Originally Posted by
I've seen black diamonds!
I'm with you. There is something wonderful about the way that every time you go fly fishing there is a chance you will feel like a bumbling novice, or a brilliant apex predator. Either of these feelings can me me laugh out loud when I'm standing by myself thigh deep in a river. Yesterday gave me plenty of chances to feel like the apex predator. I made a couple tricky casts that produced nice fish - one under some long grass up against a cut bank, the other between a boulder and a branch to get a drift under an overhanging tree. I had to laugh at my own brilliance. I was Lee Wulff reincarnated. I, with my rod and line, might have reminded a passerby of a show cowboy doing fancy rope tricks (in those moments it was easy ignore to all the other casts that I fucked up, the trees I decorated with my flies...).
A month ago I was fishing an East coast pond that holds some fat rainbows. They were hammering what I think were swimming damselfly nymphs. I had some damselfly nymphs in my box! But the trout were unimpressed. I tried water boatmen, leeches, chironomids and more. I tried every retrieval I could think of. For hours. Nothing. Finally I had a take! I had cracked the code! It was a four inch bass. This was also funny.