From the depths of Spey Nation, or really just the mind of 40 Rivers, comes a new blog called Bottom Hand. It’s about this way that people fly fish by doing some weird shit with their hands on a really long rod, and the kids really seem to like it.

The Corollary: If you’re going to take something up you might as well try to get better at it, and Alex is right in saying the people who do it best have figured some things out. How? After extensive phone interviews with 47 industry luminaries*,  to achieve excellence in achievement and ascend to the upper echelons you need the following: Time. Get some of that and then the best ways to further advance include a combination of  at least two, but not necessarily all, of the following: –Money –Hand Eye Coordination –Friends with boats –Some basic understandings of naturalism and animal behaviors That’s about it. UPDATE: Bjorn has quantified it. *(Actually , just one conversation…a long story by my buddy Quinn about his weekend…

I’m an Alex C fan, and a post he wrote a while back resonated with me. Not as a call to reinvest my energies into some sort of fly fishing Samurai code but to ask the question, Does it really matter if you suck at fly fishing? Not really. Every time I think about this, it brings me back to Thomas McGuane’s introductory essay “Some Remarks” in The Longest Silence, which is quite possibly the greatest single dissertation written about fly fishing. This passage in particular, At the end of the day, standing on the dock, I asked with some trepidation: ‘Uncle Ben, was my father a good fisherman?’ He smiled and said, ‘No Tommy, he was not. But no one loved it more.’…

I hadn’t had the meal since the Clinton administration, and the vise has sat dormant since May. Now is the time for reawakenings. A recent trip to Florida left me exposed, with a box full of stuff picked from bins and paid for that sort of but not exactly fit the profile.  For some reason my own serve me better down there, probably because they swim funny. The sandwich has a lot of things going for it, but the sauce cures poorly under the blue.

For a week straight I popped ciproflaxin, metronidazole, and loperamide from a Pez dispenser. The forces within rebelled like William Munny on a bender, making me reexamine my place in the universe. Starting with, why did I eat the fried mullet? Good question. I saw it on the menu and it brought me way back to the 20th century and a day at McSorley’s with my buddy ML and how rounds into it a man and his wife and their divorcee ladyfriend from Mobile wound into the conversation and by night’s end invited us to the mullet toss, until ML started making out with the divorcee who was really just separated and that was the end of it. I said then if I ever…