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Well, my eyes are only 31 and they seem to have the same
problem following even a much larger fly. I appreciated your answer quite a bit,
and while I'm serious about trying to fish some flies that size, My reply was at
least in part, tongue in cheek and I hope you took it with the good nature
it was intended.
I believe there is indeed more to our sport than catching
fish. It is, like life, the journey and not the destination by which we
measure our success.
Finally, with all due respect, I'm not convinced that
cutthroats are a beat or two brighter than brookies. They might be able to out
think a hatchery rainbow, but that's about it. Other than that, I couldn't agree
with you more.
Dan
Hi Dan,
My discourse was more obscure than I'd thought. What I meant by "act of
faith" was only that since my 73-year-old eyes often provide only the vaguest
notion of precisely where my midge might be drifting at any given moment, and
since that stage of the process describes an activity that can occur only
after the end of my 7x leader has somehow after eight tries finally found its
own miraculous way through the eye of the fly, why in the world should fishing
a #32 be all that different from a #20? The key word here is
"precisely." I know of course where I meant to cast, and I persist in having
faith that that's about where it is at a given moment, after factoring in wind
and stream vectors. But most fish are caught on relatively short casts, and
when fishing midges one is usually casting to rising fish, so all that's
really required is to watch for the bulge/sip in a likely area. The good news
is that once a fish is on the odds of landing him are in fact better than if
he's on a #14, maybe because -- in my experience, at least -- it often takes a
seriously heavy fish a few seconds before he seems to recognize he's actually
been hooked by so insignificant a threat, so there's much less chance either
of a break-off on the strike or of the near-instantaneous ejection of a
mouthful of feathers.
As for "smaller cutthroats," let's face it, they are members of the
lowest of the vertebrates, just a beat or so brighter than brookies on the
duh! scale. I've had both come back from under a rock and hit a caddis nymph a
third or fourth time, all of which would seem to indicate that the state of
denial is not limited to us superior humans. One of Don's midges would
be wasted on them, even if the tree behind me didn't eat it first. As for the
"state of Grace" part, anyone who's watched a beached brown trout of twenty
inches or so swim off after having had that (barbless!) midge gently removed
from its jaw will know what that means. (All together now: Amen.)
DanW
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