Coming up in a time of worms Part 2

( PLEASE READ PART 1 AS THIS A MULTIPLE PART SERIES )
In the spring of 1984 I was proudly employed as a carrier of the Spokane daily chronicle. My route consisted of mostly elderly customers, in those days you had to collect and sell subscriptions, some customers I truly loved to collect from.. others, well not so much. One of my favorites was an older gentleman in his 80's, his home was a museum of outdoor memorabilia, antlers, gear, hides... you name it, every time I would visit I couldn't help but eyeball the 5 ft tall stack of sports afield, outdoor life and American rifleman magazines in the corner near the door. He must have noticed because soon every few weeks there would be one in the paper box, the first one had a note... " thought you might enjoy this" it was a sports afield from 1933... awesome. So over the next few months I regularly received a new old magazine, and I wore them out reading about Alaska, Canada...and sometimes places I never even new had hunting ( like California.. yeah I actually didn't know they had woods still back then ) then one day.. a sportsman's journal, dedicated to dry fly fishing... and my whole world changed.. forever. After two months of ripping out pages of brown trout with green drake flies clinging to their lips like jewelry, decorating my walls, school locker, peechees, and absolutely boring the living shit out of anyone who would stay in the room, a miracle happened, the chronicle had a subscription drive, and one of the prizes was a fly rod package. This was the first time in my short life I had ever truly focused on a goal, it was everything to me, I had to have it.. and after two weeks of hustling like the last couple to join Amway... it was mine, well almost.. every Monday I would go to the local McDonald's for the paper meeting and it wouldn't be there yet... not that I didn't ask, a million times.. the fourth of July was closing in fast and I needed it. My family had planned a rare trip to a different camping location, the N Fork of the St Joe river in Idaho. I had already made all the preparations.. multiple trips to Kmart had secured me 3 packages of mosquito flies, and 2 packages of Danielson wet flies, the Elton john blue Gordons quill variant had my eye every night as I rearranged them in the folding metal fly box I had purchased to keep them safe in ( in hind sight and much field testing... gay blue flies from India don't catch shit ) One evening just days before the trip my managers car pulled up, Gary stepped from the cutlass and I saw it.. my rod, my weapon.. the hand of god. Without so much as a thank you I blazed straight for my room, tearing the rod from the plastic and shoving the two pieces together I started reading from the top of the package, Shakespeare 2 piece 6 wt fly rod, Graphite reel, my mind went crazy, Graphite yeah! no more flimsy metal that can rust..the best! foam grip for added comfort and less fatigue, Yeah! less fatigue and probably warmer too! included 1 level floating fly line ( bumps and imperfections included) backing and one 4x leader already assembled...Yeah! already assembled, now I can throw away the copy of the Curtis creek Manifesto I had purchased to learn the knots... what omg a pamphlet with all the Knots and casting guide included! this fly fishing thing is gonna be easy........ to be continued

Coming up in a time of worms.... Part 1

Becoming a fly fisherman wasn't easy in Spokane in 1984.. I was twelve years old, I cut my teeth as a fisherman in the murky waters of Deep Lake Washington on the Canadian border, Fishing was good back then. Every morning of our summer camping trips I would rise before anyone else and scour the shore line rocks for as many Helgramite and dragonfly nymphs I could get my hands on and then march down the t shaped dock, My wonder rod and zebco 202 in one hand, a butter can full of bugs in the other. It was a time in the lakes history of rare native rainbow and plentiful cutthroat trout that averaged 2 lbs and often pushed 5... and I owned the lake, walking out on to the dock to the cleaning station ( don't see many of those on a dock anymore ) the water was only a foot or two deep there along the dock, I would carefully hook a nymph as to not kill it, then with no weight I would bullshit the little bug by releasing him hook in tow into the murky pollen stained water... and like the fool he was he would dart under the dock.. and as soon as he was out of sight kaaaaaaaaaaawaaaaaaaaaaam... one less empty spot on the stringer. Sadly in those days I kept everything, because much like today.. no fish- no credit, unlike the magic of today's camera it would have required a trip to Kmart and two weeks later.. proof, instant gratification for catches was big to me in those days so my first couple thousand fish appeared in photos like old west pictures of the James Gang... bloody, dead and stiff as a board. Then the resort sold, and the new owners turned it into condo style lots and my lower income family was no longer welcome at the resort, but that's OK because it ended with the lake falling into a steep decline and the fishing was starting to get a little tougher anyway. Enter the era of the middle fork calispel creek... a small stream tea colored and choked with brush, a complete mystery to me.. the nymph style fishing I had mastered so well was over, outdated... useless as a barbed hook on the Madison river, It was then that I discovered the cased caddis, one must first peel the little feller out of his rock fortress, then thread him on to an eagle claw egg hook, drifted without weight.. deadly. This was also where I caught my first Bull Trout.. and well..ummm ate him ( I have since learned what an expensive dinner that could have been ) I apologize sincerely, my Vietnam veteran dad apparently had very little use of troublesome government regulations... I'm claiming being 9 and ignorant on this one. One day while shucking caddis my dad looked at me and said why don't you just use worms... they are everywhere, and I catch more fish than you. I turned and trying to muster a retort worthy of my caddis effort.. simply said, well... because maybe I'm a fly fisherman........... to be continued-