"A life well wasted......"

I have been playing a lot on-line, as most trout anglers do in the winter, and it seems like everyone has something to say and wants everyone to hear it. Why should I be any different? My wife would say that a Blog is the ultimate in narcissistic behavior and shameless self promotion. Once I would have agreed with her but after Facebooking for a while I found out that some folks do care what I have to say. (Well, maybe one or two.) I began writing notes about my fishing trips and found that I enjoyed it and it made me feel like I was writing for "Field and Stream", not that anyone really would pay for the ramblings of a pudgy kid scouring the waters for trout. It seemed like a good thing to do at the time, so I am trying it out.

Every story has a beginning. I went to the movies one day and saw "A River Runs Through It". I have never been a big reader so I had no idea who Norman Maclean was.   I just thought it looked like a good show and as I watched I became hooked on the fly fishing.  So I decided that I would buy myself a fly rod and teach myself the intricacies of this sport. A few hundred dollars later and a couple of trips to the Orvis store in Roanoke, VA and I was casting like a fool, literally.

It would take much trial and error but eventually I was able to get on the water and fish for trout. I fished mostly in Southwest Virginia around where I had grown up.  I managed to get my father and brother into it also and we had some fun learning as we did it.  We even managed to catch a fish or two. My brother's greatest catch was me, hooking my ear on a cold afternoon with an errant cast. Eventually, my brother moved away and my father got to where he could not wade in the rivers and creeks of the back country. So I put my rods in their tubes and packed my gear away until I lost interest. At the time it was probably more about hanging out with my family than it was catching fish.

Many years passed and I started to get the bug again. Surf fishing at the beach had wet my appetite for "pullage".  Unfortunately it got to be very costly to fish at the beach on a frequent basis.   Fishing had now become a passion and my passion knew no boundaries.  So I drug my rod tubes out and dusted them off of dirt and mold. I figured I could get back into trout fishing and save a little money, so to speak.  It felt good practicing a cast in the backyard. Kind of like the whiff of smoke you get when you are trying to quit smoking.  I knew that I had to get back into fly fishing and I now was older and a little wiser. The impatient young man I was now had a wife and child. So I immediately went out and upgraded or replaced my old gear. Older, but not wiser. 

I am fishing a lot of North Carolina and some of Virginia. I have really begun to slow down and try to enjoy fishing for the experience that it is. A chance to stand in the water and allow it to wash the stress and confusion of daily life away. I get better at it every day and I now have to use more than one hand to count the fish I have caught.

I once heard of fly fishing referred to as "A life well wasted..." I could not agree more.