Stacey & Hy on the Fly

It took so much time to tie a fly on, that I shied away from doing it - so I opted to try an experiment to see if I could "shadow cast" (like on a certain movie that we all love), and convince the fish that a hatch had just begun. The only time this worked was one time when I was sight casting to a fish with a hopper pattern on. I cast the fly many times over, letting it drift over a huge and beautiful fine spotted cutthroat trout. Determined, I locked in my concentration..
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...it even means that your favorite new hat took a nice little ride wrapped up and cushioned in bubble pillows.
We love your hat too.
BUT there might be something you don't see in your package - like wasted resources put into a landfill. While our bubble pillow packers are made of plastics, what you might not know - but are now privy to..
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Woman Fly Fishing Angler wading in mountain river

You probably think I'm going to tell you that I was healed at the moment my foot hit the water and I cast my line.. but I wasn't.

As the water washed around my feet, I took a cleansing breath and soaked in the good vibes of nature - who, unlike earth's human inhabitants, was behaving as it should - in the perfect rhythm of a symphony written by the hand of God himself. I recall the thought coming to my mind that I was meant to be there and I needed this more than I had realized. 

Hyrum handed me the rod and told me where and how to cast the line to land the fish he knew frequented the area of his favorite spot. I cast the line once. It rolled out in front of me. I pulled it back, then forward - expecting it to roll out again and land in the spot I'd intended. Instead, there was a tree just behind and above me that had claimed my fly.  Patiently, as always, Hyrum released it of the bond and set me casting again. The same thing happened. He broke off the dead twigs that proved to be a problem and again I tried, focusing on my backcast to only have my fly snag the tree in front of me - now ruining the spot I was trying to catch the fish in, because Hyrum would have to wade through it to untangle the nest of line from the shrub.

"Maybe you should just fish." I said, frustratedly...

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On New Years Eve, our family talked over the dinner of Tamales we bought from a local small (really small) business. The topic I introduced was all about the year we were about to emerge from. As you know, it...
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I am not, by definition, a keeper of all things in their places, analytical type. But there was a time, where I thought different groups of friends should be kept separately and some things shouldn't mix - like salt on watermelon. Along this same line of thinking, I believed that fishing trips had to be separated from family vacations in order to have quality time. Surely some of this thinking must have come from my prior experiences and the belief systems I had developed as a result. Most definitely, I tried to keep fishing separated from family time, because Hyrum was so obsessed with fishing - and my reluctance to have our vacations become sitting by a river, undoubtedly made him feel he would be missing out.  We'd leave the fly gear at home and he'd look longingly at the rivers we'd pass on the way from places like Portland to the coast. 
And so it was.. he'd go on fishing trips, we'd go on vacations and then there were times that our family took drives and joined at the river. It has taken time for us to figure out the pattern of the metaphorical river we lived..
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