When I was a kid, nobody would catch a trout then release it. It just didn’t happen. We had albums of photos featuring various family members positioned beside a mess of dead fish. Believe me when I say our family killed a lot of fish.

At a certain point, I guess it was during my days at university, I got away from it. Whatever compelled me to go chasing trout was gone. And it stayed gone for a long time. It stayed gone until my friend East Texas Red talked about taking up fly fishing. Like a fiend with his dope, I was back at it again, but this time armed with a fly rod, little bits of fur and feathers, barbless hooks, and a whole new idea. We were going to catch trout and then release them back into the stream.

I read all the famous pillars of fly fishing lit – Bergman’s Trout, A Modern Dry Fly Code by Vince Marinaro, Trout Madness by Robert Traver, A River Never Sleeps by Haig-Brown, the wondefully obsessive Caddisflies by Gary LaFontaine and many more. East Texas Red and I fished all over the mountain west, often with our Idaho pal, and author Ken Retallic. Our obsession with chasing trout took us many places. We logged a lot of miles, had some great times, and from time to time caught some good trout.

It all changed for me again one afternoon on the North Tongue River in Wyoming. I remember the day very well. It was so cold when we awoke that morning, there was frost on the inside of Ken’s tent. This led to a new flyfishing rule. If there is frost on the inside of your tent when you wake up, immediately get in your vehicle and drive until you find a breakfast joint, no matter how far you have to go. It was a good rule, only rarely invoked.

The North Tongue is a smallish stream  full of chunky cutthroat trout. We could see them and they could see us. I fished hard through the morning and couldn’t raise a trout.

That’s when the flav hatch started. A flav is a mayfly, specifically Drunella flavilinea, sometimes also called the lesser green drake. It was a perfect hatch, mayflies coming off the water steadily much of the afternoon. These flavs were trout chocolate sundays. Every fish in the stream started feeding with reckless abandon. I don’t know how many trout I caught that afternoon. It reached a point where I only cast at the biggest or most difficult ones. At a certain point, I had my fill.

It was that afternoon I understood whatever this crazy fly fishing obsession was about, it wasn’t about the trout. When you catch one big trout after another with relative ease, the whole business gets stale faster than you might think. Let’s get this straight – it’s not about the trout, but it’s nothing without the trout. How can that be? You might say that fly fishing is a truly romantic activity – the thrill is in the chasing, not the apprehending. Wait, that’s not right either. The thrill is partly in the apprehending, just not if it’s too easy.

These days I don’t have to catch the most fish or the biggest fish. I still love to work a trout stream, figure out what’s going on with the bugs and the trout, and I still enjoy the reward of a few nice trout for paying attention and getting it right.