This is a hard time of year for fly fishermen living in New England. At every turn, nature deceives: It’s warm, and yet the water is still cold; the flowers are budding, but the waters aren’t teeming with fish; the birds have arrived and are breaking the silence of the early morning more loudly, and more frequently, but the stripers aren’t breaking the surface. The land is bursting, but our water bodies? Still calm, still waiting the arrival of fish.
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Facing a weekend with apartment to myself, I did what I suspect many fly fishermen in the Northern Hemisphere are doing: tying flies in preparation for the rapidly approaching season. As one tier said to me recently, “If I don’t start tying now, my boxes will be empty!” While that’s not entirely true — fishermen always fear a scarcity of flies, but rarely face it — the feeling is accurate: with the days warming up, it’s now a race.
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This evening, trouble rode into town. I opened a bag of hackle and there they were: the dried husks of bugs. As I counted the husks, and ran what had been feathers but was now a fine dust between my fingers, I also counted the hours ahead that it would take for me to clean it up and to prevent all the other materials in my burgeoning collection from becoming infected.
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