I can spend eight hours on the water chasing trout and miss lunch and only realise it’s getting dark when I can’t see the fly anymore three metres in front of me. And I won’t have worried about clients or politics or chasing jobs or anything much really. It’s meditation you see. And totally absorbing.
So where did the day go? Getting packed; travelling to the water, turning over rocks to check on the latest fish food, dodging snakes on the bank as you turn over rocks, then remembering you forgot the toilet paper, back in the water, selecting flies, flicking out a line, getting the drift just right, then finally spotting trout, hiding behind bushes – commando style – so the trout doesn’t spot me, getting out a good cast, striking at the right time, playing and netting a nice three pound trout on a three pound line and then doing it all over again a dozen times …
And at the end of the day, I’ve done my most productive work in months after a glass
of good red and a freshly smoked trout. Out comes the computer, the notebook and the camera and we get to work on all the sort of structural and analytical problems that have been jammed up in the old noggin for the past couple of months. The solutions just appear, somewhere between the start of the walk back to the cabin and the second red. The trick is getting it all written up before the third red.
It doesn’t have to be fly fishing. But it works for me.
