On the '5 Stages of Fly Fishing'

Musings from a trout bum on a trout bum adage

Fly fishing is a pursuit that is constantly at odds with itself. It’s a beautiful contradiction. Even the cast, the most basic gesture of the game, asks you to speed up a line only to stop it abruptly, and do that repeatedly. Your body is supposed to do something your brain insists makes no sense. It’s like learning to write with your left hand after a lifetime of being a righty. At first, it’s awkward, unnatural, until suddenly it isn’t. And when it clicks, there’s this small moment of magic in your brain that starts as satisfaction, and grows into an addiction of chasing dopamine.

Many worthwhile things in life are held together by tension. They somehow work even though they don’t make perfect sense at first. The irrational, unexpected, uncomfortable, impractical stuff sticks with you long after the easy and obvious things fade into white noise. I’ve seen this ring true in creative work, travel, hunting, fishing of course, and in every corner of life where the good stuff hides a little out of reach, reserved for those willing to put in the time, effort, and take risks.

Like any great thing, fly fishing takes years, decades to master, and if you want to be successful consistently, it becomes evident quickly that you have a lot to learn. The very nature of it is that we are making things more challenging for ourselves as anglers, intentionally, and that raises the bar for everyone. If we were purely rational beings, we probably wouldn’t do it at all. There are situations where using a fly instead of a lure is a more effective way to catch fish. But it’s usually a lot harder than rigging up a spin rod with a bobber and a night crawler. Any tom dick or harry can go down to Walmart and get an ugly stick and few worms and be catching fish within 30 minutes. Big fish don’t care about what rod you’re holding, in fact their probably going to choose the real stinky worm over the one tied with feathers.

Some people compare fly fishing to bowhunting, as being the high-difficulty version of an already difficult pursuit. And yes, the challenge is part of the appeal. But that’s not the whole story. To me it’s about proximity - to wild places, fish and wildlife, to water, to a version of yourself you don’t get to meet in your regular day-to-day life. It’s about learning how wild things live and behave by being close to them and observing them. It’s about how rivers and ecosystems change, how we impact them, and how your existence fits into the bigger thing. It’s about those rare moments when the obsession takes over and the rest of your life fades into background static.

Over time, the in-between moments of actually catching fish start to paint a picture that resembles the whole reason you’re doing it all in the first place. The long layovers in the airport with a fly rod strapped to your backpack, the random guy on the river that gave you the fly that you caught all your fish on, the extremely fishy alcoholic that you shared a lodge in Mexico with, the ungodly early mornings, the rock covered in stonefly nymphs, the shitty gas station coffee, the quiet strategy that comes from failure and repetition and all the days you got your ass kicked by wind, smart fish, or your own ego.

Experiencing the long-game of the fly fishing journey has changed how I look at many things in life - how I utilize free time, how I handle failure, how and why I travel, even who I keep close. It’s become about far more than just the fish and the fishing. Although I do still very much care about those things.

One day in Wyoming, my buddy Noah laid out what he called the 5 stages of fly fishing. I’d been at it almost twenty years already, subscribe to all the fly fishing magazines, and somehow I’d never heard of this. Turns out I spent a long time climbing through levels 1 to 3 without knowing it, and these days I’m pretty firmly on level 4. I still want to catch fish - I’m not a monk - but I care just as much about how and where I do it, and who I’m doing it with. I’m not on level 5 yet, and very few people are, whether they admit it or not. Level 5 is guru sh*t. Level 5 is the guy who can watch three tailing permit twenty feet from the bow, have zero temptation to grab a rod, and actually be happy to watch his buddy fish instead. Someone at peace with desire, which unfortunately is not me, yet.

Many people have written and commented on the 5 Stages of Fishing before. If you haven’t heard of them, here they are:

1 / All you want to do is catch a fish. Any fish.

2 / You need to catch a lot of fish. You could catch every fish in the river and it’s not enough.

3 / You only care about catching really big fish.

4 / You want to catch a big fish, the way that you want to catch it.

5 / You don’t even care about catching fish. You just want to be there. You just want to see it all one more time, even if you’re the one rowing the boat all day. Watching someone else do it gives you the same satisfaction as doing it yourself.

When I heard Noah lay out these stages, they immediately assumed permanent real estate in my brain. Yet what started as a well-worded diagnosis of my personal fishing journey, began to open my eyes to what is really at stake here. I started to realize that as we develop as anglers through these stages, the more we begin to understand that these experiences don’t exist without the places in which we’re doing them. And sometimes it takes immersing yourself in these wild places with a challenge and a goal to really get that.

Conservationists are made, not born. There is no better way to understand the risk of human impact on wild places and wild things - and the beauty of them - than to tangle with those things yourself and attempt to put your hands on them. Hunters and anglers champion conservation initiatives because they experience wild things in an intimate way that most others have not. Sometimes, you need to get close to something and really see what it’s all about in order to appreciate it. Fly fishing is - beyond being any kind of personal journey, lifestyle, sport, art form, or tradition - an unlock to understanding what’s at stake. To me, that’s the only thing really missing from the 5 stages. Other than that, they’re pretty damn spot on.