The Contemplative Angler

Not a rise. If a friend hadn't assured me that this pool was the home of "some decent trout" I would have thought the water barren. Then it came to me! With all my flies I had been appealing to the trouts' sense of sight... but what about their sense of decency?...

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I could see the backing, it was just down the aisle from the rack of Powerbait. I wasn't mightily impressed. It looked just as I remembered when I last spooled some on a reel. Just some string - tough but not noteworthy. "Self", I said to myself, "why does every other fly fisher see backing and wax eloquent about it; why do I never experience the joy of "the screaming reel?"...

Contemplation, pondering the mysteries of the universe and beyond, is never going to make it as a spectator sport. It had its run of course. Simon of Stylites had a respectable audience for thirty-seven years - but living atop a pillar has an attraction that sitting on a rock in midstream will never match...

A wonderful admonition if Mr. Thoreau had been speaking of fly tying -- simplifying, eliminating the profound complexity of some of our established patterns. Take, for example, the fly once universally employed when fishing for Atlantic salmon. Until some enterprising soul had the audacity to replace the feather wing of a full-dress salmon fly, which might sport twenty different types of feathers from exotic fowl, with a simple hairwing of bear or squirrel, it was a given that salmon would only strike the gaudy betrayer.

Below are some salmon flies, hairwing flies from Maritime Canada surrounding a full-dress "Blue Doctor". All of them catch fish,and not just in North America, but in all the streams where Atlantic salmon swim. So, what did it take for the first Maritimer to "dress-down" a salmon fly? Did he sleep that night or toss about, torn by guilt for believing that the noble Salmo salar would roll to such a simple device?