My fly fishing began sometime in the late 1950's when I tied my first flies on my father's bench vise in the basement of our home. I alternated between spin and fly fishing until I graduated from Penn State in the late 1960's, but I knew the direction my fishing career would take when I was given a treasure trove of vintage fly fishing gear that belonged to my wife's late grandfather, and I found myself skipping classes to fish the local streams around State College - Penns, Spring Creek, Big Fishing Creek and others.
After graduating from college, I got my first real job and relocated to Lancaster County, but I may probably have fished as much as I worked over the next several decades. I spent days, if not weeks on end, fishing many, if not most, of the better known streams and rivers in PA and NY, and elsewhere in the northeast. I loved fishing the Upper Delaware for trout and the Salmon at Pulaski, for example, before theses places were so commercialized, and before all of the lodges, drift boats and river guides, were on those rivers. Back when you could hook (though maybe not land) over a dozen or more big, wild rainbows on the main branch in a good evening's fishing.
I made my first fishing trip west in the mid-1970's after corresponding with Dan Bailey in Livingston, MT, and continued to go fishing somewhere in the northwest at least a time or three, every year until I was able to fully retire when I turned 55, when my wife and I headed out there to spend the entire summer. That was 17 summers ago, and we've been doing the same every year since, and return home to PA now for just the winter.
I turned 70 this past year, and I am definitely slowing down. Yep, I sold my Hyde at the end of this past summer, and have ordered a new Clackacraft for delivery in May, because I think it should be easier to row. (I don't have any problems rowing 13 miles in windy weather though, and still do it regularly.). And, wbranch, I'm putting a 2-stage winch on the Clackacraft's trailer, to make it easier for my best friend to winch the boat up steep take-outs. (He's 81 years young.)
I guess you might also say that age is catching up to me because I'm also buying a new pickup truck camper this spring so I can have a bit more comfortable place to sleep than on the bare floor of my truck bed in sub-freezing weather like I did a few times last fall while chasing those big fish that migrate out of Hebgen Lake into the Madison River. Well, for that, and maybe for not having to get up at 3:00am in order to be on the river before daylight, when I can take that camper the day before. Or, perhaps to have a warmer place to sleep than in the front seat of my truck when the temperature in West Yellowstone read 17°, or when my fingers got a bit cold when tying on those baetis dries while fishing in a snowstorm on the Missouri.
Yessiree, getting old is a beech. But it still beats the alternative.
John
cutters?).
