No More Excuses... Just One Regret

H: Okay, I'm calling it—I've officially hung up my waders (next to Josée's : ) for the season. And what a great season it was! 9 days fly fishing in Montana on 7 different rivers, lakes, and creeks (see: Story Lake, Montana Fish Porn, DePuy Spring Creek, Fishing Yellowstone National Park, Hyun…ready to fish the Boulder River). 2011 was a year of several firsts: cruising for gulpers on Hebgen (Happy Hour on Hebgen Lake), night fishing for monster trout (Mice Fishing the Farmington), and chasing elusive false albacore out in Montauk (Bring out the Bikinis!). And last but not least, our 7(?) minutes of fame on WNPR's Where We Live: Gone Fly Fishin radio show. Certainly, no sophomore slump.

The 2 flygirls are no longer newbies. We've grown tremendously as anglers this year. Looking back, my only regret (and valuable lesson learned) is that too often I've let this blog get in the way of my fishing, specifically the pressure to take good pictures of the fish we've caught. It's not a problem when I'm fishing with Josée. But on my own, it's been challenging and frustrating at times (I'm not about to take a poor fish out of the water and bank him/her for a money shot). Next year, I'm just not going to sweat it. Besides, there is way too much porn (fish porn, that is ; ) out there on the internet.

So, 6 months of fishless days loom ahead. I'm naturally a bit saddened but also partially relieved. There are so many things I've put on the back burner. "I'll get to that when the fishing season is over," my friends, coworkers, and family members have heard me say over and over again. Now, there are no more excuses. I can finally

• catch up on homework for my evening class (I've been a bad student)
• devote some time to actually designing this shotgun blog we started just 6 months ago
• build a rod rack for my car
• start planning our next big fly fishing adventure (New Zealand? Canada? Belize? salmon? bonefish?)
• do some skiing/snowboarding when I get too stir-crazy in the city. 

That should keep me out of trouble, hopefully. No more obsessively checking weather.com or wunderground.com for the weather forecasts for my favorite fishing spots (lord knows they are wrong 50% of the time anyways), or following the ups and downs of my favorite rivers at waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis or reading the daily fishing reports before reading the local, national and global news. Who would have thought these would become my most visited bookmarks?

At some point during the season, I became a fly fishing junkie : ) I'm sure I'll suffer from fly fishing withdrawal over the winter. When the shakes become real bad, I guess I'll just have to bundle up, go outside and cast...cast...cast! Here's hoping for an early spring.