"Lo Dolce Pesca" wrote


the extra twenty bucks Larry for the piece of mind that you won't have to
worry about a ripped off bicycle in the bushes when you come back to the
fishing access at 10:00pm and it's pitch dark after you've been into wild
fish during a heavy March Brown hatch on the Upper Delaware River


Actually its not places where commercial shuttle is available that I'm
thinking about. The place I was daydreaming about is many ( 80 ?) miles
from the nearest flyshop.

My budget isn't "that" tight ( although I fish daily for long periods, and
$600/ month sounds a lot worse than $20/ day :-) and I routinely pay for
shuttle on the Missouri, and other places I fish.

....actually I think what I do about fishing money is kinda interesting
....so I'll bore you with it ... hope it doesn't increase your indigestion

..... I'm semi-retired, which means I just work a little and put that money
in a fishing account. My current situation is such that I could spend far
more than what's in the fishing account without stressing my real budget,
but I actually enjoy keeping a separate "fishing budget" and trying to keep
the fishing cheap ...none of my hunting or fishing now comes out of the real
budget.

There is a way to approach this that makes "buying power" have less control,
not more, over one's life. Being truly poor would be hard to take, for
sure. But a "He who dies with the most toys, wins." ideology ( I followed
it from years, and often worked 70hour weeks to get stuff I had no time to
use ) is a type of spiritual prison, where your "things" can easily take on
more value than "yourself." My observations, mainly of myself, indicate
that fly fishing feeds the "I need cool stuff" ideology more than many other
activities, and "stuff collection and display" can actually reduce the
amount of pleasure one gets from the other, less tangible, rewards of the
sport.

I've found that making sure I keep the buying in check increases my
pleasure from the actual time on the water by increasing the importance of
ME and of NATURE and, very importantly, of TIME, and decreasing the
importance of "my cool gear"

Hum, I thought I'd be able to explain this better than that, but, I'm not
much of a writer, and I've never tried to express this before, although I've
strongly felt the difference between the current "budget fisher" and the
Larry of old that very likely bought a new Sage for a 2 day trip, just to be
sure he had the "best" .... I like the cheap Larry a lot more

Opps, I do get sidetracked, don't I ...sorry