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This winter was not like last winter, nor like last winter. It was a winter for the ages -- one to endure. In driving around NH this past weekend, along country roads seemingly tunneled through snow piled feet high, the lesson was clear: the winter is not yet over.
It also begged the question: when will the season begin?
With spring approaching -- it is approaching, I tell myself, despite what the weather does -- I've stated tying regularly again. I'm trying to prepare for the season, sure. And I'm enjoying it. But I'm also enjoying remembering last season, and dreaming of plans for this coming one. My good friend Anton has described fishing as "pleasure deferred." I agree, though instances like this the pleasure is somehow both: deferred and immediate, present and future tense. Part of that pleasure lies in experimenting. And experimenting I have been.
Marc LeBlanc’s Green Spey fly is one of my favorite Spey flies. It bursts with color (which, in the depths of winter, is a great thing) and has, in the words of Megan Boyd, plenty of “life” to it.
I love working alone in the rod shop, as I always have someone with me. A few, in fact. My dad’s fly fishing workshop is rich in history. Every tool has had a full life. Every tool, it seems, knows more than I do.
At about this point in a New England winter, when the first warm spell has given way to more sub-zero temperatures, the opening of the fishing season once again appears like a mirage on the horizon: we’ve come so far, and seem no closer. And so it that at this very time of year, the fishing trips your friends take are nearly as good as the ones you hope to take in a few month’s time.
Atlantic salmon fishing has been described as many things—“the fish of a thousand casts” and “a jerk on one end waiting for a jerk on the other” to name only two—but of all the descriptions, this is the one I have come across most frequently: “the king of fish, the sport for kings.” How refreshing, then, to find a river that makes kings available to the kings’ men.
