One should carefully approach the trout stream and objectively read the water before tying on a fly, stepping into the current, or making a cast.
The alternative is to assume that what has worked for you before will work again this time. The latter is my inevitable default. Particularly when I’m feeling pressured to catch a fish, empiricism goes out the window in favor of some cross between stubbornness and superstition. The worst thing about that option is how stinking effective it is. It is just that kind of positive reinforcement that encourages bad habits.

For nearly twenty years, I’ve had a bad habit when fishing the Letort Spring Run outside of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. After visiting it a handful of times as a neophyte fly angler in my teen years with middling results, I sought answers. I had just moved to the area and wanted to crack the code. A local fly shop proprietor handed me two flies: a cress bug and a Shenk’s White Minnow. “If you can’t catch them on these, you can’t catch them at all.” Inspiring.

I did catch trout on cress bugs. And I did become quite adept at taking rising fish with midges and imitations of the smattering of hatches the Letort produced. But Shenk’s White Minnow was the well-publicized cypher that opened the creek up to me. More appropriately, my clumsily tied woolly bugger/white minnow hybrid did just enough to catch a few big brown trout.

So for nearly twenty years, in the absence of mayflies flitting about the water’s surface I’ve tied on my bastardized version of Ed Shenk’s streamer. If I park at one lot, my first cast is to one particular hole. If I park at the other lot, I cast in a specific place. From there, I followed a well-choreographed angling flowchart. Even after moving away, the ruts developed from four- and five-day fishing weeks on the Letort are hard to steer out of.

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I caught my first trout on a fly rod in south central Pennsylvania. The lush valley with its limestone streams was different enough from suburban Virginia to be aesthetically enchanting to an otherwise distracted teenager. Closer streams with less challenging trout were an option. But I was smitten. Without any ties aside from a few fish and the beginnings of a library whose authors hailed from the Cumberland Valley, I had home waters away from home.

I didn’t get to meet Charlie Fox or Vince Marinaro. I didn’t get a chance to fish some of the oft-mentioned spring creeks that succumbed to pollution or development. But there was enough left by the late 90’s: people and places, both. I began to accumulate whatever I could. Books, mostly. Also pieces of tackle, articles, and photographs. More memorable were those conversations. Streamside chats, a few dedicated minutes at conservation banquets, and, once I moved to New England, phone calls.

“The last 50 or so rods I built were on Lamiglass blanks,” Ed Shenk told me. I had asked him about rod building; specifically making his little “Flea” rods. It was one of our last conversations. “Before that there were Grizzly fiberglass blanks and the Conlin ‘Teeny Tiny’ blanks.”

I had never seen the latter two models. Until I was holding one – holding mine – in the summer of 2023.

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