Expert. Definition: Ex ... has been. Spert ... drip under pressure
- By Graham Waterton
John Gierach had been fishing the South Platte during an evening midge rise. He trims his leader, puts on a size 4 buck tail streamer and catches a large brown. He goes on to describe:
'Not long after that a rather well known fly-fishing expert said this could not be done, that one could not catch trout by fishing a streamer through a midge hatch. I counted myself lucky that I wasn't an expert and therefore didn't know that.'
The moral of this is to listen to the expert advice, absorb, thank them politely and then go and do what you feel is right. Fish have a habit of making a fool of all of us. It's sometimes very satisfying to follow the traditional path and succeed but sometimes it's more satisfying to ignore the trad view, apply your own logic and succeed. In fact he had tried for the fish for a while with tiny midges but figured that fish as large as this one are often cannibal and hunt in the dark. Could it resist a early midnight feast? It didn't. Follow your own logic.
Another little Gierach nugget:
'The first boil was unbelievably large. In most waters you'd assume it was a full grown beaver, but not here. Here there were no beavers, probably because the trout had eaten them all.'
Both quotes come from The View From Rat Lake and like all his books, a good read. If you don't find a lot to smile about when reading Gierach, you're a miserable git.