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It's part of me. I really can't explain it. I grew up in a house where no one fished, and I didn't know anyone who fished. I'm not even sure how I was introduced to the idea of fishing, but my earliest memories are of sitting on the banks of a vernal pond holding a stick with a button tied to the end of a string and waiting for something to bite. I must have been a very patient child since there was nothing in that pond (which dried up every summer) but frogs and snakes, salamanders and the occasional turtle. All I ever knew was that I had to fish, and I would spend my free time either fishing or preparing to fish. The first fish I ever caught was a tiny brookie that bit a worm dangled in a small pool that formed beyond a culvert a few hundred feet down the road from the house I grew up in. I was 4 years old. A little bit older I was allowed to walk to the nearest pond where I'd fish for sunnies and bass. At that time I was using a Zebco 202 and my lure of choice (when I wasn't fishing bait) was the rubber worm since they were cheap. Each spring I'd get a bunch of 'em at Spag's and, along with whatever lures I could salvage from the branches and stumps of the local waters, they'd get me through the year.

Fly fishing was something that I believed to be beyond my reach at that time. I didn't know anyone who fly fished, so the only image I had was of well-heeled swells in expensive gear making special trips to faraway places to catch trout or salmon. The first time I used a fly rod I was 16 and trolled for landlocked salmon on Moosehead Lake in Maine. The next year I bought a #6 glass rod in the clearance bin a LL Bean for $15 and matched it with a $20 Pflueger (both of which I still own) and I was on my way, dinking around with muddlers on the Androscoggin for smallmouth. When I joined the Navy I got distracted by girls and booze, but I kept coming back to fishing, and started doing more fly fishing. After I got married, two things sealed my conversion to becoming an almost exclusively fly fishing nut: my father-in-law, who maintained an old sporting camp on an island on Parmachenee Lake where we'd go to fish the Magalloway for trout and salmon, and who went to Alaska each year; and a chance run-in with a guy who owned a fly shop in Portland who became one of the best friends and fly fishing partners a guy could have.

Today, I find few things as pleasurable as being out on a calm morning in my canoe catching (or not) bass on topwater flies and poppers, or wading out in the salt for stripers. I can't think of any place I'd rather be, and I am eternally thankful that God put that desire in my heart.

Mike