For me it began around 1986 when my then-girlfriend’s dad gave me my first fly rod—a two-piece, 5 weight, all-purpose trout rod—and taught me to how to cast it off a boardwalk bridge stretching over a river in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The basic fly rod casting motion is a back-and-forth pendulum where the rod moves back-and-forth from 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock. The helpful metaphor here is that 12 o’clock is where your casting arm is extended straight up to the sky, and 3 o’clock is your casting arm extended straight out from you, parallel to the water. It’s all rhythm and timing and once you get it, you “get it.” You let more line out with each successive “false” cast, building momentum, and on the final cast, your arm comes forward and with a well-timed release the fly line shoots out in front of you, gradually unfurling from a tight arc until the fly lands quietly on the water.

You really “get it” when you catch and land a fish on the fly. Fly-fishing tackle—from the rod, to the leader (or tippet), to the flies—is lighter than conventional recreational fishing gear, and because you retrieve the line by hand (a process known as stripping), when you feel the fish take your fly, you really feel it. It’s a sensory thing: the fly line is the medium by which you feel the fish, and maybe because there is such a direct connection, that progression of feelings—from the initial adrenaline rush, to the challenge of the fight, to the anticipation of seeing the creature at the end of your line—seems to be more magnified, more visceral than fishing with conventional tackle. After landing that first fish, if you’re anything like the 4 million other fly fishermen currently estimated to be plying their avocations in the Northeast¹, you’re done. Hooked.

There are stages of this affliction, and I’ve heard it put this way: as a beginner, you just want to catch fish, any fish. Then you get the hang of things, and, feeling more comfortable with your gear, fly selections, and general sense of locations and time to fish, you just want to catch lots of fish. After that, you move to the industrial revolution stage of fly fishing, a phase highly correlated with an expansion of skills (e.g., mastering the double hall, the roll cast, and the bimini knot), an expansion of indispensable gear (e.g., two reels; one with an intermediate and one with a fast-sinking line), and an expansion of questionable gear (e.g., “But honey, I really need this 10-foot Zodiac…oh and a new 4-stroke engine to push it…” [see An Afternoon with Uncle Albert]). During this phase, your desire is primarily twofold: to catch a big fish and to catch different species (ideally several in the same outing²). The last stage of the fly-fishing progression is the seasoned angler phase. How or when you get there is variable, but I think you’ll know when you’ve arrived. You’ve caught the monsters; you’ve gotten the slams. Now you’re traveling farther and longer in pursuit of new species, as well as familiar species in new settings. Perhaps the key trait of this last stage is that you now spend more time giving advice than asking for it. I wouldn’t know; I’m not there. Yet.

Of course, this whole “stages of fly fishing” thing is a gross generalization. Some may ring true, but most any fisherman—fly rodder or beach chunker—will tell you: “Any fish is better than no fish.” The skunk stinks: it is to be avoided at all costs.

The move from freshwater fly fishing to salt water for me was simply a matter of logistics: from metro-Boston (where I lived for 20 years), the shortest distance to reliable fishing was the coast. Add to that the fact that I grew up spending parts of every summer since early childhood avidly surf casting from beaches in coastal Massachusetts, and the result was inevitable. So, after my introduction to the basics, and some reasonably successful outings on trout streams in Michigan, Vermont, and New York, I took my new found skills seaward! In 1988, outfitted with a 9-foot, 9 weight rod, a reel with a 9 weight, intermediate, weight-forward line, and a handful of flies, I began to fly fish in salt water. The progress was slow, but steady. Honestly, I don’t even remember my first fish on the saltwater fly rod. It was early in my endeavors, though. Definitely not the first time out, maybe not the second, but very soon thereafter, because it became very clear to me that this new thing—this brave new world of fishing—was eminently do-able. That first fish may have been the striper that exploded on a surface popper (i.e., a buoyant fly that makes a sputtering sound when retrieved) one spectacular flat, calm morning while casting and walking the ocean-facing beaches of Plum Island. Or it may have been a voracious bluefish close to shore during a blitz (i.e., a fish feeding frenzy) off Popponessett. While I can’t place this important milestone, I can recall some other particularly memorable ones.

There was the time in July of 1992, when the blues were blitzing off the southeast side of Great Point, Nantucket. The fish were within surf-casting range, but they were not coming into fly-casting range. So my brother and I teamed up. I took all the hooks off of an old wooden orange Gibbs Polaris Popper and snapped it to a leader on the surf-casting rod. My brother tied an orange foam popper fly (with wire leader, of course…those blues have nasty teeth) on the fly rod. I began to cast to the blitzing blues with the surf-caster and—being blues—when they took notice, they would follow the surface popper inshore, pounding it, taking it, dropping it, and pounding it again and again. The trick here was for my brother to time the fly cast so that as the lure and following fish approached fly-casting range, he would drop the fly right on top of the lure, and I would simultaneously stop reeling. It took maybe 10 or 15 tries, but we nailed it. And when a pissed-off bluefish decides to run, your fly reel sings!

