Skip Morris Article Blog

(...not a blog, not an article, but somewhere in between...)

Reflecting on How To Succeed in Fly Fishing

Skip Morris Article Blog— Once you reach an age that gets you into movies at senior pricing (even if you aren't yet retired nor are old enough to start getting Social Security payments) and have fished since you could stand upright without help, you'll have gathered some perspective.

And some wisdom? Perhaps.

Insight? You'd have to have gained insight from all that fishing unless you spent those thousands of hours holding a rod with your eyes shut and your mind switched off (which means you're either long gone from drowning or are actually a robot).

Skip Morris Article Blogs:

Off-the-Cuff Impressions, Thoughts, and Experiences
from a Longtime Fly Fishing Writer

Perspective and wisdom and insight worth writing down and then worth reading?

We hope so, because Skip has put into prose his reflections on all these things, and more, in the pieces below. They're off-the-cuff impressions and thoughts, experiences, suggestions for fly-fishing success, in general a look into the mind and feelings of a longtime fly-fishing writer.

These pieces are too free and loose to be articles, and they're not quite blogs. But whatever they are, they are here. And they are free for you to read at your leisure.

Learning at Your Leisure

In the Skip Morris Article Blogs, you'll learn some things that will catch you more fish and make fly fishing more fun, such as how sharp fly fishers on a Montana river found more tricks for moving pampered trout in a sullen mood than a Mississippi riverboat gambler brings to a card table. And how keen observation can lead you to patches of avidly rising trout other anglers miss.

But you'll find ideas to ponder here too, often the kind only experience provides.

Why, for example, are fly fishers east of the Rockies mad for smallmouth bass while so few seem to care much about this marvelous sport fish in the West, even though western smallmouth water here is everywhere?

And there are stories, such as fishing amid half-clad and unclad sunbathers on a California creek in the liberated 1970s.

The Soft Side of Experience

What these pieces are not is a course in fly fishing or fly tying—in fact they're something of an escape from all that (despite how valuable focused fly-fishing instruction is).

We all need to escape sometimes from information, challenge, and the demands of growing our knowledge and skill, and instead relax and let the soft parts of our consciousness carry us on a gentle ride.