Wonder

Fly fishing has always been a wonder for me. The ability to wonder is a gift and derived by encountering beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable things or events. It generates curiosity in many of us and can evoke a desire to understand, investigate, and validate. Not everyone wonders about, well anything. But for those who do wondering invokes questions and probability in most people’s minds and sometimes initiates the impulse to understand deeply. Much of fly fishing is about problem solving. It’s about all of the variables we can encounter in the process as we fish or prepare to fish, and dial them in to a pinpointed algorithm that works. As fly fishermen we encounter much we can wonder about and has resulted in a plethora of ideas and solutions contributed by many based on how to chase and catch fish. Some people conjure up opinions and exert them as fact. Others have suspicions that formulate opinions and seek the facts. Fly fishing, as a sport, is filled with people with a broad range of personality profiles, and egos, and sometimes generates incorrect or incomplete information to the fly fishing community.

I’ve learned a lot about the sport, but don’t know everything. After all, if you know everything then there is nothing left. You are at the end of the journey with nothing more. It’s over. What a terrible thought and a place to be. I don’t ever want to be there and hope to be a student of the sport and continue to grow all of my life. It’s partly why I fish. So, the approach to my thinking and writing will come from asking about questions I have, and hopefully the fly fishing collective can help provide the facts and answers. However, part of my approach will be to challenge opinions exerted on us without fact and seek to evoke truth through science and math. 

I hope to learn from others and for others to learn from me, and have fun as we do so.

The picture is the bottom of a water bottle filled with the content pumped from the stomach of a Big Horn River trout.