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It’s not a wasted day. What day of fishing ever is?

Steve Raymond, “Elko Interlude” in October 1995 Flyfishing

For Angling may be said to be so much like the Mathematicks, that it can ne’r be fully learnt; at least not so fully, but that there will still e more new experiments left for the tryal of other men that succeed us.

Izaak Walton

Before winding in for the day, or stopping for a snack, make 3 or 4 extra casts.  For often fine fish are hooked in this time, when you are mentally tired from the hours wading and casting, or haven’t encountered much luck from the end or the morning rise to the lunch hour, or as the day heated up.  The anticipation of “just three more casts” and the expectation that these may be the last for an hour, or maybe for weeks, heightens the importance of the final fishing moments and enhances the expectation of success, realigning the senses along the rod, the line, the tippet and fly to the unknown and unseen fish.

Bob Voelker

One can play the piano while thinking of the morning’s mail, or one can watch a baseball game while planning a bank robbery, but in order to fish successfully, at any rate for the nobler species, one must give one’s whole attention to the sport in hand. And this is the reason why a trout rod is the best magician’s wand for exorcising the ghosts of care.

Odell Shepard, Thy Rod and Thy Creel

[In fishing waters there is] this mystery and challenging strangeness that the angler sets his will and wit to explore. Standing in one element, he invades another, striving to search it thoroughly. With a fifty-foot finger of bamboo and silk and gut he probes the deeps and the shallows, feels along the riffles, glides slowly out into bays of glitter, striving  towards and almost attaining a sixth sense, trying to surprise the water’s innermost secret law. But this, of course, he will never do. In other arts and crafts, and even in a few sports, we can distinguish three stages of apprentice, journeymen and master; but in angling few ever pass beyond apprenticeship, and masters there are none.

Odell Shepard, Thy Rod and Thy Creel

Why is it almost universally believed that luck remains the fundamental element in going fishing?

Bryn Hammond, Halcyon Days

The most probable reason of his ill-success [in fishing the evening rise] is that he is excited and flurried, keeps moving from one feeding fish to another, seldom placing his fly accurately, and continually moving upstream to cast to a fresh fish. He is in such a hurry that he does not even dry his fly, and after a few minutes has become so utterly demoralized that he cannot differentiate the rise of a yearling from that of a three- pounder. Another reason for the non-success of the dry-fly man on such an evening often is that the fish are taking the nymphs under water, and not feeding at all on floating insects. The advise to give a beginner is that he should spot a good fish rising well and stick to it until he has either pricked it or set it down.

Frederick Halford

It is an unsatisfactory thing, this evening rise. You get fish, certainly, but you seldom get as many as you feel you ought. And the mind is weighted with an unpleasant apprehension of finality. Daylight has a definite end which nothing can prolong … The trout, too, during an evening rise are always difficult and often exasperating.

John Waller Hills

[With respect to the evening rise] – Numbers of trout appear to be rising frequently and steadily and confidently, but when the angler puts them to the test, they disappoint him. On some evenings the trout cease to rise after an artificial fly has once been floated over them; on others they continue to rise freely, but will take nothing artificial, and the angler exhausts himself in efforts and changes of fly, working harder and more rapidly as he becomes conscious of the approaching end of the day.

Viscount Grey

Fly fishing holds a tyrannical fascination for all those who have been initiated into its mysteries. The riddles it presents are endless; as fast as one is resolved, or appears to be resolved, by the pertinacious and thoughtful, another confronts him challengingly and engages his efforts. Sometimes the solution of one riddle is in itself the creation of another. And so, this endless tyranny goes on. Only those become weary of angling who bring to it but the idea of catching fish.

Rafael Sabatini

Fishing is unquestionably a form of madness, but happily, for the once bitten, there is no cure.

Lord Hume

"Well this love of fly fishing sure takes me place I otherwise wouldn't go."

 Nick Lyons  "Confessions of a Fly Fishing Addict"

"Fishing is nothing if not a pastime. It would be hell if I did it all the time."

 Nick Lyons  "Confessions of a Fly Fishing Addict"

"The season is ended.  There was not enough of it; there never is."

 Nick Lyons  "Confession of A Fly Fishing Addict"

"Standardization is sadly lacking in the hook industry.  Each maker has its own standards, for the most part anyway, but none exist from maker to maker.  We fly tiers have complained about this for ears, but our complaints have fallen of deaf ears.  We have not been able to force hook makers to commit to standardization as the fly-line industry has.  Hook makers have been around for to many years and are very set in their ways.  Yet this trait has allowed tiers to have a wide choice of hook styles.  I don't know about you, bit I would rather have choices than standards."

William E Schmidt  "Hooks for the Fly"

"Barbs damage fish's mouth, are a pain to get our of the drying fleece, and are hazardous to us dummies who hook our ears while false casting."

William E Schmidt  "Hooks for the Fly"

It is sufficient to know that the art of angling “requires as much enthusiasm as poetry, as much patience as mathematics, and as much caution as housebreaking.”

Genio Scott, Fishing in American Waters

Man, from his inferior share of the earth’s surface, to which little space he appears confined without a fin to dive or a wing to soar, contemplates with pleasure the scintillating heavens; while the sublime roar of the ocean, its breakers beating the shores into fragments with its billowy battalions in close lines, and in storms booming like thunder, penetrate his soul with awe and reverence at the power manifested, to which, in comparison, his own is nothing.

