"Dark Prince of Fly Fishing"

The odds are that a writer whose work has appeared in the magazine Fly Rod and Reel and who has been on free junkets to some of the world’s classic fly fishing streams would be a d’Artagnan with a fly pole. Don’t bet on it, at least not in my case. A colleague of mine, who accompanied me on a subsidized fishing trip to Europe, once wrote that while fly fishing I “looked and sounded like a crazed Buddhist monk in a grade-B karate movie.” He wrote it, no less, in the Atlantic Salmon Journal, a publication venerated by fly fishers. He was not far off the mark, given that I have a shaven head, practice martial arts and vent frustration over not hooking up in an admittedly animated fashion.

My inability to properly present a fly – heck, even to lay out a line – was made more bitter by the fact I knew some of the best fly fishers in the business; people who had written classic books on the subject. One of them, throwing up his arms after a failed attempt to teach me, dubbed me the “dark prince of fly fishing.”

In my desperation to catch a trout on a fly pole, I even committed the ultimate blasphemy. I put a worm on instead of a fly. It worked; I caught a huge rainbow trout. My satisfaction was fleeting, however, because I knew I had cheated. 

Eventually, I put aside my fly rod. Until this spring, I watched friends catch and release zillions of trout on flies while the fish ignored my worms and a plethora of artificial lures. I figured I had nothing to lose by slinging a fly around again. At first I flailed at the water as if it were my enemy. My stomach began to knot, as my leader soon would if I did not calm down. Suddenly, I could not care less about the whole game. I surrendered. And won. When I stopped trying to will the line into flattening out on to the water it did just that.  I had forgotten the advice of one of the greatest martial artists of all time, Bruce Lee. To achieve, he said, forget about self and approach the task as if nothing particular where taking place at the moment. In other words, stop trying so hard and relax.

I began to catch a few trout. A friend, Chip Baumann of Killingworth, gave me a killer fly that he had tied and I caught a few more. Another friend, Junior Lang of Clinton, noticed that I canted my casting arm too much to the right. Once this flaw was corrected, a few more yards were added to the length of my cast. 

Fly fishing was fun for the first time. Satisfied with what I am doing, having no urgent desire to get any better at it, I probably will. For sure, there are plenty of places to fly fish for trout in the area. Chatfield Hollow holds Chatfield Hollow Brook and Schreeder Pond, which constitute a state DEEP trout park, a designation meaning the place is easy to fish and is frequently stocked. The pond at Chatfield Hollow is superb for a novice fly fisher because it is shallow and easy to wade. Best of all, it has all the room in the world to cast. Trout park creel limits are lower than other ponds and streams.

The Hammonasset River, running the borders of Clinton and Madison and Killingworth and Madison, draws anglers from all over the state.  From the dam at Route 80 to Chestnut Hill Road, it is a trout management area, open year around,  catch-and-release only from September 1 to the third Saturday in April. Limits are more restrictive but the fish are bigger and plentiful. Many stretches of the river are walled by brush and trees, not so easy to fly cast but others are easily fishable, even for people like me who cannot present a fly right on a trout’s snout.