammal.

That reduces the number of bites by a considerable portion, but your friends will wonder why you’ve got another hand growing out your elbow.

It’s a trade off, but when the payoff is a small stream, a lot of trick casts, and a few willing brown trout, I’ll take mutation any day.

Blah Blah Blah Small Stream.

The fishing itself wasn’t dramatic, but it was – for want of a better term – pure. The casting was difficult, the fish gorgeous, and the setting unreally pretty.

Can you see him? That's an 8" trout.

I rarely see photographs of myself fly fishing (I’m usually taking the pictures), but when most every picture shows you hunched behind a bush or casting from your knees, you realize you’re reverting from “civilized behavior” (which isn’t very civilized at all) into a predator – without really noticing it.

The result was a fishing trip where you stop your pursuit of trout every few minutes to appreciate what you’ve submerged yourself in, and even then you still can’t quite grasp it.

Sometimes it’s almost as if you’re an actor in an unbelievably boring (to the world), wildly perfect movie, as if perfection can’t be achieved in every day life.

Fish Parts

This fishing itself wasn’t that dramatic, and rather than risk repeating my recent small stream reports, I’ll simply say this:

The fishing was largely good, though like most small streams, it turned on and off suddenly.

A rare Underground fiberglass fly rod photo (we're only human).

We arrived a little too early, and one run yielded exactly nothing. Two hours later we passed the same run, this time mining it for six pretty brown trout.

It’s easy to fall for the hype (anti-hype?) that small stream fish are dumb and easy – eating everything that floats by – but the truth lies pretty far from that statement.

Like anything almost perfectly in tune with their environment, they dance to a tune that us clumsy, smelly humans have largely forgotten (or are simply ignoring).

Fish Parts 2

I can’t explain it in explicit terms, but it’s clear I’ve become fascinated with pictures of brown trout parts. Like most trout, they’re more colorful than they’d seemingly need to be, and while I won’t say I’m tired of rainbow trout, I can say the brightly colored brown trout offer a nice break from silver.

What color exactly would you call that?

Sure, he's upside down, but check out the colors.

Wave good-bye.

The Fly Fishing Itself

The fishing itself was alternately too hard, too easy, too frustrating and too overwhelming to write about.

Befitting our shared status as geezers, Singlebarbed fished an old Fenwick HMG fly rod (8.5′ 5wt), while I dragged out my old-style Diamondglass 8′ 5wt – a rod so sweet you could descend into a diabetic coma just by waving it.

Authentic Geezer Gear (I'm starting a new fly fishing line by that name)

And I won’t even bore you with fly selection (though Humpies are our friends).

The bite was damned slow in the morning, but picked up midday. In truth, you don’t need high-end gear or boxes of flies to fish a small stream, but you’d better come equipped with a good roll cast and a great deal of accuracy.

See you on your home waters, Tom Chandler.

Bye!

Ed Engle remains one of my favorite fly fishing writers, in part because he’s pretty damn good at cutting right to the chase.

In a recent Boulder Daily Camera outdoors column, he dives into the concept of home waters, a matter near and dear to my heart:

If you did occasionally travel to a different river or stream and run into a fly-fisherman, he might inquire where your home water was. In my case I’d say, “I’m Ed Engle, and the South Platte River is my home water.” He might have already known its reputation as a “technical” small fly-fishery with a lot of history or, if he didn’t, I would explain to him what our fishing was like. And more often than not, we’d become friends.

I understand that kind of identity, and the high-altitude perspective that makes it possible.

I moved to the Upper Sacramento River (when I could have moved almost anywhere) because it was clearly my home water, and while I can’t deny the itch to fish more exotic places (like the 25-minutes-away McCloud River), I can’t pretend my home water is anywhere but the Upper Sac.

Engle clearly understands this, and it’s an interesting take from someone making a living in an industry where distance is often equated with a bigger, manlier, more extreme experience.

And speaking of the industry, Engle also takes an oblique look at fly fishing tournaments, wondering at their true costs:

Right now, the fly-fishing industry, which seems to believe it is falling on hard times, is busy pushing televised fly-fishing competitions where the river being fished is hardly mentioned and all that counts is how many trout are caught. More and more, it seems like the only thing that is important in fly-fishing is what gear you use, how many fish you catch and how big they are.

I gave Engle’s Fishing Small Flies an excellent review (it’s jammed with real small fly information from someone who’s done it, and it’s far from a regurgitation of the things everyone already knows), and his long out-of-print Seasonal is a wonderful book about a life outdoors.

Only one chapter touches on fly fishing (a rehabilitative visit with John Gierach), but fly fishermen will likely find that chapter alone worth the price (and there are plenty of other great chapters wrapped around it).

See you on your home waters, Tom Chandler.

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