Fellow E-12ers:
Romping through the alphabet as we close in on Extravaganza 2012 (Group One is now 57 days out, but who’s counting?!?), “D” is for (a) your E-12 preferred mode of transportation, a McKenzie-style drift boat, and (b) your preferred style of fishing, a drag free drift (or “DFD”).
The former is the most pleasant of experiences for your rookies out there. Imagine 8 uninterrupted hours on one of Montana’s most famous fly fishing rivers [choose from the Clark Fork of the Columbia River, the majestic Bitterroot River or the Big (“A River Runs Through It”) Blackfoot River] and put yourselves in the capable hands of your E-12 guide as, two per boat, you silently glide downstream up to 14 miles each day stealthily approaching rising rainbow, cutthroat and brown trout just as natural as a log quietly making its way downstream.
To turn a phrase, “the silence is deafening” when you travel via drift boat: (y)our chosen mode of transportation making way for the incoming sounds of screeching eagles and ospreys, for the quietude of wind blowing through the passing cottonwoods and aspens and for the slurping sounds of trout ingesting the bounty of your hatch-matching offerings. No chirping of phones, no chiming of missed messages, no pinging of quickly irrelevant incoming emails and no duties or responsibilities other than to seamlessly become apart of your surroundings, to blend into the naturalness of it all and to quickly become at peace with yourselves, knowing that all that you thought “important” has soon become irrelevant as you enter the time and warp zone of nature’s bounty.
For, while aboard, you sole task is to place your fly in a propitious position for ingest and to allow it to meander downstream in a “drag free drift” such that, like your drift boat, your carefully placed fly on the water becomes as one with its surroundings, communes with nature just as you have and becomes at one with the surrounding, ever-changing environment. To accomplish this task, your guide will teach you the art of “mending”—the process by which you lift your fly line and carefully place it upstream of your fly so that it can obtain its desired mission…a DFD. It is the ability to properly place your fly on the water and then to allow it to drift as one with its companion water-based trout food fare that yields the bounty of fly fishing; it is the job of your guide to properly place his drift boat and it is your job as his charge to then properly develop a drag free drift, the combination of which is one fine day on the water (regardless of the day’s fish count, btw)!
Fish on, gang!!
Best to all in eager anticipation of it all,
Rock Creek Ron
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p.s. Stay tuned for our episode where “E” is for “Entomology”!! RCR
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