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Zusatztext Jeff MacGregor The New York Times As fine a representation of outdoor writing as you´re likely to find -- wise! funny! and well wrought. Informationen zum Autor John Gierach was the author of more than twenty books about fly-fishing. His writing appeared in Field & Stream , Gray’s Sporting Journal , and Fly Rod & Reel . He wrote a column for Trout magazine and the monthly Redstone Review . Gierach passed away in 2024. Klappentext "Gierach's tenth in an unbroken stream of fly-fishing epics . . . flows across the page at the same graceful tempo as a well-cast fly line."--Jessica Mazwell, "The Register Guardian." Illustrations. Chapter 1 The Happy Idiot Lately I´ve been thinking about what makes a good fly-fisher, possibly the last fair question of the twentieth century that might actually have an answer. I mean that in a purely technical sense, as in someone who´s pretty good at catching fish on a fly rod. The other stuff -- the humor, graciousness, inner peace or whatever -- is important and may even turn out to be the whole point, but I´m not sure you can learn that part. I´m beginning to think it either comes by itself with time, or not. On the other hand, I think you can learn to be a good fisherman (at least I hope so), and it´s probably easier to get all philosophical about it when you actually catch some fish now and then. The best way to pick up the nuts and bolts of something like fly-fishing has always been face to face with someone who already knows -- whether it´s a teacher, a friend or a kindly stranger -- and there can be a lot to learn. Twenty or thirty years ago, when it was becoming fashionable for fishermen to use the Latin names for bugs, outdoor writers joked about getting a doctoral degree in fly-fishing. Now, with introductory to advanced classes, seminars, demonstrations, books and videos on everything from casting to fly tying, certification of casting instructors and such, you can damn near do that, although how much study you need before you´re qualified to hook and land a fish is still an open question. In fact, there are times when fly-fishing seems to be suffering from the same malady that afflicts the rest of society: too many so-called facts and not enough real experience, but I have to say the quality of information on fly-fishing is better than most. Sure, there´s the normal showmanship, bullshit or whatever else you want to call it, but if you do precisely what a magazine article tells you to do in the exact conditions described, you´ll probably catch some fish. On the other hand, you could also catch fish by doing something completely different. Maybe even bigger ones, or more of them. Not long ago one of those prime-time TV news shows followed the performance of two stock portfolios, one picked by a heavyweight investment counselor, the other picked by a monkey. Naturally, the monkey won. (The investment guy took it well. He said, "Can I have the monkey´s phone number?") Fly-fishing can be like that, too. You´ll probably do well going by the book, but there´s also a kind of random goofiness in operation that rewards the happy idiot. It would be handy to put together the kind of profile the FBI assembles on mad bombers -- "your typical good fly-fisher is a single, middle-aged male of moderate to low intelligence, sullen, withdrawn, probably lives with his mother" -- but actually, all the really good fly-fishers I know are unique. If one is a real match-the-hatch style technician who counts the tails on mayflies and fishes flawless, entomologically correct imitations, another will catch just as many trout drifting a Royal Wulff through the same hatch. For everyone who fishes hard from an hour before dawn until midnight, someone else will land just as many fish but still somehow manage to spend half the day sleeping under a tree.
