Fly Fishing and Writing: "Still, we enjoyed ourselves"

I’m going to wax a little philosophical about writing in this post… taking a look again at how fly fishing is a lot like writing. Truly, the frustration with either activity is directly related to how you approach them.

 

So, I just arrived home from a three-day fly fishing trip. In our minds we’d done everything right. We’d checked the weather a few days ahead of time and even the night before. We saw there were chances for rain on Sunday, but we were arriving Monday, so we were in the clear.

 

So we thought.

 

Upon arriving, we set up camp, and then I walked into the woods to relieve myself… one of nature’s many luxuries. I heard a loud churning noise and walked back to the campsite to tell Dave the river sounded loud. He seemed skeptical, so we decided to walk down and take a look at the water.

 

It was raging. It must have been nearly a foot and a half higher than normal. We would later find out the river was putting through 3000 cubic feet per second of water. When the river is at normal levels, it puts through much less than 1000 cubic feet per second (normal would be 500 to 600 cubic feet).

 

In short, it looked like the opportunity to catch any fish was nil. The river was literally too dangerous to wade, let alone try to fish. We even spoke for a time about bagging the trip, knowing that it would be days before the river was back to normal. (We later found out that the rain we’d seen for Sunday turned out to be a four-hour downpour, and we were looking at the aftermath).

 

Why would we leave? Well, dry fly fishing is already a difficult way to catch fish. So much needs to be perfect to catch a keeper. Fish (bigger ones) need to be feeding from the surface. They need to be hungry enough to expel the energy to feed off the surface. Your fly also needs to come pretty close to matching what they are feeding on.

 

When the river gets flooded (as it was) lots of “feed” in the form of insects and worms gets washed into the river. When the water starts to slow, the fish eat copiously below the surface. Plus, the water we were looking at was opaque with stirred up silt, so the fish couldn’t even see if something were floating on the surface.

 

In short, water flow like that kills the fishing. So, yeah, we thought about bagging it because our mind was on big fish, seeing as how our previous two trips had been productive. In early June, we’d each caught the biggest fish of our over 20-year fly fishing career.

We had fish—big fish—on the mind.

 

Did we bag it? No. Why? Because we’d already paid the 45 dollars to stay three nights.

 

Instead, we changed our mindset. We decided to focus on the experience of camping, relaxing, avoiding Covid-19 news, and trying to fish when we could. The first night, we drove an hour south to another river that hadn’t seen as much rain. We caught a few fish, but no keepers. Still, the river (the South Branch of Michigan’s famous Au Sable River) was beautiful. We were on the Mason Tract. (George Mason was an auto exec who owned miles and miles of land along the river early in the 20th Century. When he died, he bequeathed the land to the State with a proviso that the land could never be developed. It’s some of the most pristine river you can find with no cabins or manmade structures what-so-ever… well, beside the fly fisherman’s chapel. There’s actually a little chapel on the river. One can fish on a Sunday, but still go to church and commune with God… if that’s their thing. Granted, there’s no pastor, but you can buzz up to the chapel, say a prayer, and then get back to casting).

 

 

 

We enjoyed the scenery of the Mason Tract. We enjoyed seeing a Great Blue Heron flying down the river. We enjoyed walking in nature. We didn’t catch any keepers, but we were fishing and walking down a river… and that was enough.

 

The rest of the trip was about the same. The Pigeon River did come down quite a bit over night, but it was still whisky-colored from all the silt. Still, we fished that night. We didn’t do well with only three fish between us… none of them over 5 inches.

 

Still, we enjoyed ourselves. A beaver slapped his tail on the water at me as I walked by its dam (if I was going to have a heart attack at 50 that would have been the moment). Birds flew all around us. The mosquitos were relatively absent. We had great conversations about life and writing around the fire. Dave is close to finishing a draft of a novel, and I’m close to starting a new one. We talked a lot about that. We sat for hours in the campsite reading. We played corn toss. We ate well.

The third night the river was back, more or less, to itself. We could see the bottom clearly. The fish were much more active (though no keepers).

 

Still, we enjoyed ourselves… mainly because we decided the purpose of the trip was the experience, not big fish.

 

Fly fishing and writing have a lot in common. Catching big fish on a dry fly is a long shot. Once, in the past, a guy was hiking through the campground. He asked how we were fishing, and we told him fly fishing. He laughed and said, “Oh, so you guys don’t like to catch fish when you fish.” We laughed too. It’s a pretty accurate statement.

 

Hackle and different material tied around a hook trying to imitate an insect. That’s your bait. Then there’s every reason for a big fish not to be feeding on the surface.

 

So much is stacked against you when you’re dry fly fishing. Same goes with writing.

 

What’s your big one? Five thousand sales for your self-published novel? Landing a reputable agent? Publishing with one of the Big 5?

 

Those are lofty goals and probably even less likely to happen than me catching a 21-inch brown trout on a dry fly.

 

If you focus exclusively on the Big Ones as a source of pleasure, you’re likely going to be a miserable writer. I often tell my students, “Enjoy the writing; everything else is downhill.”

 

Like with fly fishing, as a writer, you need to learn to just enjoy the experience… those moments when you lose yourself in the creative act. That perfectly crafted sentence. Figuring out some logistical glitch in your plot. The high of writing more pages than you thought you might on a given day.

 

Focus on that…because the big ones might never happen. Statistically, the chances are stacked against you… heavily stacked.

 

Do you bag it? Quit writing? Wallow in each rejection? Lament your publishing hardships on Twitter?

 

No, you redirect your enjoyment to the process of writing itself. Nothing ruins fly fishing like over-focusing on big fish, and the same can be said of writing and publication.

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