Genio Scott, Fishing in American Waters

Not only has a larger portion of this terraqueous ball been bequeathed to fish-kind than to mankind, but “its first families” were also more richly endowed by Providence in beauty of form and of coloring. There was a period when all the inhabitants of this planet were fishes, previously to the sublime moment when “God said ‘Let the dry land appear.’” The ancients thought that the illimitable beauties of the waters were reflected in the heavens; hence they gave the constellations the names of fishes.

Genio Scott, Fishing in American Waters

One moment the artificial is floating quietly and gently, and the next instant there may be a sudden heaving and bulging of the water, accompanied by a sound of basso-profundo depth that cuts into the consciousness with a sharpness which is a little unnerving, but also exhilarating.

Vincent Marinaro, Fishing the Dry Fly on Quiet Waters: A Character Study, in A Modern Dry Fly Code

On the stream, the fly fisher makes his own history. Off the stream, his talk about flies opens a treasure box of antiquity, full of fish stories, views of embattled theorists, memories of immortal fly fishers and all the numberless books that have made fly fishing the most literary of sports. The trout fly of today grew out of the trout fly of yesterday. From a dim background in medieval France and Renaissance England, it has had a line of development and a breakdown into schools of thought from which the flies of today take their character.

Fly fishing has three elements: equipment, knowledge of stream life, and presentation. The equipment centers on the artificial fly; knowledge of stream life encompasses insects and trout; presentation is skill, acquired and magical, in presenting the fly to the trout. Fly-fishing argument, which if fabulous, revolves around the comparative value of these elements. At the heart of the argument is the trout fly, its patterns and forms giving tangible expression to fly-fishing theory. Most trout flies are “imitation,” resembling natural insects, or “fancy,” resembling in their abstract patterns merely the generality of insect life.

John McDonald, Introduction, The Complete Fly Fisherman

I am not a good fisherman myself. I devoted a considerable amount of attention to the subject at one time, and was getting on, as I thought, fairly well; but the old hands told me that I should never be any real good at it, and advised me to give it up. They said that I was an extremely neat thrower, and that I seemed to have plenty of gumption for the thing, and quite enough constitutional laziness. But they were sure I should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not sufficient imagination.

They said that as a poet, or a shilling chocker, or a reporter, or anything of that kind, I might be satisfactory, but that, to gain any position as a Thames angler, would require more play of fancy, more power of invention than I appeared to possess.

Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but that is a mistake.  Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous—almost of pedantic—veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.

Jerome K. Jerome, Storytelling on the Thames

The average angler’s inability to profit by experience—his own or another’s—is legendary.

Raymond R. Camp, Stouthearted Men

The chastening effects of an absolute failure after a period of exhilarating success is a wonderful mold of character. Years of such experiences are bound to mellow the heart and temper the judgment.

Ray Bergman, Some Field Problems and Their Solutions

I love to see the salmon leap in the sunlight on the first flood of a “June rise’, and I love to hear his splash in the darkness of the still night when the place where he jumped can be determined only by the sound, unless perchance his break in the water disturbed the reflection of a star. I have stood on heights afar off at the opening of the season, ere my unconsecrated rod had chance to exercise its magic, or my lips and feet to kiss the river, and with the combined exhilaration of impatience, desire, and joy, watched the incessant spurts of silvery spray until my chained and chafed spirit almost broke at the strain; and I have lain on my couch at midnight sleepless and kept awake by the constant splash of the salmon leaps. More interesting, if not so stimulating, is the leap of the salmon at obstructing falls, with the air filled with dozens of darting, tumbling, and falling fish—the foam dashing and sparkling in the sun, the air resonant with roar, and damp with the ever-tossing spray. Nay, more: I have seen a fall whose breast was an unbroken sheet thirty feet perpendicular, inclosed by lateral abutments of shelving crags which had been honey-combed by the churning of the water in time of flood; and over these crags the side-flow of the falls ran in struggling rivulets, filling up the holes and providing little reservoirs of temporary rest and refreshment for the running salmon; and I have actually seen and caught with my hands a twelve-pound salmon which had worked its way nearly to the counterscarp of the topmost ledge in its almost successful effort to surmount a barrier so insuperable! Surely, the example of such consummate pertinacity should teach men to laugh at average obstacles which stand in the pathway of their ambition!

Charles Hallock, from Fishings on a Salmon Stream, from Fishing with the Fly

Few scenes offer so great a variety as a running stream, and still fewer are so well calculated to fill the heart with gratitude for being brought into such close communion with the Maker and Preserver of all things.

William Henderson, from My Life as an Angler

Fishermen never lose their love for the employment.  And it is notably true that the men who fishes for a living love there work quite as much as those who fish for pleasure love their sport.  Find an old fisherman, if you can, in any sea-shore town, who does not enjoy his fishing.  There are days, without doubt, when he does not care to go out, when he would rather that need did not drive to the sea; but keep him at home a few days, or set him at other labour, and you still see that he longs for the toss of the swell on the reef, and the sudden joy of a strong pull on his line.  Drift up alongside of him in your boat when he is quietly at his work, without his knowing that you’re near.  You can do it easily.  He is pondering solemnly a question of deep importance to him, and he has not start eye, or hand, head for ten minutes.  But see that start and sharp jerk of his elbow, and now hear him talk, not to you--to the fish.  He exults as he brings him in, yet mingles his exultation with something of pity as he baits his hook for another. Could you gather the words that he has in many years flung on the sea-winds, you would have a history of his life and adventures, mingled with very much of his inmost thinking, for he tells much to the sea and the fish that he would never whisper in human ears. Thus the habit of going a-fishing always modifies the character. The angler, I think, dreams of his favourite sport oftener than other men of theirs. … [Angling] gratifies the most refined tastes, .. becomes a passion unless the pursuer guard his enthusiasm and moderate his desires. It is nothing strange that men who throw their flies for trout should dream of it.

