I couldn’t help myself.

It was a fish. It swam up from the clear depths to chase my fly. I saw the whole thing unfold before my eyes. I trout set the snot out of that striper.

And, of course, that means that the striped bass pictured above is not the fish that I just described. Because I missed that fish in an epic fashion.

I am not sure what you call the psychological/biological phenomenon of being able to recall physical sensations. But I can still feel myself tensing up as the fish charged my baitfish imitation. I can feel my hand tightening on the cork of the 9-weight. I can feel myself lowering the rod so that I can have the optimum thrust as I jerk the line taught with hurricane force.

I can feel the complete lack of resistance as I trout set the line, leader, and fly into oblivion.

The striper hung in the water column, gills flared and expression slightly confused. Its meal was gone. Thanks to me and my 5-weight ways.

I had caught other fish by that time in the day. I had caught plenty of other fish. But the one thing that I had going for me in all the previous instances, and all those that would follow, was that I couldn’t see the fish. It was cast, strip, strip, strip, strip set. Easy as pie.

Casting and fighting the fish was artful, hooking the fish was mechanical.

But in that moment when I saw the whole scene unfold before my eyes, I reverted to another time, another place, and another fish. You can take the dry fly away from the angler, but you can’t take the angler away from the dry fly… or something.

There is probably a lot to be said about the interplay between the physical and the mental in fishing. How much muscle memory we employ while casting, reeling, and even twitching showcases how fearfully and wonderfully we are made. We also learn so much: seminars, books, arbitrary fly fishing blogs. At the same time, it is just fishing. And so those impulses – say, jerking a fly rod like you’re starting an old mower – override what we know.

This is how the story ends:

I didn’t trout set again. Not because I got better, but because my retrieval cadence was consciously synced to the internal metronome of “stripset-stripset-stripset” for the rest of the day.