How it all began: Casting at Camp Lejeune

When we were stationed at Camp Lejeune, I bought my wife a spinning rod for Mother's Day. She has often talked fondly of childhood fishing experiences, so I thought it might give her something of her own to do, she being hip deep in raising kids. She did use it a few times, but let it quietly drop.

So I gave it a try. I'd never been interested, thinking, as so many do, of the tedium of watching a bobber or drowning worms. But this was different. There were things to do: learning to cast, mastering knots, an endless variety of lures. There was gear, which adds so much to a sport. And in the backcountry ponds of the Marine base, I began to catch fish.

In those days the typical Naval Hospital had far too few physicians for the patient population it served. We worked very hard and practiced very good medicine, if I say so myself, but inevitably service suffered and wait times became too long. When that happened, the Skipper would close the system to retirees, and allow only active duty and their dependents. But they left it to us young lieutenants to tell the veterans of Iwo Jima and Khe Sanh that we couldn’t see them, and that never lasted. We'd slip one in here and there, and after a while the cycle would repeat itself.

One of those I slipped in was a retired Sergeant Major. When we were done, he asked me what I did for fun, and when he heard I was trying to learn to fish, he told me not to bother on base anymore. I was to try his two farm ponds. So I did.

They were full of hungry, unsophisticated bass and eager bluegills, and I had a ball. I also learned that the Sergeant Major had a story which is worth telling someday. Anyway, one day I heard his voice over my shoulder saying. "Doc, put that thing down and try this." He handed me a nine-foot white fiberglass fly rod, whippy and slow. It must have been an 8-weight, though I didn't even know they had weights. I only knew that if I could get that little popper onto the water, an explosion would follow.

FlyRx: See how to make the Sergeant Major's popper >

The next day I went to the Exchange, and bought a 9 foot glass/graphite rod, a seven weight, for $22, and a matching line for eighteen. And a box of leader-tying material, and a few poppers. I got every library book I could find on fly fishing, and even though all of it was about trout, there was plenty of good info. I had no teacher, just books, but it was all so very cool that I kept at it, and I hit those ponds hard almost every day. To this day I can't tell you what happened to my wife's spinning gear. I just never went back to it.

Of course there are times and places where a good spin-fisher or baitcaster will outfish the fly fisherman. But what I had learned was that I didn't only want to catch fish, I wanted to catch them in a certain way, with particular tools. Some days I'd go home with a thumb sanded rough from lipping bass. Some days I got nothing, but I was learning to enter, however partially, the world of another species.

That July, home on leave in New England, I'd find out how different it is to fish moving water for selective trout. I got in the Farmington River at 0700 with my seven-weight, and fished hard all day without a strike. I saw many rises and worked them hard without a taker. A kindly gentleman gave me a size 20 foam ant, and later a lady took pity and gave me a length of 6X, explaining that my 4X looked like a hawser to those fussy trout. By 1900 I was beginning to shiver and couldn't stop. Then a brown trout ate my ant, and I landed him.

Now all these years later, I realize I'll never really figure it out. I'm beginning to think that, even when I land a particularly challenging fish, I haven't necessarily achieved what I think I have. That fish may have taken my fly for something completely different from what I thought it was imitating, for all I know. Getting him to take is nothing to sneeze at, sure, but it may not mean what I think it means, and even if it does, I'm still just scratching the surface, getting just one little glimmer of insight. But it's been enough to keep me coming back.