W.C. Prime, from I go a-fishing

I will now conclude this long chapter by a cursory notice of anglers, as men; and I do assert, that I have almost invariably found them persons of good and charitable dispositions, possessing mild, though firm tempers, sharp and intellectual minds; incapable of committing base and ungenerous actions; much inclined to the heavenly passion of love; free from the debasing vice of avarice; lively and light-hearted; agreeable and intelligent. The very pursuit, while it demands the possession of intellect, must sharpen it. Were I to select the professions among the members of which I have met the best men, and the most skilful anglers, I would certainly name the army and the law. I mean the highest branch of the latter; as for the attorneys, with many honourable exceptions, they are an incorrigible race. Indeed, I have rarely seen any of them who could angle at all, perhaps only one; and he was a sinister biped (left-handed). They are, for the most part, devoted to worldly gain; and, as Giles Daxon used to say, will never give a direct answer to a question.

Few merchants are good anglers. I have met but two or three; one a near relation of my own, who now, however, thinks such a practice beneath his crown and dignity. Let us charitably hope that is, because he has not the time.

--The O’Gorman, from The Practice of Angling

Once more. Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is a magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men e lunged in his deepest reveries – stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if you r caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hillside blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though his pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting? – Water – there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who, because he would not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Herman Melville from Moby Dick

Lancelot sat and tried to catch perch, but Tregarva’s words haunted him. He lighted his cigar, and tried to think earnestly over the matter, but he had got into the wrong place for thinking. All his thoughts, all his sympathies, were drowned in the rush and whirl of the water. He forgot everything else in the mere animal enjoyment of sight and sound. Like many young men at his crisis of life, he had given himself up to the mere contemplation of Nature till he had become her slave; and now a luscious scene, a singing bird, were enough to  allure his mind away from the most earnest and awful thoughts. He tried to think, but the river would not let him. It thundered and spouted out behind him from the hatches, and leapt madly past him, and caught his eyes in spite of him, and swept them away down its dancing waves, and let them go again only to seep them down again and again, till his brain felt a delicious dizziness from the everlasting rush and the everlasting roar. And then below, how it spread, and writhed, and whirled into transparent fans, hissing and twining snakes, polished glass-wreaths, huge crystal bells, which boiled up from the bottom, and dived again beneath long threads of creamy foam, and swung round posts and roots, and rushed blackening under dark weed-fringed boughs, and gnawed at the marly banks, and shook the ever-restless bulrushes, till it was swept away and down over the white pebbles and olive weeds, in one broad rippling sheet of molten silver, toward the distant sea. Downwards it fleeted ever, and bore his thoughts floating on its oily stream; and the great trout, with their yellow sides and peacock backs, lounged among the eddies, and the silver grayling dimpled and wandered upon the shallows, and the may flies flickered and rustled round him like water fairies, with their green gauzy wings; the coot clanked musically among the reeds; the frogs hummed their ceaseless vesper-monotone; the kingfisher darted from his hole in the bank like a blue spark of electric light; the swallows’ bills snapped as they twined and hawked above the pool; the swift’s wings whirred like musket-balls, as they rushed screaming past his head; and ever the river fleeted by, bearing his eyes away down the current, till its wild eddies began to glow with crimson beneath the setting sun. The complex harmony of sights and sounds slid softly over his soul, and he sank away into a still daydream, too passive for imagination, too deep for meditation, and

‘Beauty born of murmuring sound,

Did pass into his face.’

Blame him not. There are more things in a man’s heart than ever get in through his thoughts.

--Charles Kingsley from Yeast: A Problem

In genial spring, beneath the quivering shade,

When cooling vapours breath along the mead,

The patient fisher takes his silent stand,

Intent, his angle trembling in his hand;

With looks unmov’d, he hopes the scaly breed,

And eyes the dancing cork and bending reed.

Our plenteous streams a various race supply,

The bright-eyed perch with fins of Tyrian dye;

The silver eel, in shining volumes roll’d;

The yellow carp, in scales bedropp’d with gold;

Swift trouts, diversified with crimson stains;

And pikes, the tyrants of the watery plains.

Alexander Pope from Windsor Forest

You see the ways the Fisher-man doth take

To catch the fish; what engines doth he make?

Behold how he engageth all his wits;

Also his snares, lines, angles, hooks, and nets.

Yet fish there be, that neither hook, nor line,

Nor snare, nor net, nor engine can make thine;

They must be grop’d for, and be tickled too,

Or they will not be catch’d, whate’er you d

 John Bunyan, “The Author’s Apology” from The Pilgrim’s Progress

Sitting around the Antrim Lodge bar one evening, Jack Rowles and I were appalled at the number of strange fishermen milling about, and we decided to draw up a written examination for Beaverkill anglers. Our idea was that after grading the papers it would then be possible to sort out the really serious fishermen from the canasta players and the guys who were simply on the lam from their wives and were going around disguised in waders. By the time Frank started closing up for the night we had several dozen pertinent questions, of which I recall only a relatively uncomplicated one. It was a field problem and it went like this:

            You are standing, rod in hand, at the head of the Cairn’s Pool on the Route 17 side, when simultaneously (A) a case of bonded bourbon whiskey bounces off a passing truck and lands undamaged in the middle of the highway, where the next passing motorist is sure to see it and pick it up, (B) at the lower end of the pool a beautiful and shapely blonde who has been swimming starts shrieking that she has lost her bathing suite and urges you to hurry down and restore her circulation by any means you choose, as she is getting chilly, (C) across the river a barefoot boy gets his foot caught in a switch of the Delaware, New York and Ontario Western tracks and hollers for you to cross over and pry him loose before the Binghamton Express, which is due in three minutes, comes around the bend, and (D) a brown trout of at least four pounds begins to feed greedily on large mayflies within easy casting distance, and is obviously a cinch for a #10 Light Cahill.  In one sentence, state what you would do.

