Measuring Success

It's been suggested, repeatedly, that anglers go through a number of stages throughout their fishing lives. In the beginning all a new angler wants to do is catch a fish, any fish, it doesn't matter what kind or how big. The goal is to avoid being skunked!

As time passes you start to get the nag of this fly fishing thing. First you find a pretty reliable spot, learn how to fish it, with what fly/flies and a level of confidence begins to develop. The picture is becoming a bit more clear. You start to venture onto different waters and catch fish there too. Before long you're catching a good number of fish with few skunks.

This is where it starts to get a bit tricky. Enter the lust for big fish.

Somehow one day, you can't put a finger on it but it's definitely happened. Just a fish is not good enough anymore. You're a real damn angler and you deserve big fish, so much so that you begin to feel a certain disappointment with any fish that's not, in your mind at least, big enough. The desire to catch big fish is so great that there are times when a day with 20 small fish to hand is considered wasted because there were no big fish. Don't believe it? A one-time fishing companion declared he would never fish a particular creek again because the trout were too small. "If there's no chance at a 20 incher there's no point!"  In his mind, around 20, 10-14" trout to the net, were not worth his time. Go figure.

Then there comes the definitive classification of species worthiness. This depends a great degree on geographic location of the angler, but not always. This is one of the two stages of angler progression that can take hold for life. Speaking from personal experience, I grew up chasing largemouth bass and sunfish with a fly rod but even before I caught my first, trout have been my species of choice. Can't explain it, Don't fight it. Don't get me wrong though, I WILL fish for anything that pulls my string as long as it's legal.

The drive experienced during the natural angler progression can become so overwhelming at times that it's hard to think about anything else whether we're fishing or not. But hopefully, at some point, reason kicks in and we remember why we started fishing in the first place, to get outside and experience what being on the water has to offer.

As I get older, 60 is just months away, I find myself in that latter stage. Gone are the days of wearing the badge of catching "the" big fish. Don't misunderstand me, I still want to catch a big fish, and lots of them if possible, but numbers and size have ceased to be the point.

Also gone, are the days when I felt the need to be on the water when the line would freeze up in the guides because it makes me tougher than the guys who are sitting home tying flies. Neither do I feel the need to dodge tornadoes, hail or gale force winds just to say I was on the water when.

I've been out there and froze my ass off, nearly losing fingers to frost bite, dodged hail storms and cast in wind that would lift 2x4's off the ground, just to prove a point. Looking back, I'm not sure what that point was, nor am I sure I ever did. In a few of those cases I feel lucky to be alive and have all my phalanges still intact.

I first read about the natural progression of an angler in my mid-thirties. I think it was John Gierach's version of it. Young and full of spunk, I remember thinking at the time, "whatever."  More than a couple decades later, it's pretty clear, if you're not there yet, you're just not there yet and no amount of words will explain it. It's easier to see the point 25 years on.

Having started fishing at a really young age it could be said I had a head start on the natural progression of an angler, maybe not. By the time I was in my twenties the urge to only catch big fish had already set in and it wasn't until I read the analogy of an angler's progression that it occurred to me there may be a different way of looking at things. But of course by then my transition to fly fishing was well underway and the process had started all over again except this time it all had to be done with a fly rod. Even in  my mid-thirties I still figured there was a flaw in the progression. Now it makes perfect sense.

I know for a fact that I'm one lucky duck. I've been able to fish from the Florida keys to Washington State. In the process I've caught somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 species of warmwater, coldwater and saltwater fish. Some of them have been pretty spectacular specimens. So what's the point of all this? Bragging? No. There's really nothing to brag about. Stick with it long enough, pay attention, stay open-minded and any fool can catch a lot of fish.

The point is a while back I posted the picture above on a Facebook fishing page. I immediately got blasted with comments like, and this is my favorite of the bunch, "sunset pics = no fish looser!" Actually I did quite well that day but it wasn't the fish I wanted to remember, though I do. I've hit that ramp dozens of times, at all times of the day but I had never seen a sunset like that over my kayak. What I have seen many times, fishing from that ramp and other places, are largemouth bass with my fly hanging out of their jaw.

The picture isn't the best being from my phone camera but it does capture the scene I wanted to. Looking back I feel for those guys that couldn't just see the sunset for what it was.