April 16th, 2007

Poets and Engineers
By James Castwell


It's been said most of us fall into one of the above groups. That we are geared up to figure out problems meticulously using just one side of our brain; or we just let the problem sort of soak into the other lobe and hope for the best. Why worry. I guess I agree with both methods. And yet I continue to write these things. Week after week. Pounding and pounding information into little skulls of nothing but mush. Trying to get ahead of the curve and inject some information about fly fishing and tying and casting and all the other wonderful things there are to know about.

So what happens. Little. Okay then, darn little actually gets utilized. That's it, utilized. Taken in and put to some use. Take like stringing up a fly rod. How many ways are there to get it right? Or wrong? Now add those together and you can see my problem. Are the wrong ones really all that wrong? Well, if some of them will cause you to break your fly rod, what do you think? But, let me take this problem a bit further now. Suppose a reader thinks to himself he really is not that far along in fly fishing and certainly doesn't need to learn any fancy way of stringing up a fly rod. He will prefer to continue doing it the pain old fashioned country way, thank you very much.

If he reads it at all it will be just that reading the words and not actually understanding them and worse yet, not for a minute considering making the idea part of his ritual of doing things. Hey, some guys just go at things in their own sped and own way. And I am not about to begin to interfere. There is a flaw with his slant on the subject though. Since he see's no reason to learn or even consider the mundane ideas on some of this he will likely, sooner or later, bust his fly rod stringing it up.

And he will not remember reading about it before. Because he didn't. He didn't read about it. He skipped it. He didn't need it. Let's hope he isn't standing in the front of a bonefish boat when he is stringing up his rod. Let's pray it is not the first day of his vacation in Belieze at a thousand bucks a day. And it's his only fly rod. For a week.

Now there is this too. I get questions each week about things. Email and private messages wanting to know little details about all matter of fly fishing related things. Do I want to help them? Certainly I do. Often I try to give them just enough information to keep them going even further into the subject. Like this question this last week. Good for him. Thinking all the way. He wants to raise some nymphs. I don't know why. So what. Way to go. Lots of reasons to do it. All valid. So now he wants me to send him information on what to feed them.

Should I? Seriously. Should I send him the magic formula for nymph mulch. The exact chemical composition of the well known food used in all of the nymph labs in every country in the world. Each and every testing facility, with all the white rats, and mice and pinkies, and cats and dogs and monkeys and beetles and even aquatic nymphs. The phone number of 'Nymph Nuggets' Inc.? Do they even sell to regular folks? How should I know anyway?

I don't know. I think maybe I will tell him to just grab a gob of the weeds the nymphs are growing on and hope for the best. Who knows, hell it might work? ~ James Castwell

Till next week, remember . . .

Keepest Thynne Baakast Upeth

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