You’re never going to look back, excited about the mornings you slept in.

It will never be the half-way, B- for effort fishing that you’ll remember. It will always be the mornings when the coffee couldn’t come soon enough. The times when you had to wait and watch the minutes tick by before you could make that first legal cast. All the uncomfortable nights in reclined seats and makeshift campsites. It is the times that you worked for it, that you went for it, that you felt like you earned it.

Those times are the times that will come up first as you remember last season. The moments you still talk about years and decades from now.

Are there pragmatic benefits? Absolutely. Pressured waters fish much better for those who get to the coveted runs first. More hours on the river translate into more opportunities. Hiking further and deeper puts you places others won’t or can’t go. Again: you’ll be happy you fished with a bit more of an intense edge.

But there is more to it than that.

You are there to see the sunrise. You are present when few others are, even on the major highways. You are audience to countless birds and rodents and other creatures that are never seen because of their active hours or remote haunts. You get to be in quiet places; lonely places; breathtaking places.

Working for these fish pays off as goals, set by no one but yourself, are fulfilled in relative anonymity. The highs are objectively questionable, and the lows are potentially dubious. But there is a present pleasure that is incalculable.

The fall into bed, trunk filled with disheveled gear, been up for too many hours feeling is a miserable joy that not everyone has experienced.  It stays with you, extending your fishing trip from the interval between first and last cast to the toll it takes on wallet, body, and mind. If shared with others, there is a camaraderie that isn’t quite band-of-brothers caliber but still exceeds anything proffered by team building exercises by far.

It all boils down to the equation that values the chase as much or more than the catch. The fish matter, but the other stuff spinning around in the periphery is what lifts the fish themselves to the level that they achieve. The far afield trout is on a pedestal whereas the convenient lunker barely warrants mention. Where there is no angling pain there is very little narrative gain. Even if the only audience is your personal, internal rewinding and revisiting of the story, there is a renown realized because of the holistic pursuit.

Boiled down, the time you put into fly fishing is an investment worth storing. Bottled up, the distilled and aged days or seasons pursuing fish will satisfy and intoxicate for years and decades to come. A bit longer, a bit earlier, a bit more challenge provides the depth of character that can separate your experience out from the rest.