Library buddies

Stuck on hold while making a call, I noticed my wall of fishing books and
decided to count them to fight boredom .... over 140. These are uniformly
"how to" or "where to" books, the other type fishing venue, "fishing
stories," i.e. fiction in a fishing setting, has never appealed to me.

After ending my call, I made a quick, closer, look to see which book was
"best." Most of this library hasn't been touched since first reading,
although some volumes are used often as reference. I expected to end up
with such a reference book as my choice for "most useful" but was surprised
to settle on two volumes, each read a few times, but not lately.

"A Modern Dry Fly Code" by Vince Marinaro

"What the Trout Said" by Datus Proper



Why these choices? Both greatly affected HOW I think about fly fishing,
fly design, hatch matching, observation of naturals, etc etc, ... not just
WHAT I think.

The "what" in both books is largely out of date, but the "how" is what makes
"new" possible. It would be great to have access to real, live, fishing
buddies with the type of inquisitive minds these men had and a few "angling
mysteries" to work on.

Occasionally ( very rarely, actually ) I meet an experienced angler in my
travels that is still actively observing and trying to reach his own,
slightly new, solutions to angling problems, but most are simply tossing out
the fly sold them at the shop in the way it shows on the video. And, of
course they are catching fish, as the "big problems" are solved, with the
solutions available at any fly shop, and only little details remain to
allow improvement ....which is really kinda sad for us, imho.

Flipping through both books listed makes me wish for more "problems" in
angling, more situations where clearly feeding fish are damn hard to catch,
more reasons for observation, thought, and experimentation, more waters that
really deserve to be called "technical." These guys had a hell of a lot of
fun that isn't really available to us now .... now we're pretty much stuck
with just "catching fish."



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