The Best Fly Fishing is Everywhere - 12.26.2025
Ramblings & Readings, Creativity & Conservation, Happenings & Hope
My Fishy Friends,
Pacific Ocean waves crash not far from where I write this, and they appear inconsistent yet unending. Similarly, a network of rivers, streams, and creeks flow into the same ocean at an equivalent rate. At their points of intersection, anadromous fish pass, simultaneously ending one journey and beginning another. I wish them, and you, well.
Cheers,
Jesse
Banner photo: Point of intersection
The Best Fly Fishing is Everywhere Playlist, Vol. 4
Here’s the fourth installment of The Best Fly Fishing is Everywhere Playlist, a baker’s dozen of tracks I’ve been listening to as of late that are in some way—specific, generally, or broadly—related to fly fishing. Enjoy!
Welaka
During my tenure in the fly fishing industry, I ended up spending some decent time in and around Orlando, Florida. On the outskirts of the city resides a world-class fly angler, casting instructor, author, artist, and human named Jon Cave. Jon was featured recently in a new film entitled “Welaka,” meaning river of lakes. It’s a celebration of sorts of what’s now called the St. Johns River, and the surrounding ecosystem. Beautiful cinematography, captivating narration, and good vibes throughout.
From Benny Sip
It’s funny how your world and your path can overlap, intersect, and parallel with another’s. Such is the case I find in New Zealand-based author and angler Benny Sip. While not at the same time, we guided at the same ranch in Colorado; and, as I have traveled extensively on the South Island, we have a shared connection to that fine place as well. He’s also a prolific writer, often employing what he and Brian Doyle (another favorite author) call ‘proems’—prose poems. Benny just re-released his first book A River Runs digitally, and his next will be out in the new year. Each proem is easily and rapidly consumed, yet on a time-release digestion schedule; filled with keepsake ideas and light bulb moments, and the more they’re returned to, they better they get. As a sampler:
Polaroid Lens
Power belongs, not to the man with riches,
fame, or status, but to he who looks
at the river and sees something
altogether different.
Winchester Update
The North Umpqua’s Winchester Dam is a 130-year old, malfunctioning fish passage barrier providing no hydropower, irrigation, nor water supply; instead, it impedes salmon and steelhead from reaching the river’s pristine headwaters. The ongoing saga to remove the dam (which I wrote about a few years ago in The Drake) has an update as of this week: an administrative law judge issued an order that requires completion of new fish passage facilities by 2028. Such facilities are going to be very expensive. Read more via WaterWatch of Oregon.
Above: Winchester Dam amidst construction by owners in 2023.
Things
Put up in a place
where it's easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time.
~ From Piet Hein’s Grooks
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