“This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years that hurls us towards life then drags us to nothingness…. We inhabit time as fish live in water.
– Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
Ivan gets bored with fishing. Sometimes. He can admit it, and in a way feels lousy doing so. “I don’t say this lightly. It is the truth” He will say in earnest, as in a state of slight self loathing. In reality it’s only a small part of his angling as a whole – this part he sometimes get bored with – which he supposes is rooted in the perpetual grind of putting himself into position catch a big fish… day after day. Ivan recognized this in himself to be almost cyclical in nature, a little pocket of resistance that grows in his craft after a certain amount of time has passed.
It’s not true boredom; it’s more a need for a change that is obscured by the requisite associated boredom that comes with it. “It’s hard to see around it sometimes, legit change is hard.” He nods while saying this. “I need this change even in the face of successful fishing.” It’s a catalyst. It’s how Ivan has learned to move his fishing game forward, and how I’ve learned to understand why he always seems just a little ahead of everyone else out here.
Ivan often expounds on his great and good fortune to live so close to a blue ribbon trout stream and everything in its surroundings that produce it to be one. The drainage has amazing upper sections of brook trout and hemlocks, the reservoir they drain into is deep and cold, and the tailwater it produces is well known and rightfully so… it’s beautiful, it’s consistent, and all the waters can be productive.
He sympathizes with those who feel that fly angling is a necessary passion. It is an axiom of his being and is manifest as the type of angler he is always becoming – his fishing is considered incessant and inveterate, pushing boundaries to degeneracy at one point in his life. He may not outwardly agree but he owns it, and it’s true… because it is a necessary passion. Some nights, as soon as his head hits the pillow he sees moving water, a river or the like. It’s not because he loves the rivers and streams so much (which he very much does), it’s because he is on the water. He spends a lot of time there and sees the stream behind his eye lids because it’s burned itself there, in his neurological makeup. It’s apparent now that he was in search of a change of pace, but not by conventional means. It had be by his backwards accessing and very non-linear chains of reasoning.
Ironically it was a seemingly trivial occurrence that changed Ivans approach in how he moves forward as an angler, how he quantifies what constitutes success. Sometimes things occur that reinforce just why someone may love something or someone so much. And when we can realize this happening, or to have happened, it becomes a cardinal observation. For Ivan this snapped in to place the very moment when he became fly-less.
It was the first week of August and it was characteristically hot. Here in the summer months we have a form of humidity that isn’t overly oppressive, but it’s long and consistent. The kind of consistency that can break ones morale, and more importantly ones fishing plans. Ivan fishes the tailwater section of stream this part of the year, the water never hits 60 degrees in the Catch and Release beats and the sudden contrast of hot and cold is appealing as it is apparent. A kind of fingerprint certain tailwaters close in proximity to tidewater weather patterns seem to possess – where the 90 plus degree air and the 58 degree water interface. Your experiences can seem to alter a bit. Ivans recalls that most of his best fishing memories astream are enveloped in these evening mists of summer. The needed change in his angling strategy, so unconsciously searched for, happened to also be borne out of these mists.
On the access trail to the river is where Ivan first passed two anglers who were not from around his way, or maybe even the same country for that matter. They were very obviously new to fly fishing. Young guys maybe 18 years of age at the most; the romantic in him instantly convinced himself they were possibly on their first fly angling venture on this stretch of river. When they physically crossed paths they both were wearing smiles that, without looking at one another, Ivan recognized to be of the best variety, immensely difficulty to suppress once they have taken ahold of you. The greatest display a human face can arrange itself in… uncontrolled happiness, indelible in nature – boyhood smiles.
They were still in view when Ivan arrived at the stretch of water he planned on fishing. He couldn’t help but notice their difficult efforts to get any line or leader out on the water that resembled a proper fly cast. At first it frustrated him – watching these failed attempts. But then It became clear that they were in complete disregard for what most in that moment would deem as failure. From about 60 yards away, Ivan could easily see they were having an absolute blast in their futile efforts – loving every second of it and each other as company. There was a polarity to this display of self education. It was contagious and he was attracted to it. “They are learning, let them learn. We all have been there… learning.” He said aloud, faraway eyes. “Indifferent to the world in the happiness of learning something new.” He again said aloud as he remembers this small but important anecdote, the joys a tenured fly-fisher may recall and think very fondly of… their own process of learning. “Only to be able to do that again for the first time.” This reaffirmed why Ivan loves our sport to the degree in which he does. Unfortunately he had to leave..
The duo were well below him when they again passed upon his trek to returning to the parking lot. This section of trail is on higher ground than the river by 5 or 6 feet, the grade was steep but they were close. Without words and without much time to access his already questionable faculties of proper decision making, Ivan handed his entire fly box to them and kept on moving. The fly box that he had for quite some time, many years in fact. The fly box that he used at the time he began to tell himself that maybe, just maybe, he knew what he was doing out here among this moving water… It had some sentimental value to him to say the very least. “They were my patterns, home water patterns; refined by color, size, and quantity.” He would voice. All were tied on his vice.
The look these young men reciprocated to their unexpected exchange was that of which Ivan handed them something he thought mistakenly belonged to them.. as if he was returning an item lost. But they took it… and Ivan instantly regretted his decision. Being sans fly-box completely escaped him for two days until he found himself en route to a close but very different section of the river. Replaying the details on how he became fly-less, Ivan began laughing at his stupidity for instantly losing years of fly box curation. But the clouds parted to a sense of proudness in his display of angling altruism. This all converged to lead to some unexpected motivation. He was challenged, albeit by his own doing, he was challenged none the less. So here began a view on the philosophy of self inflicted change. In this case it began as an inward challenge as to whether or not he could catch fish with patterns that may not be his first choice, or last for that matter. Since he was without his box, ”Could I catch a fish on whatever I happened to, very hopefully, find in my pack or vehicle?” This grew to what it is today, an odd but effective course of action to always stay at or close to the edge, the edge that is progress as defined in angling terms. This form, being self-inflicted is learned, the best form is when it happens by some backwards looking fortuitous accident – to subtend a a familiar angle but from a very different circumstance.
The fly Ivan found in the visor of his vehicle this day was a size 14 Humpy. Of course he had others too, but this fly stood out – it also was the first one his eyes found. He forced himself to use it and learn it, to find a way to cast it efficiently and fool a fish. He had pretty much zero confidence in the fly before this day but he caught fish with it after a while.. after cutting the tails off. “I suppose it made it look more like a beetle than whatever it’s designed to resemble?” Ivan looked at it as it was in the lower corner of the trouts mouth. Fish after fish that August were caught in the meadow reaches of waters he frequented on this humpy – a pattern he would have never chose had it not been for those two very new and ambitious anglers. In time it took his terrestrial game to a new level, brought in to the light how something as simple as cutting the tails off a fly can change the way it sits afloat and moves with the current. “The difference between beetle and winged insect was the subtraction of tails; resulting in a difference of a few hundred thousandths an inch in float depth” he wrote in his journal. He found a threshold to trigger attention from fish.. to trigger attention from himself.
Fly angling as a whole, as Ivan shows astream, is an exercise in ones abilities to recognize, formulate, then overcome changing data sets in real time – an exercise in computational efficiency. It may not seem like it but it is indeed a ubiquitous metric. “Can we practice real life on the river?… Is this what this is?” Maybe part of what we seek going a fishing is the satisfaction from being able to arrange disorder in to order. It’s what we do out there upon the waters. Maybe this is why some may extract such joy from this game – in the form of personal satisfaction – albeit a solo pursuit. The fish in the net is the resulting singularity.
By Sean Eagan
Degenerate Angler
December 2022
