About that time I caught more than 3 fish

Easy as fishing...as long as you're not fishing for trout

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Five, Issue 13

If it were easy as fishing, you could be a musician
If you could make sounds loud or mellow
Get a secondhand guitar, chances are you'll go far
If you get in with the right bunch of fellows
People see you having fun just a-lying in the sun
You tell them that you like it this way
It's the work that we avoid and we're all self-employed
We love to work at nothing all day

The Sunday Reader, June 14, 2026

Your heart is in your throat and you’re choking, watching a trout as long as your leg glides backwards, nose disdainfully brushing your #28 Blue Wing Olive, judging you, judging your offering, judging your presentation like a Michelin reviewer poling warily at the meatloaf in a dive diner, before flicking a fin and sliding away.

Technical fishing for trout — all the salmonoids, really — is the high cathedral of fly fishing. Bamboo rods and dry flies are the sacraments. It was a cathedral I’d entered late in my fishing career, because as usual I’d gone at the whole nine yards bass akwards.

My dad took me fishing as soon as I could walk. We lived on Long Island, so we fished heavy tackle and bait on the docks and bulkheads of the South Shore bays. When I was old enough we worked the Fire Island beaches with surf-casting rigs twice as tall as me.

Mostly we caught medium fish on all this heavy tackle, and I became obsessed with lighter, more sporting gear. I worked my way down to ultralight spinning gear before finally making the jump to fly fishing. There were pretty much zero saltwater fly fishers on Long Island in those days — at least among the Italians I grew up with — so I taught myself.

Indeed the Italians found the entire idea crazy and said so, frequently and loudly. Fishing wasn’t about sport; fishing was about putting food on the table.

My Italians were loud but kind. They’d already decided I was weird, but I was their weirdo, so they tolerated my shenanigans as I taught myself to cast a fly rod, tied streamers and then fish them. Turned out a well-worked streamer was Kryptonite to the snappers and tailor blues that thronged the bays, especially when I’d wander through crowds all casting identical popping cork and bait rigs.

On days when there’s nothing but boring hamburgers on the menu, a taco truck can pull up and do land office business.

Most fly fishers start with panfish, work their way up to trout, and then an adventurous few graduate to saltwater. I started with saltwater because that’s the water I lived by, and didn’t really have access to good freshwater fishing until we moved to Connecticut, with its famous Farmington and Housatonic Trout Management Areas.

Connecticut is, famously, an easy drive from Manhattan; the Trout Management Areas were catch-and-release only so the rivers weren’t fished out. And the trout grew fat and happy and smart; even a fish with a brain the size of a pea knows not to eat that fuzzy bug when the last three had hooks in them.

I got into trout fishing the way I got into everything. I read everything and tried everything and learned everything I could. I joined the local Trout Unlimited chapter, and started taking care of the river. We even reintroduced Atlantic salmon to the Naugatuck River, where they had once been so prolific that laws were passed limiting how many days they could be fed to servants.

So it was no surprise that when Ed came up from Florida to work on our city desk for the summer and asked the staff about trout fishing they pointed him in my direction.

Ed had been the city editor of a Florida daily, then made a mid-career change to journalism professor. He’d joined us for the summer through a program designed to give journalism professors real-world experience.

Which he didn’t need. He wanted to escape the Florida heat for the summer.

And go trout fishing.

Trout are cold-water fish, found in mountain streams and rivers like the Housatonic and Farmington in the Berkshire Mountains. Florida’s freshwater fishing is almost entirely ponds and lakes filled with bathtub-temperature water.

Ed was an avid fly fisherman who had successfully fished for everything that swims in those lukewarm lakes; mostly bass and sunfish. But like all fly fishermen, he had trout on his mind.

He was a great guy, and we soon became fast friends, and I agreed to take him trout fishing all summer.

It did not go well.

Here’s the thing with fly fishing for trout: no trout dies peacefully in its sleep. Trout ruthlessly kill and eat until something kills and eats them. And everything eats them: Bigger fish. Birds. Otters and other animals.

