The very nature of river discussions casually amble somewhere between the specific and the absolutely pointless.  In such cases, it’s not always an option to break the glass and pull the fire alarm.  Nor is it advisable to yell “Fire” in a crowded movie theater – the sort of chalk test that we’ve come to use everyday to explain our actions.  As we stand here beneath the widening chalk board, the exit door to the room lies far away to the right, past that frustratingly simple triangle, the olive green trash can tucked under the graying aluminum ringed desk.  There’s a quietly painful feeling that an increasingly growing number of us suppose that if the answer is wrong, then we’d just erase the question and without pause put the right one it’s place – problem solved.

If you’ve spent any time with me on the river, there’s a couple of things I’ve found myself repeating, not for better or worse, but simply an observation about fly fishing – if you fish the water you’ve missed, you’ll miss the water you should fish.  Or,  sometimes I’ll drop the brilliance of  “Remember to forget” – that your muscles will eventually stop being fooled by your mind, and it will all stop making sense start making sense.

I recently overheard a small group of fly fisherman chatting over the last hours spent on the water – what worked, the weather, etc.  “Yes, the water is high and fast right now but it’s supposed to be” lingers like camp fire smoke blended into that hoodie you didn’t wash after the last overnighter but will probably get in the laundry tomorrow.  Look past the leaning cottonwoods who just might be doing so to listen more closely to the day’s report.  As a quick side note, when the water does go back down, it will be very good for walking the edges after the water’s gone down, collecting shop flies and hand-tied wonders – you should limit on foam dries and bead headed nymphs very quickly.

You and the tree’s both heard the quip that sounded something very similar to ‘Starve Steve McQueen” and it sticks (pun intended) out the most – a concept taught somewhere by someone at sometime in someplace, that by uttering that phrase while watching a large fish that has immediately closed that gap of two feet from behind that rock and is immediately at your fly will somehow result in critical mass, or as Merriam Webster defines as “ of sufficient size to sustain a chain reaction.”

Simply, it takes a lot of time and energy to think about what you should do when a fish takes your fly, and in that time gap of time, it’s already realized that it’s not real, and turned it’s head.  Set The Hook.  If in the course of your pursuits you’ve found yourself thinking about what to think when the fish takes your fly, why not just Set The Hook?  People have a tendency to get in their own way, and they can’t unplug plug in to the river and the rhythm and Set The Hook.  This fine pursuit of the trout requires one to get out of their own way, discover and connect rather than be censorious, and Set The Hook.

Having now reached critical mass upon the idea, let me mention mending.  How much time do you have?