The Best Fly Fishing is Everywhere - 08.29.2025
Ramblings & Readings, Creativity & Conservation, Happenings & Hope
My Fishy Friends,
To beat the heat, go early, go upriver, go do both, or wait it out. I’m a little tired of the latter, so I’m going to try the two former. Speaking of tired, getting up before dawn makes for a damn fine nap…
Cheers,
Jesse
Banner photo: Small stream in the big woods.
“Fifty Miles”
Fifty miles separate the two waters, and the fish that reside in them.
Only fifty miles between a warmwater oasis and a coldwater refuge with as different denizens as the waters’ color and clarity…
The Squamish Poacher
Here’s a nice short film that found its way to me this week: “The Squamish Poacher,” all about the fly pattern that holds that name and its inventor, Joe Kambeitz. As shown, Kambeitz has quite a legacy in northwest fisheries — one that extends across the globe in the form of the Storm Drain Marking Program. If you’re not already familiar with this name, I’m sure you’re familiar with the practice: using painted fish or decorative plaques, signs, and artwork to designate street drains that flow directly into fish-bearing streams and rivers (Google it, if you don’t know what I’m talking about). Simple idea, GIANT impact.
More Poachers
Years ago, I attended a dinner party hosted by some friends who were renting a furnished home. While browsing the owners’ library with the party host, we stumbled upon Edmund Ware Smith’s The One-Eyed Poacher and the Maine Woods. This struck me for the obvious reason that I’m a Mainer but for the secondary reason that one of my eyes is, shall we say, special. My friend remarked that I might indeed be the one-eyed poacher in the Maine woods! I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider ‘borrowing’ the book that night, but I did not. A while later, that same friend gifted me a copy of the book. The author, Smith, was prolific, and this book is hilarious.
So…
…you want to write about fly fishing? asks TU’s Kirk Deeter in this essay of the same name. Deeter’s writing and fly fishing resume stacks up against most, so the nuggets and opinions shared in this short piece come from someone who, undeniably, has done it. Now, that’s certainly not to say that his is the only way or the ‘right way’ (whatever that means) to do it, or that there isn’t any room to do it other ways, because there are! Still, I found some of his thoughts to be helpful, intriguiging, and/or good reminders.
Fish nor Fishiness
Perhaps neither fish nor fishiness exist unless and until we anglers think they do. Perhaps it is simply a matter of aligning one's mind with the probability of fishiness by the repeated and intimate act of fishing.
~ From Jessica Maxwell’s I Don’t Know Why I Swallowed the Fly
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