            I don’t intent to tip our mitt on this because we might want to use it in another examination.  But it might help to bear in mind that four-pound trout in the Beaverkill are a lot harder to come by than bourbon, blondes or barefoot boys.

--Ed Zern in Hunting and Fishing from A to Zern

The Big Hole like other great rivers is possessive. High on its little tributary Wise River the early morning air is so cold you can swallow it like spring water, so fresh it tastes clean like wine. A spire of rock plunges a thousand feet to the sparkling little stream. A little rainbow smacks your first cast and you are off. Nothing much seems important after that except dancing trout, water and sunlight that seems to fill the world.

--John Randolph, “Good Places” in Fly Fisherman May 1986

"Collecting materials can become an obsession in itself."

 Eric Leiser  "Fly Tying Materials"

Halford is the historian of the dry fly. He did for it what Stewart did for upstream fishing. Neither were pioneers, for both described what they did not invent; but both, by practice and writing, made an unanswerable case for the system they advocated. With Halford was associated a band of enthusiasts who devoted themselves to perfecting the art and spreading the creed. Among them they systematized the practice; they dealt with and solved technical difficulties; they developed rod, line, hooks and flies to their present excellence; and all that they acquired or invented was told to the world in sober and convincing English. Never was a reform worked out with greater ability or presented with greater lucidity.

… Halford’s place in the history of fishing is well marked. He is the historian of a far-reaching change, and as such it is possible that he will always be read. He was well-fitted for the task. He possessed a balanced temperament and a reasonable mind. He took nothing for granted, and proceeded by observation and experiment.

… If he is to be criticised it is  because like most reformers he overstated his case. He considered that the dry fly had superseded for all time and in all places all other methods of fly fishing, and that those who thought otherwise were either ignorant or incompetent. He did not realise, and perhaps it is impossible that he should have realized, that the coming of the floating fly did not mean that previous experience and previous knowledge were as worthless as though they had never been; but that it meant that from then onwards fly fishing was divided into two streams. These streams are separate, but they run parallel, and there are many cross channels between them.

J.W. Hills, A History of Fly Fishing for Trout

One of the great charms, however, of angling in all its branches is that it gives endless opportunity for difference of opinion and discussion among the followers of the various schools. Every good fisherman and every sportsman will urge his own particular view with all his might, but at the same time will be prepared to listen to the arguments of those holding opinions quite opposed to his own, and will ever be ready to respect these opinions and credit his opponent in argument with being convinced that his (the opponent’s) view of the question is the right one.

Frederic Halford, An Angler’s Autobiography

Ninety-nine out of every hundred dry-fly men have gained their early experience in the use of a fly rod by fishing the sunk or wet fly. My case was an exception to this general rule, and perhaps my observations on the difference between the two methods may not commend themselves to all of my readers, and be deemed a heterodox by some of them. I must confess that the sunk fly has never appealed to me with the same satisfaction as the floating fly, and yet I am fully convinced that to be a first-rate performer with the wet fly requires considerable natural aptitude and prolonged study of the subject.

… He who for preference would find a feeding fish, stalk it, cast to it, and if successful rise, hook, and kill it, is evidently intended by Nature to be a votary of the floating fly. On the other hand, he who for preference will wander, rod in hand, along the banks of a mountain stream and cast his fly or flies upon it; in short, doing what is commonly called ‘fishing the stream’, on the chance of tempting the lively little trout to their destruction, is as evidently a born adherent to the sunk fly. Some of my friends whose experience of fly fishing, wet and dry, is far greater than my own, condemn my opinions. They urge, no doubt with good foundation, the argument that in many parts of the world, notably in the United States and New Zealand, the largest fish are therefore without exception killed on sunk flies.

 Frederic Halford, An Angler’s Autobiography

From fear of being prolix, I must once more hark back to the river, and tear myself away from the fascination of the ozone-laden sea and its finny inhabitants. Barbel, bream, roach, dace, chub, perch and pike are only in season during the late summer, autumn and winter; the spring and early summer were therefore the slackest times of the fishing year. From April 1^st to June 1^st, according to the laws of that epoch, no fish could be killed in the Thames except trout. We had all seen specimens of these magnificent Salmonidae set up in glass-fronted cases and displayed on the walls of the various riverside hostelries – deep, thick, short, brilliantly spotted, and generally very handsome trout of from say 5 to 16 pounds.

All had heard of the breathless excitement of hooking one of these monsters, of its headlong rush for fifty or more yards down the broken water of the weir, culminating in a leap into the air; and of the game fight following the first check, during which contest a considerable proportion escaped and a few were safely steered into the capacious landing net, to the intense gratification of the angler and his attendant. All the larger fish were killed by spinning, generally with natural baits – bleak, dace or gudgeon – and an occasional smaller trout was taken on a fly. It never was my good fortune to kill one with a fly, and anything I could write on the subject would be hearsay. I knew nothing of fly fishing beyond an occasional try for dace or chub, and was not in those days much drawn to that form of fishing.