And there was my first keeper.³ It was a very early morning in June, after a long walk to the end of Snow’s Point in Orleans (some of the best fishing spots are the hardest to reach). I had been casting for an hour, working up and back the shoreline, with nothing more than a schoolie⁴ to show for it. The scenery was incredible—a veritable coastal layer cake. Directly in front of me was the swift-moving water of Nauset inlet, above that the greens and yellows of the salt marsh, then the thin ribbon of the sandy dunes, topped by the glint of the Atlantic, and culminating with the wide morning sky painted a water color wash from orange to blue—all shrouded in patchy grey fog. A lobster boat cruised by close to shore and just as I was cursing the wake and disruption—WHAM—my line went tight and for a brief second I thought I had gotten hung up on a submerged boulder. But then the line started to peel off my reel, and I knew I was into a big fish. It didn’t take off with a sudden burst or “run” like some past stripers and bluefish had, but it fought a slow, stubbornly determined fight. Four or five times I had the fish to within 15 or 20 feet of the shore, and each time it would hasten off, with an unhurried but deliberate retreat for deeper water. When finally I pulled it up onto the safety of the sandy slope and reached to extract the deceiver from its gaping mouth, my hands were shaking. Laying my fly rod next to the fish and using a mark I had made on my rod, I estimated the fish to be about 36 inches. I debated the fate of this guy for a short while—all of the stripers I had caught up to this point had been returned to the water. I was on the verge of doing the same—I had the fish in the water with its lower jaw grasped firmly in my hand-when I unflinchingly decided that the time had come to enjoy some fresh striped bass for a dinner. Or two. See Bass Steaks on the Grille recipe.

There was also a particularly spectacular day flats fishing on Monomoy. Akin to the more famous flats fishing of the tropics, where anglers “sight cast” to bonefish and other species in very shallow waters, the same experience can be had in our home waters of the Northeast. As incoming tides flood the wide expanses of inter-tidal sandy flats, stripers (and sometimes blues) will leave the refuge of deeper water and swim onto the shallow flats. Traveling solo or in groups of twos or threes (the bigger fish are more solitary), these fish will feed opportunistically on crabs and other invertebrates on the bottom, or silversides and sandlance in the water column, but instead of being in an active prey mode, their behavior on the flats is perhaps more aptly described as a lethargic cruise. One of the best known destinations in Massachusetts for sight casting on the flats is the vast flats surrounding the Monomoy islands off Chatham. From the Monomoy National Refuge or The Outermost Marina, you can catch a ride on a skiff that will drop you at South Beach or North Monomoy Island. From there, it’s up to you—there’s miles and miles of flats to the west of South Beach and to the north and west of North Monomoy.

As I set off from the South Beach drop-off, I had my eye out for an area that was close to some of the deeper inter- and sub-tidal channels that mosaic the system. The weather was cooperating; the forecast was for mostly sunny skies and winds 5-10 knots from the southwest, ideal for this type of fishing. It’s all visual; you’re looking for the subtlest clues—changes in color or movement that reveal a potential target—and clouds and wind are not simpatico. As the sun slowly climbed the sky, I walked and walked and walked, wading through the mostly knee-deep water that was gradually filling the sandy flats. After 30 minutes, I came to an area that looked particularly promising near some darker, deeper water, so I slowed my wading walk, and really focused. With the motion of the water, the small changes in depth and sand color, and the ripples on the surface from breezes, it was all very vague and aqueous, and it was too easy to be fooled into seeing things that weren’t really there. The dark shape off to the right: was that a fish or pile of seaweed? The suspect visions were all acquitted when I clearly made out a striper moving across my path not more than 20 feet from me. I was so woefully unprepared for this moment of action that by the time I fumbled two false casts the fish had bolted off in a flash. It quickly became clear that if there was to be any chance at getting a real shot at one of these fish, I was going to have to really focus, be totally prepared, and cast quickly and accurately.

After several minutes, my eye caught another moving dark patch.I immediately started false casting, and while the cast was unwinding line from the stripping basket, I was tuning in on the object, gathering as much information as I could in a split second—its distance, direction, and speed—and then adjusting my cast, I dropped the fly about 12 feet away. To compensate for the mediocre cast, I made three quick, long strips, bringing the fly into the path of the moving fish. Slowing my retrieve, I gave it a couple short twitches. The striper slowed and turned towards the fly. My heart raced. A short pause and then a short strip. The striper pumped its tail, and I watched in disbelief as it opened its mouth and sucked in my fly. The exhilaration of that first flats fish played out more than a dozen times that day, as the fish came in great numbers and showed a real enthusiasm for the fly I was using. At one point, I had a harbor seal come onto the flats from the nearby channel to give short chase to a fish on my line. As rewarding as the fishing was, so too was the gratification I had after two other anglers independently approach me to inquire what I was doing that they were not. I attributed it to seeing the fish well, letting the fly sink after the cast, a short “twitchy” strip, and the small, chartreuse-and-white, epoxy-head deceiver I had been using…that, and a healthy dose of beginner’s luck!

I could go on with my fly-fishing recollections, but you get the idea. Every trip out is an experience in and of itself. Even if the Bay gives up only a single schoolie, every trip has the promise, the potential, to be one of those epic days—to become engrained forever into your memory, a part of your psyche. And that’s why I’m hooked.

Photograph of three fly fishermen in waders: Jason Karas; all others: Keith Brauneis