Now Tom [not his real name] seemed like a pretty nice guy, well-spoken and friendly. I had just recently met him and he didn't know about my long involvement in fly fishing. So when I heard him say, "I hate fly fishermen," I was a little taken aback, but not entirely surprised because he had told me he was a part-time hook and line commercial fisherman.

A recent event on a local trout stream caused me to sit back and look hard at the current culture of fly fishermen that are out there wading our waters these days. It was both eye-opening and saddening, to say the least. I was fortunate enough to get on some water with a Saturday evening escape of honey-do's and family obligations so I chose to visit some nearby water at one of the popular easy-access points.

I'm going to do my best to keep this as short as possible, but I won't make any guarantees it's a fishing story after all.

Friday, July 15th, 7:30ish in the evening I rolled into camp to a warm welcome from Steve (Icemanxxx) and Tim (Tlerm), who had driven all the way from the Kansas City area. More of us were scheduled to arrive as the week went by.

From 1945 to 1992 Josephine Sedlecky-Borsum was the proprietor of Ed's Sport Shop in Baldwin, Michigan. In her 47 year rein as a shop owner and fly tier she tied hundreds of thousands of flies. Most of her customers were local but she did have regular customers from all across the country and even from Europe.

I had tied some flies for a couple of swaps. There was still some of the material from those flies on the desk. That sort of thing gets me into difficulty all of the time. There is a deep need to know how those materials would go together and how the fly might work.

Wow, two straight nights of rain with two inches of rain or more each night. I watched the weather channel and listened to the weather radio to see if we needed to bail out of the house and head to the church. We have no basement in our house. We had rain and a lot of wind, but no rotation within five miles, but it makes for a short night.

Perhaps you're in the same fly casting bind I was in. You often don't have enough room to make back casts, and at your age casting a 7-weight fly rod for three or four hours leaves you exhausted and sore. Spey casting, you read, will save you a lot of energy and ibuprofen.

Faster than quicksilver slips through your fingers the summer slipped away. My mother mentioned that we would be going back to the city next week so that we could get ready for school and suddenly I realized that I might not see Joe again until next summer. When you're a 12 year old the school year seemed like an eternity.

This is a pattern I came up with and is doing very well at catching trout for me. I am very fond of Peter Frailey's Web site and his "Hare & Herl Bugger" and his pattern inspired me to try this. It is not a difficult pattern to tie up. You will notice in the step-by-step tying instructions that I tie in "reverse" and you can tie it whichever way best suits you.

You see it every day, camera phones which will connect you with the world, videos, even remotes at home that require no effort and no thought to make them work; just point and click. I keep watching for the newest of fly rods and reels that will allow you to just point and click to make them perform. They should be very popular, since they tie in so well with our culture.

Several years ago I wrote a weekly outdoor column for a local newspaper. It was a wide ranging column covering all facets of outdoor recreation from bird watching to fly fishing. One spring I wrote a column entitled "Finding The Challenge" and the subject was fishing for trout while they were spawning. It was, and still is in some circles, a controversial practice.