Frederic Halford, An Angler’s Autobiography

Piscator non solum piscatur – “There is more to fishing than catching fish.”

[Night fishing is an abomination to some who are --]

1. Those who are so fond of the comforts of the couch of repose – and this includes all anglers who have themselves been caught in the matrimonial snare – that they cannot or will not abandon them.

2. Those who are afraid of ‘things that go bump in the night.’

3. Those who fumble in the dark, have no ‘hands’, and whose other senses have more or less degenerated.

4. Those who have never fished at night and on that score feel qualified to condemn night fishing severely as an unsporting method.

5. Those who would not condemn night fishing if the method did not produce such disgustingly big baskets of over-size trout.

6. Those charitable souls who imagine that all deeds done in the dark are necessarily shady deeds.

7. Angling authors who desire to maintain a reputation for respectability.

8. Publishers of fishing books who dislike dangerous originality from those who are idiotic enough to write fishing books.

9. Dyed-in-the-wool Poachers who dislike the presence of dyed-in-the-wool anglers.

10. River-keepers who imagine that every night fisher is a salmon poacher in disguise.

11. Village Constables who imagine that all nocturnal sportsmen are burglars in disguise.

12. WH Lawrie, The Trout About Trout Fishing

The sun was down. The light which illuminated the huge clock in the court house steeple was turned on. From several directions came figures carrying fly rods, already strung up, with jiggling wet-fly droppers dancing in cadence with each step. For this group the evening meal was over, any important worries had been laid aside for tomorrow, the important business was coming up.

L. James Bashline, “The Night Watch”

In the Night the best Trouts bite, and will rise ordinarily in the still Deeps; but not so well in the Streams. And although the best and largest Trouts bite in the Night, (being afraid to stir, or range about in the Daytime;) yet I account this way of Angling both unwhomson, unpleasant and very ungentiel, and to be used by none but Idle pouching Fellows.

James Chetham, The Angler’s Vade Mecum

There are interesting comparisons between fly-fishing and long-time friendships. Both require careful attention and patience. Each demonstrates a fair degree of grace. Humor is needed to experience them fully. And when time is spent enjoying either pursuit, many happy moments can be discovered and shared.

Al Weber in the Ames Tribune August 20, 2004

"The solution to any problem -- work, love, money, whatever -- is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be."

John Gierach

"Since man began to pursue the game fish of the world with the fly,he has spend countless hours crafting accurate imitations.  For the experienced tyer, creating the perfect fly is the golden bridge that will place the quarry just hat bit nearer.  Great pride is taken in the art, and every strand of fur or web of feather is painstakingly crafted into the type's own unique creation.    For the new comer to fly typer's, the pure joy of catching a fish on a fly that has so lovingly been crafted is a just reward."

Martin Ford   "Fishing Flies"

"The concept of hitting the water 'right'- at the right time of year, on the right day, at the right time of day - is central to fly-fishing, and it's one of the more important elements of fishing in the high mountains."

John Geirach  "Fly fishing the High Country"

"Fishing is a kind of reading, which is why so many fisherman, when they are not fishing and not tying flies, like to read about fishing. They indulge winter fantasies with articles about perfected streamers and new material for the belly of a jassid and with river stories -- the classics of Hemingway and Grey, those of the modern masters Schweibert, Chatham, Gierach and Lyons. Indeed, beyond reading as a form of self-help or of escape, fishing may not only be a kind of reading, but the most intense form of reading there is."
Anonymous

One of the first rules in fishing is that there are few rules in fishing that resourceful trout do not manage to break.  Indeed, if there be any they don't smash to smithereens at one time or another. A couple:
1.    if you want to make sure the fishing will turn lousy, just dare invite a fellow angler from far away; the farther, the lousier.

2.    The moment your fishless guest takes off, the fishing will magically improve.
Robert Traver

"If you've fished all day without any success, here's a bit of advice. Cast your fly out as you normally would and then wade to the bank, lay your rod down on the bank, head to the weeds, etc. and take a "whiz".  When you return, if your rod is gone, you'll know that you hooked a biggun. If your rod is trying to go, you have a fish on line. If it's just lying there doing nothing, repeat the process. If that doesn't work, take a sip from your flask. If that doesn't work, take another sip. You still might not get a trout, but after a few more sips, you won't give a damn!"

Moon Holler Misfits Fishing & Hunting Club ©
I Shot That Deer In Self-Defense
"Red Neck Trout Tricks"
Jimmy D. Moore

The fact of the matter is, we anglers depend upon and cherish the words of our predecessors and fellow fishermen.  Reading becomes one of many ancillary pleasures of the sport."

Gerald Almy  "Tying & Fishing Terrestrials"

"And so, this endless tyranny goes on. Only those become weary of angling who bring nothing to it but the idea of catching fish."
Rafael Sabatini

The flytier who practices with the flies he or she has created soon realizes that there can be a large degree of difference between a fly pattern that catches the admiration of anglers and those that catch trout."
Ken Iwamasa

The deepest pleasures of angling are measured in the soul.

W.H. Lawrie

The sort of angler who expects free top-quality fishing information is guilty of abject laziness and of wanting to muscle in on other men’s hard-won discoveries. What they want is something for nothing, or at least without personal effort.

