A Quote by Vance Bourjaily

Now I am . . . like anyone with a strong preference for the fly rod, totally indifferent to how large a fish I catch by comparison with other fishermen. So when a fifteen-year-old called Fred, fishing deep in midsummer with a hideous plastic worm, caught a four and a half pounder . . . I naturally felt no resentment beyond wanting to break the kid's thumbs.
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
But ah, to fish with a worm, and then not catch your fish! To fail with a fly is no disgrace: your art may have been impeccable, your patience faultless to the end. But the philosophy of worm-fishing is that of results, of having something tangible in your basket when the day's work is done.
I am almost certain fishermen posess a peculiar bend to their makeup. Fisherman are optimists, and the fish in the future is always preferable to the fish at hand. Even the best fishermen catch fish only a small percentage of the time, which means we persevere in a sport that features failure as its main ingredient. Truly great days, when the fish hammer the fly as soon as it lands on the water are rare.
My dad taught me how to fish. When I am stand in a trout stream now, and I have the waders on, and I've got a fly rod in my hand, or I am fishing for bass, I think of sitting in a boat with my dad. How can that be a bad experience?
People who fish for food, and sport be damned, are called pot-fishermen. The more expert ones are called crack pot-fishermen. All other fishermen are called crackpot fishermen. This is confusing.
I go to Alaska and fish salmon. I do some halibut fishing, lake fishing, trout fishing, fly fishing. I look quite good in waders. I love my waders. I don't think there is anything sexier than just standing in waders with a fly rod. I just love it.
I think if you went back to the eighteenth century and you asked a fifteen year old boy, 'Would you like to marry a woman who has had plastic bags needlessly inserted into her breasts?', that fifteen year old boy would probably be like, 'what's plastic?'.
Loads of overtaking is boring. You go fishing and you catch a fish every ten minutes and it's boring. But if you site there all day, and you catch one mega fish, you come back with stories that you caught a fish this big (indicates a big fish), intead of this size (indicating a small fish)
About the only certainty, other than uncertainty, in fly fishing is that a fly won't catch fish if it stays in its box.
I grew up fly fishing when I was a kid. The feeling of it is fun. I went fly-fishing on Lake Delaware once, and I caught a record brook trout.
Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students.
So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with. For example, if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish - you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it. Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty, and so on.
Fly fishing or any other sport fishing, is an end in itself and not a game or competition among fishermen. . . .
For this form of fishing (with a wet fly), the rod is no longer a shooting machine but a receiving post, with super-sensitive antennae, capable of registering immediately the slightest reaction of the fish to the fly.
You know how sometimes you meet writers that are so full of themselves? They feel really proud that they wrote something . But what they don't understand - and I like to tell this to writers - is that writing is like fishing. It's just like fishing. If you don't fish that often, you're not going to catch that many fish.
I like to catch fish and release them. I probably haven't killed a fish that I've caught in sport fishing for 20 years. No reason to kill it. You know, just take it and release it.
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