It is no surprise that one’s approach to life, including our passions, change or, as we old hippies say, “mellow” with time. For the past few years, I have been trying to recapture the passion and energy I once invested in fishing, in particular, fly fishing. While I don’t believe I will ever be as obsessive and driven in the sport as I was 40 years ago nor do I want to, I do believe the fire is being rekindled.
For example, I started to spend considerable time at the fly tying desk this winter. During my fly fishing formative years in Western New York fishing primarily for brown trout on streams with very predictable mayfly and caddis hatches, my tying was dictated by these hatches. Moving to Eastern Washington my fishing requires some different imitations, such as stoneflies, craneflies, and different caddis fly species. Circumstance now also find me spending more time on big rivers teaming with smallmouth bass and walleye.1 Add to that stillwater fishing in the many trout lakes in our part of the state, which requires imitating different fish food. All of these factors have helped fan the flames of the old passion.
A former co-worker and recent retiree has become a regular fishing companion. His favorite ‘local’ fly fishing destinations are the many small lakes in Eastern Washington created by the damming of the mighty Columbia River (see Seep Lakes blog post). This has encouraged me to research and tie appropriate flies for fishing from a float tube and matching Chironomids (midges), leaches, dragon and damsel flies.
Finally, I’ve started focusing on streamers, including articulated streamers with deer hair heads. Kelly Galloup videos have become my go to tutorials on these flies. His videos are, initially, difficult to sit through, as he talks an awful lot, but his advice has improved my tying and materials selection even for someone who has been at this for a few decades.
Now my biggest challenge is properly organizing a fly collection that was already overflowing my fly boxes. A fun problem to have.
- There are also salmon and steelhead, but that is another story all together. ↩︎
Landing In The PNW 
Nice flies! I switched from a float tube to a 9′ pontoon a couple seasons back and love it. So many benefits. Only drawback is it doesn’t pack small enough to carry on the motorbike. 👍
Yes, I like fishing from my pontoon also even though it is hard to fish when you need to be on the oars. At my advanced age kicking a float tube in a breeze is not much fun. That said, a lot of our better trout lakes in my area require some amount of hike in, so the float tube still gets a lot of use.