Bryn Hammond, “Halcyon Days”

I early learned from almost any stream in a trout country the true angler could take trout, and that the great secret was this, that whatever bait you used – worm, grasshopper, grub or fly – there was one thing you must always put upon your hook, namely, your heart; when you bait your hook with your heart the fish always bite they will jump clean from the water after it; they will dispute with each other over it; it is a morsel they love above everything else.

John Burroughs in Locust and Wild Honey

I have thus run over some of the features of an ordinary trouting excursion to the woods. People, inexperienced in such matters, sitting in their rooms and thinking of these things, of all the poets have sung and romancers written, are apt to get sadly taken in when they attempt to realize their dreams. They expect to enter a sylvan paradise of trout, cool retreats, laughing brooks, picturesque views, balsamic couches, etc. instead of which they find hunger, rain, smoke, toil, gnats, mosquitos, broken rest, vulgar guides and salt pork; and they are very apt not to see where the fun comes in. But he who goes in a right spirit will not be disappointed, and will find the taste of this kind of life better, though bitterer, than the writers have described.

John Burroughs in Locust and Wild Honey

Sol’s Looney Tables

Best Times to Go Fishing:

·        On the first full moon after pay-day if it falls on a three-day weekend.

·        One week before or after the predicted peak of any big-name hatch.

·        During a violent electrical storm; you will have the stream to yourself.

·        On the cusp of a new moon when Mercury is in the house of Pisces and your wife is in the house of your mother-in-law.

·        Thirty minutes after Nick Lyons has fished a particular stretch of water.

·        During television rating week.

·        Any time this year – there is extra day because of Leap Year.

Worst Times to Go Fishing:

·        On Opening Day.

·        For one month after you limited out.

·        When the barometer is falling off the wall; too windy.

·        During a line squall when the wind is blowing out of the northeast and your boat is blowing out of the water.

·        During the week in which you made reservations for prize salmon water.

·        When Ernie Schwiebert is going along with you.

·        When there is a mackerel sky—unless you are fishing for mackerel.

·        When the sun is in Aquarius, the moon is in conjunction with Venus and your wife is in opposition to the whole idea.

May-June 1980 Fly Fisherman

Taking a serious fly-fishing trip with the family can only lead to disaster.

Don Zahner, “Tense? Try Fly-Fishing” in July-September 1980 Fly Fisherman

When tensions and stress threaten to bring on nervous collapse, it’s time to go fishing.

Dr. Jerome L. Sieger & Dr. Armin Thies

Fishermen, even more than golfers, have a reputation for lying about their achievements. This problem of public credibility goes back a long way, but within the past century or so, fishermen’s trustworthiness has been so completely undermined that they are almost never believed. Their families and friends rarely believe them, and perhaps even more significant, they rarely believe each other. The very term “fish story” has come to mean a tastefully embroidered account of real events, at best, and outright fantasy, at worst. We’ve reached the point where a fish story isn’t supposed to be true; the angler’s reputation his overwhelmed his perspective. The fish story has become fine art. Look, for example, at how many expressions that imply trickery or foolishness have originated in fishing: We fall for something “hook, line and sinker …;” we never give a “sucker” an even break; we suspect that something is “fishy.”

Paul Schullery, The Debunking of Daniel Webster in Rod & Reel March/April 1981

It is the history of civilizations that conservationists are always defeated, boomers always win, and the civilizations always die. I think there has never been, in any state a conservation government, because there has never yet been a people with sufficient humility to take conservation seriously. This is natural enough. No man is intimately concerned with more than his lifetime, comparatively few men concern themselves seriously with more than a fraction of that time; in the last analysis all governments reflect the concerns of the people they govern, and most modern democratic governments are more deeply concerned with some brief, set term of office than with anything else. Conservation means fair and honest dealing with the future, usually at some cost to the immediate present. It is a simple morality, with little to offset the glamour and quick material rewards of the North American deity, “Progress.”

Roderick L. Haig-Brown, Measure of the Year

Unlike fishing with a dry fly, where you can observe your quarry in action, in nymphing you must fish in areas where you may only suspect trout activity. The success of a nymph fisherman therefore parallels his ability to read water. Where you "plunk down" the fly is really what it is all about.
Al Troth, "How to Read the Water" in The Masters on the Nymph edited by J. Michael Migel and Leonard M. Wright, Jr.

When fished directly upstream, if the fish is rising in the fastest part of the current in the length of the cast, the fly will travel at the natural pace, the line gradually slacken below it, and there will be no drag. If there should be below the rising place of the fish and in the length of the cast a portion of the stream faster than that in which the fish is feeding, this will cause the line to pull down and make it travel faster than the pace of a natural insect in the same position thus causing drag. The method adopted to retard this drag until the fly is below the rising fish is to check the cast at the forward position, so that the fly does not extend in a straight line, but falls on the water with some slack behind it. Until the fast part of the stream has straightened out this slack there will be no acceleration in the pace of the fly, and consequently no drag. This too is a strong confirmation of the advice so often given by dry-fly experts never to throw a straight taut line, but in every case to make the fly alight on the water with a curved or slack line behind it.

Frederic M. Halford, The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook

The object of the dry-fly fisherman is to place his fly in such a position and in such a manner that it will float accurately over the rising fish following a similar course and traveling at the same pace as would the natural insect on the same run. Any deviation from the natural course governed by the flow of the stream, and any acceleration or diminution of the pace of the living insect on the part of the artificial fly, is designated drag. The use of the word drag, to define any unnatural appearance of the artificial fly on the water due to its proceeding in a different direction or drifting down at a slower or faster rate than the natural, was, no doubt, in the first instance suggested by the perceptible wake made by the artificial fly under such conditions.

