Have you ever pressed the button on a device to re-start a favorite song a short way in, because you decide you weren’t listening properly? You were distracted. A worry. An overdue task remembered. A greeting to a passing acquaintance. Somehow it took your eye off the ball, and you failed to appreciate the tune, the lyrics. And now, you decide, you will start it again and fully appreciate it.
And at the end of a day on the river, do you ever think back over the hours on the water and mull on what you could have done differently? You meet up with your fishing buddy, and as you take your rods down and de-brief he mentions that he got all his fish on the hopper. Damn, you didn’t even try the dry! Perhaps you are alone, but you realise you fished with lightly weighted flies, or a dry dropper, and you never plumbed the depths, and you wonder what might have been.
I know that there are days at work, when on reaching day’s end, I realise that the weather has been my favourite mix of wind and mist and billowing clouds and scattered rain or drizzle, or some such, and I have failed to notice it all. To enjoy it.
I could have paused for a cup of coffee, gazed out the window to collect my thoughts. Used the conscious interruption to re-frame my work day and juggle priorities to conquer pro-active measures pursuant to my goals, and rushed less to answer other’s calls or mails.
I think that on the river, it is different. I do take in the mountain scenery. Notice the flitting warbler. Scan the hill for Eland. Happy distractions, but ones that perhaps took my eye off the water. Caused me to miss a take, or position wrongly for a good drift. “Damn. I should have been paying attention” I say to myself.
I think I do that. Not always of course, but often enough. I probably do it a lot more when I haven’t encountered many fish, or think I could have done better in terms of fish landed. And, as is that filthy, unshakeable human trait, that bad sector, I always think it if my colleague has caught more fish than I have.
Of course days on the river, even hours, don’t have that handy back button. But I don’t think I ever have these thoughts in a regretful frame of mind. What I do think, is “When will I get back to the river to put that right?” I feel that often, and I feel it strongly. And so it is that a relatively unproductive day spurs me to more. Two or even three unproductive days spur me all the more.
On the drive back I will be thinking that my hoppers were just too big, or my parachute flies just not buoyant enough for the tumbling pocket water. Or perhaps all my flies just seem so bulky and over-dressed, and at the first opportunity I must get tying!
Before I head out next time I will be getting things ready to enable the sort of day which can end without such doubts. So I will stock a pocket with snacks, so that I don’t have to head back to the truck early like last time. I might imagine the disaster if one of my wading boot laces snapped far up the valley and threw my concentration off for the hours thereafter, and I will go check that the spares are in my bag, and contemplate if they should go in my fly vest. Rain gear: check. Hook sharpener: check. Spare tippet rings: check.
. And then on Thursday night as I am about to go to bed, I suddenly wonder if I put my tippet spools back in my vest, and I will go open up the room where I store my tackle, just to be sure, even though I have not yet planned my next day on the water. Then I will watch a few fishing videos, just to reload the software in my brain in case I developed some bad sectors without knowing it. Or worse still, perhaps some of that info has been over-written by some or other dusty work initiative. It must be restored forthwith, in readiness for the river, even if today happens to be Tuesday and there is little prospect of me being at the waterside before Friday. Because whichever day it is that I find myself at the river, fly rod in hand, I know there will be no replay button like that on my Spotify. This will be it.
And I believe that this, my friends, is one of the powerful cores of a thing called addiction.
