SPITTING OUT THE BONES


When I was a kid we would occasionally have fish for dinner. When I questioned how to eat fish I was told that "You eat the meat and spit out the bones." Good advice for eating fish and many other things in life as well.


In my early days of fly fishing I was privileged to make the acquaintance of Vince Marinaro and to spend time fishing with him when he came to fish the Au Sable River in Michigan where I was living at the time. After I moved from Michigan to Montana we maintained our relationship through letters and cassette tapes. Those letters and tapes are some of my most treasured earthly possessions. Vince was one of the luminaries of modern fly fishing and his first book, A Modern Dry Fly Code, was just being rediscovered by the fly fishing public about the time that I first met him. That book presented many ground breaking ideas from the jassid to the crisscross hackled dry fly.