This Memorial Day I’m bringing back an old feature that used to appear on Casting Across. For a few years, Fridays on Casting Across meant the “Last Cast of the Week” post. I’d feature three articles, videos, or social media accounts that I consider worth a click and a few minutes. As I got busier, and my time surfing the internet waned, I mixed in a regular post entitled “Rusty Flybox.”
The Rusty Flybox was a way for me to dust off a few posts that didn’t get a lot of traction the first time around. Either the social media algorithms didn’t like them or I released them before many people were reading Casting Across. Or, they stunk. But I don’t think that last one is true.
As today is a holiday, and since Fridays are slotted for podcast releases these days, I thought I’d trot out another Rusty Flybox. This Memorial Day, you can read about:
- A 500 mile road trip and its fly fishing points of interest.
- Me, falling in a big river.
- Why I insist on writing about outdoor companies and marketing.
Check out all three articles below.
Mile 450: Nostalgia kicks into overdrive on Route 15 south of Harrisburg. 450 miles from home, and I feel like I belong. A turn west in Dillsburg, and in less than 15 minutes I can be on the Yellow Breeches or the Letort. These are my old stomping grounds. This is where I lived for over five years, so the streams are literally part of my life. This period of life was the closest I’ve come to being a trout bum. My car smelled like waders, and there wasn’t a hatch I missed. Leaving was hard, but it was the right thing to do.
More than any place I’ve ever called home, coming back to the Cumberland Valley for the first time years ago elicited real homesickness…
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I don’t know if I was distracted by a fish, another angler, or the swelling pride from an unusually productive day of angling. What I can recall was the speed with which I was underwater. Walking upstream, into a good current, you can imagine the hydrodynamics. A cup will fill with water if you put it in a pond, but it will fill up a little more violently if you put it in a class-5 rapid.
Instantaneously my feet registered “wet” and “cold.” Thankfully I had on my wading belt. But the tightened strap created an interesting sensation within my waders, where I visualize water forcing its way through the small fissures between neoprene and t-shirt like a crack in a dam…
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Fly fishing companies are rarely “the man” or “the industrial complex.” Many brands in this space embody the ethos of the sport and actively protect the resource. And, probably much to their chagrin, they’re almost all pretty small players from a dollars and cents perspective. Even some of the big names endure as labors of love, essentially run as a family business. Lots of newer players are bi-vocational and doing it all out of some basic passion rather than lust for riches.
Because of that fact, and since I personally appreciate it, I’m going to keep writing about gear and brands…
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