Frederic M. Halford, The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook

The expression “hatch” must be clearly understood to refer to the first appearance in the winged stage, although, of course, the true meaning of the word is the emergence of the larva or nympha from the egg. The word has been used in this anomalous sense for so many generations of anglers that I think it well to continue to use it notwithstanding the knowledge that it is not scientifically accurate.

Frederic M. Halford, The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook

If you have a preference for a particular fly by all means fish it. The fly you prefer is far more likely to kill than one in which you have no confidence. Do not, however, let your self be blinded to the possibility of patterns being improved, and when you use one which strikes your fancy as an unusually good imitation of the natural insect give it a fair trial before condemning it.

 Frederic M. Halford, The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook

Confidence in a particular fly is one of the most potent factors tending to render it successful in use.

Frederic M. Halford, The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook

Those of us who will not under any circumstances cast except over rising fish are sometimes called ultra-purists, and those who will occasionally try to tempt a fish in position, but not actually rising, are styled purists. The expressions are often used by angling authorities as a species of reproach or commiseration, or even with the intention of being read as chaff. Now I would urge that the first rule to be observed  by every man who wishes to be deemed a dry-fly fisher is to follow the example of these purists or ultra-purists.

Frederic M. Halford, The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook

There is, to my mind, no necessity to discuss here the relative merits of the dry-fly and wet fly. The questions has been debated ad nauscam, and there is room among true sportsmen for the votaries of either style of fly-fishing. The confirmed advocate of the dry-fly school will under all conditions float his fly. The wet-fly man will sink his fly or flies, and he who, like the late Francis Francis, believes “the judicious and perfect application of dry, wet, and mid-water fly-fishing stamps the finished fly-fisher with the hall-mark of efficiency,” will continue to use each method as and where he deems it to be the most likely to lead to success.

Frederic M. Halford, The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook

[Fly fishing], if we let it, will make our lives a bit richer, sprinkled bright with the rich colors of the flies we use or the game we pursue or the inexpressibly lovely places in which we pursue them.

Nick Lyons, “The Lyons in Winter” in March/April 1980 Rod & Reel

The connection between fishermen and the measure of the men lies in the spirit with which they fish or carry fishing inside them.

Nick Lyons, “The Lyons in Winter” in March/April 1980 Rod & Reel

Fish-story tellers have jeopardized their credibility time and again by inserting into their tales a wanton degree of hyperbole, often introducing the most improbably characters and events without batting an eyelash. This has earned us all a bad reputation and has made things hard for those of us who would tell a story and not stray one iota from the truth.

Craig Woods, “The Stranger and the Red Quill” in Rod and Reel, January-February 1980

Fishing friends are long friends because the doing of it is an intense perceptive preoccupation and one that is charged with unexpected humor.

Edward Weeks, Fresh Waters

It is the spirit of fishing, its immeasurable charm and mystery, which ever leads us beyond the woods where the wild birds sing. Never can we reach our final goal, for always before us lie further fields yet to explore.

Romilly Fedden, Golden Days

I assert that a man does not go fishing or hunting in order to obtain, or kill, as much game as he can. I assert that he does it in order to achieve a certain relationship between himself and wildness, to match himself against the land and against certain of its creatures, possession of which he has taught himself to desire. It is not merely his skill with rod and gun which he wants to exercise … there is a more spacious feeling, the feeling of free agency within a large solitude … the feeling of being alone and unhampered in one’s pursuit, to follow it as one sees fit, by no man’s sufferance.

Vance Bourjaily

Fish are, of course, indispensable to the angler. They give him an excuse for fishing and justify the flyrod without which he would be a mere vagrant. But the average fisherman’s average catch doesn’t even begin to justify, as fish, its cost in work, time and money. The true worth of fishing, as the experienced, sophisticated angler comes to realize, lies in the memorable contacts with people and other living creatures, scenes and places, and living waters great and small which it provides.

Sparse Grey Hackle, Fishless Days Angling Nights

Yet compared with the serious things of life, fishing is after all a trivial business. The thoughtful angler must frankly confess this. It adds to the difficulty of the problem when he asks himself why the pleasure of catching a few trout is so great and failure so disheartening. The eagerness and excitement with which one sets about fishing water which holds big fish is almost childish. The value of the prize is in no way comparable to the desire it arouses. When the fish are rising and showing themselves, the longing to hook them which one feels is almost insane. And when we see them feeding regardless of our fly or dashing off terrified at our efforts to delude them, the resentment which the fisherman feels is almost like the anger of a madman.

Harold Russell, Chalkstream and Moorland

At the very heart of the sport lies a curious imaginative circuitry between fisherman and fish, for the former has to try to think like the latter, the angler has to be part fish.

David Profumo and Graham Swift, The Magic Wheel, An Anthology of Fishing in Literature

An angler’s chief delights come in installments and are no sooner revealed than disappear again beneath yet another swirling and diaphanous veil.

Bryn Hammond, Halcyon Days

Doubt not but that Angling is an Art; is it not an Art to decive a Trout with an artificial Flie? A Trout! that is more sharp sighted than any Hawk you have nam’d, and more watchful and timorous than your high mettled Marlin is bold? and yet, I doubt not to catch a brace or two to morrow, for a friends breakfast; doubt not therefore, Sir, but that Angling is an Art, and an art worth your learning; the Question is rather, whether you may be capable of learning it? for Angling is somewhat like Poetry, men are to be born so; I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice, but he that hopes to be a good Angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit; but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the Art it self; but having once got and practis’d it, then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be like Vertue, a reward to it self.

