The Fellowship of the Trout

Fly-fishing is about catching large, beautiful fish. But it's also about the community that plays a role in so much of your success on the water.

Jun 12, 2024

My personal best brown trout, a 20-incher caught on the South Holston River around 8:45 a.m. on Saturday, June 8.

“Fishing consists of a series of misadventures interspersed by occasional moments of glory.”
Howard Marshall, Reflections on a River (1967)1

Around 8:45 a.m. on Saturday at the South Holston River outside Bluff City, Tennessee, I caught the biggest brown trout of my life.

My friends and I traveled up I-81 from Knoxville for our annual weekend fishing trip. That morning, the fog had just lifted from the water and there was a green glimmer in the air that yellowed as the sun rose higher above the trees. Though I can’t explain what, I must’ve been doing something right because I kept getting bites, an unusual occurrence for me, a mediocre fisherman on a technical stream. I was fishing a fly small enough to fit comfortably on the pinky nail of my 2-year-old son, with an even smaller fly just above it. The brown trout took the bottom fly (a perdigon nymph, if you care to know) as it swung out and away from me. The bobber sunk for less than a second when my mind recalled the Fish Whisperer’s words about a trout being scientifically capable of spitting out a fly in one one-thousandth of a second (sometimes even faster). So I set the hook hard enough to penetrate a steel beam.

The hooked fish turned upstream, then down, wrestling madly for its freedom. I’d lost one like it the afternoon before, so I started to sweat as soon as Jonah, who was fishing 10 yards away and caught sight of the trout before I could, uttered the words every angler hopes to hear. “That’s a big one,” he said as I reeled in my line with the drag loose enough so the fish wouldn’t break off. The fight lasted a good 10 minutes until the trout grew tired enough that I could maneuver him toward my friend, who had readied himself to swoop down and net the fish for me. I’ve now caught dozens of browns on this river. This was not just the longest of them but by far the thickest and prettiest with its buttery yellow body and black, brown, and red spots. It even had a blue halo-shaped dot on its cheek, a feature that drives purists crazy.

The hook of the tiny fly came out on its own. I observed the trout lying in the net, trying to get a measure of him. I wanted to hold him in my hands for a long time, but I knew that being handled out of the water for too long would put his life in danger. And in a world like the one we live in today, where everything good is either dead or preserved by a few loonies trying to practice counterculture in a dystopia, you just have to let fish this magnificent survive.

I have often said that what I love most about fly-fishing—beyond actually catching the fish, of course—is the feeling of serenity inherent to the place in which the fish are sought. Catch-and-release trout fishing is mostly done in moving water, either rivers or streams, and away from crowds of other anglers looking to catch their limit then head home to filet and fry their trout for dinner. The places I fish are quiet, with pretty sights and bald eagles and blue herons around to share the stream with. A lot of the time, I like to fish alone.

But there is a lineage to fly-fishing that makes it as special to me as the other things I love: soccer and music and collecting old books. The practice is difficult enough, compared to conventional forms of fishing, that until YouTube you could only learn it from someone who learned it from someone else. I fish this way because the Apocalyptic Cowboy told me one day over pipes at his workshop that real writers don’t throw Powerbait. He taught me how, lending me his equipment and spending hours beside me on the Holston, Clinch, Watauga, and Little rivers, then invited me over to his house to tie fake flies with others who now form the little community that travels together on trips like this one.

How’s this for inheritance (or whatever you want to call it)?

On Saturday, I fished in waders borrowed from AC at a stream the Fish Whisperer drove us to in his truck. I used a net given to me by a stranger from Minnesota in the parking lot of the South Holston Fly Shop (I had forgotten both of mine at home, and the only ones on sale were too big and expensive to justify purchasing). The rod I was fishing with I’d found abandoned three years ago on a small stream in the Smokies, and the fish probably would’ve gotten away if it weren’t for Jonah positioning himself to swoop in with his larger net—which also had marks on it to measure the size of the trout, something I otherwise would’ve guesstimated/lied about.

There is a lot that doesn’t make sense about fishing. Depending on the day or the hour or the weather, a spot might be full of eager fish or devoid of any. A fly might be lethal or useless, just as today a technique may work that tomorrow only gets you hung up in a tree. So many factors can be written off as luck or a fluke or karma, fate, serendipity, whatever.

The only thing I’m sure of is that success on the river is rarely experienced alone. We may be selfish enough to feel jealous of the friend (usually the Fish Whisperer) who catches more or larger fish while using a wading stick, wearing prescription glasses, and crouching like an old Japanese man in the water. But once we’re on the board—or, more often, when someone in the group’s been really struggling to land something and you finally see their rod bend and they look at you with a big smile and you bellow “Fish!” in unison—the joy becomes communal.

I have many fishing trips I want to take out West and in South America. I still watch fishing videos in the shower and hope the U.S. presidential election will be canceled so we can install someone as kind and sensible as Tom Rosenbauer, fly-fishing’s Mr. Rogers, as president-for-life. And while I will likely continue to fish alone, more often than not because of the logistics of trying to scratch the itch while not abandoning my family for long periods, I imagine a lot of these big trips will happen with some combination of AC, the Fish Whisperer, Jonah, Kohl, Victor, or some other folks I meet who will teach me a thing or to, lend a hand or a net when I need it, and at the very least take a picture to prove that I wasn’t lying about landing a very special trout.

Storytime with Big Head

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