Sometimes you just have to catch fish

In the course of fishing with my friend Dave the other night, our conversation turned to the philosophical, something that is apt to occur after a couple trout with a beer chaser.
Our questionings turned to the legitimacy of catching trout on a wet fly as opposed to a dry.

The classic empirycist's utilitarian argument versus a kind of Socratic idealism.

Dave is what most anglers call a dry-fly purist, a small sect of rigid, uncompromising traditionalists.
He asserts with conviction that the only trout worth catching is one caught on bits of feather and fur that imitates the adult form of a mayfly, caddis or whatever. Whereas, nymphing or dredging for trout sub-surface is an ignoble and wretched pursuit left only to the dissolute and damned fly-angler (perhaps one micro-step up from the bait and lure chuckers.)

My reply: "Sometimes you just gotta catch fish, Dave."




Dave with a beautiful trout caught on a dry fly.



Indeed, it's not that I was nymphing or tossed out a full-sinking line (I did that later); I employed a dry-fly for a while but when no fish are rising, it seems to me that they might be feeding below the surface.

So I went with a "dual-purpose caddis," one that floated for the first while but would slip under the surface on the retrieve, imitating the very image of an emerging caddis.

I didn't see anything wrong with this, and neither did the trout. One trout took it on the surface and I picked up a couple more sub-surface. It was the best of both worlds, a kind of Cartesian dualism if you will.

Not for Dave, who changed up from one dry fly to another, the words of his dad, Rudy, still haunting him from youth. "If you're not fishing with a dry fly, you're cheating," and everyone hates a cheater.

Just to show that I didn't mind cheating or cheaters, I tied on a bead-head nymph and chucked it out there. As another great philosopher once said, "If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough."

The next cast, I nailed a fish - but Dave also hooked up seconds later.

So there we were, a double header, one on a dry fly and one on a wet, both sides satisfied with their obvious proof, but locked in an existential dilemna.

I don't suppose either of us reconciled the other to their argument, so I'll defer to the venerable writer/philosopher and fly fisherman Thomas McGuane, who once wrote:

“I was swept by the perfection of things: the glorious shape of each trout, the angelic miniature perfection of mayflies and the "dual-purpose caddis" and by the pure wild silk of the big River. For such things are we placed on this careening mudball - but sometimes Dave, you just gotta catch fish.”

Thanks Tom

Me with an equally beautiful trout caught on a dual-purpose caddis.

If you care to wade in, leave me a comment below.
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