Izaak Walton

It is true that for most anglers, a good proportion of the charm of angling lies in the fact that it brings one into close contact with the many-voiced life of the waterside: with small, shy creatures not normally met in towns, with trees and flowers and a wonderful world of birds. But it is a certainty that one sees far more of the wild life of the waterside if one leaves one’s rod behind.

Maurice Wiggin, The Passionate Angler

Most thinking, dedicated fly fishermen are convinced that one of the great qualities of the sport is that it is non-competitive. There is enough competiotn in other aspects of life without including it in one of life’s great and magic escapes. The least aspect of competitiveness destroys its most charming qualities, giving it an atmosphere of sly haste, pervading it with petty jealousies, envy and resentment. These sad things are so prevalent in this world that most men go fishing in order to get away from them for a while.

Bryn Hammond, Halcyon Days

Sleeping we image what awake we wish;

Dogs dream of bones, fishermen of fish.

Theocritus

That, my dear boys, is spring fishing all over. Pool after pool, looking perfect, and certain, as you feel, to hold fish over without a sign. Your high hopes are growing faint or have gone altogether, when, often at the most unlikely place, jump in your arm goes an electric thrill, and the one rise of the day has come and the fish is gone; or else, hardly knowing how it has happened, your nerves are found watching, and the half-raised rod is twitching and quivering with the line tight upon a plunging, splashing, rolling salmon, beginning a battle of anxious, growing hope, ending with a noble, glittering prize.

As far as catching fish goes, you may now go home. Unless your liens are, indeed, cast in pleasant places you have had your only fish of the day, and you will catch no more. The memories of many days of spring fishing tell us so, and in our hearts we know it as we admire this shapely, shining fish. But, go home! do you say? Hang it, man, the day is only just begun. Go home! Don’t you know that every cast that I make after this I shall feel certain that I am going to take another fish. I shall be fishing better than I have ever fished today. I’ve got one; nothing can make it a blank day now, and, with a little luck, I shall certainly get another.

Well, this is called patience by those who don’t know. But it is nothing at all like patience. It is hope, undying, unquenchable, the heart and soul of salmon fishing.

….

And then there is the joy of fishing itself; of throwing a line whether fish take or no. It seems impossible to convey the reality of this as a separate pleasure, to any but honest anglers. ‘You fish?’ they say. ‘What patience you must have.’ Not at all; hardly anything is less true. Some of the most impatient souls alive are untiring salmon fishers; men to whom blank days or lost fish are but as whetstones to keener fishing on the morrow.

A.H. Chaytor, Letters to a Salmon Fisher’s Sons

Patience, which so many persons suppose to be the necessary qualification, is certainly required; but it is not a thoughtless or inactive patience. It is not merely willingness to wait for an hour, or two hours, or a whole day, watching for an indication that the lure has proved attractive. Patience of that kind has but a small part in the sport. The befitting patience is more than a lazy or stoical endurance. It is continually alert. It embraces much more knowledge and a much greater resourcefulness of thought than are commonly imagined. It is a state of mind more complex than that which is necessary to success in any other pursuit on flood or field.

Earl Hodgson, Trout Fishing

Fly-tying has little consideration for ethics these days, and neither does the practice of fishing itself, but this need not necessarily be bemoaned. As in all things, fashions and ways and means in fly fishing go in cycles, not least in the matter of flies.

Bryn Hammond, Halcyon Days

As I have said, fishermen when they cast their eye on flies and began to imitate them, proceeded on what we can now recognize as three distinct principles. Some imitated fly life generally, and produced an article which was a fair copy of an insect but could not be connected with any particular species or genus or group. Such flies are called fancy flies. They have many redoubtable advocates, drawn in modern times chiefly from Scotland. Steward pinned his faith to his three famous hackles, his black, his red, and dun spider. No doubt each of those could with a little laxity, be identified with a  specific insect, but he did not set out to imitate such and chose his flies with an eye rather to weather and water. This, in fact, is the feature which distinguishes this school; more attention is paid to light, to the clearness of the water, and to the sky, than to the insect. Steward has many followers to this day.

The next school use what are called general flies, that is, flies which imitate a genus or a group, but not an individual. They differ from the last in that they regard imitation as more important than light or water; but they consider that precise copying is impossible, and, if it were possible, unnecessary.

The third and last is content with nothing short of an actual copy of the individual species which trout are taking. Of these was Halford, who when he first wrote included fancy and general flies in his list, but at the end of his long life says that his full experience convinced him that specific imitation is best in all weathers and all waters. Of course these three schools merge into each other.  A fly can be more or less general, or it can be on the borderland of fancy and general, or of general and individual. Take the Partridge and Orange as an example. It is fished in the north all year round, and may be called a fancy fly. But it is possibly the best imitation of the February Red, and when so used it is specific. And besides the February Red it also kills as an imitation of the nymph of the Blue Winged Olive, and as such is general. Or again, the Wickham is regarded as a fancy fly, yet a trout must be keen sighted to distinguish it from a Red Quill, specific imitation of a Red Spinner. So there is no hard and fast line with fishermen, for most of us use all three sorts. Few are entirely fancyists or generalists or individualists. Yet the distinction remains and has been an important one throughout history.

J.W. Hills, A History of Fly Fishing for Trout

 
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