I was about 12 years old when I discovered the world of fly fishing. In the pages of old outdoor magazines my dad had saved I read about fly fishing and tying flies. With the help of my dad I ordered fly tying materials and tools from Cabelas and started tying my own flies. I eventually had to buy a couple of fly boxes to put them in. There was something magical about catching a fish on a lure you created yourself.
Of course my first flies were crude, but it wasn’t long before my skills increased and by high school I was an accomplished fly tyer. We didn’t have much trout fishing close to where we lived but dad would take me places whenever he could. Other than that, I’d take my flyrod and flybox and tear up the panfish in our farm pond and in the nearby lakes.
I was fly fishing lakeside one morning about 7am when an older gentleman came up to me, stunned that he had run across a teenager with a flyrod at the lake. After looking at my gear, fly box and flies he said he had something for me and went to his rental cabin. A few minutes later he came back with a fly box loaded with beautiful flies and streamer and said that he wanted me to have them. For a teenager that was into fly fishing it looked like a gold mine, but I told him that I couldn’t accept them, it was too nice to take from someone I didn’t even know. But he insisted. He said that fly fishing was a phase he went through and he was more into catfishing. Its been 25 years and I still have that box of flies, some of them are gone and been replaced with others.