Bigger trout.

Big trout are geniuses in the fine art of paranoia. Because small trout that are insufficiently paranoid never become big trout.

They become lunch.

So trout fishing turns everything you know about fishing on its head. Almost all fishing is done with a tight line to a bait in the water. In fact this is so ubiquitous that fishermen say tight lines to each other the way most people say have a great day.

Trout fishing is done with dry flies so small they stand atop the water, imitating small insects hatching underwater and then emerging at the surface to take wing. A tight line would make these flies skate like a water skier, and then drown.

So the flies must be cast gently, to float down on the water without breaking the surface, on lines as thin as a human hair. And that line must be managed during the cast to place the fly in the correct thread of current running like an insect conveyor belt feeding the trout you are targeting, and then managed so there’s so much slack that your fly doesn’t twitch or skate or do anything else unnatural.

Fly doesn’t float directly to the fish’s snout? No trout.

Line not slack enough and your fly twitches? No trout.

Your cast puts a shadow over the fish? Could be a bird! No trout.

Your fly doesn’t perfectly match the real insects?

No trout.

And that’s regular trout fishing. Technical trout fishing in the Trout Management Areas is much, much worse. Everything is turned up to 11.

And the flies are much, much smaller.

The first time I offered Ed a #28 Blue Wing Olive and offered to tie it on for him he thought I was pranking him. I didn’t blame him. I thought the same thing the first time someone handed me one.

The Rapala Ulta Light is considered to be a very small bass bait; the Mepps Aglia Spinner is for even smaller fish. But if you want to catch trout in technical fishing areas you need to learn to drop a #28 Blue Wing Olive on exactly the right spot so the current carries it precisely to the trout. Without your cast leaving a shadow over the fish. And that cast ending with your leader loosely curled so there is enough slack to keep your fly floating true.

And if you do all that perfectly half the time you still end up with your heart in your throat and you’re choking, watching a trout as long as your leg glides backwards, nose disdainfully brushing your #28 Blue Wing Olive, judging you, judging your offering, judging your presentation like a Michelan reviewer poling warily at the meatloaf in a dive diner, before flicking a fin and sliding away.

We fished for trout all summer. Each time I’d catch a few trout, and release them. Ed never caught any. He soldiered on; I think his getting skunked bothered me more than him.

Now I’m sure everyone is thinking All this does not sound very Feola-ish. And everyone is right. I’d read about dry fly fishing for trout for years. I’d mastered enough to catch trout regularly.

And frankly, I had as usual become a bit bored and started working out alternate methods. Not long after this I was sitting on a bluff overlooking one of the prime pools on the Housatonic, waiting my turn, as a series of very competent fly fishers worked the pool all fishing the same Blue Wing Olive flies we’d all bought at the fly shop across the street. And thought What are the chances I’ll fish the same fly any better than them?

And I thought about how my streamer was Kryptonite to the snappers and tailor blues of those Long Island bays who turned blase at all those identical popping cork and bait rigs. And I tied on a #16 Royal Coachman — a piscatorial faux pas equivalent to wearing a Canadian tuxedo to the Metropolitan Opera — and proceeded to bail fish out of that pool.

As the summer waned and the days and Ed’s time in Connecticut drew shorter I decided to take Ed on one last expedition and show him my fav fishing. The Housatonic had smallmouth bass in among the rocks of the heavier currents. And for some unknown reason these smallmouth bass had a psychotic hatred of mice. A mouse lure formed of deer hair with a little leather tail would send smallmouths into paroxysms of rage.

They would do anything to murder it, flying out of the water like ballistic missiles to murder the infernal rodent. They weren’t trying to eat the rodent. They were trying to murder it. They were so wild you missed more fish than you hooked. But who cared, when you were laughing so hard and having so much fun?

This kind of fishing Ed knew. Straight casts. Tight lines. No shilly-shallying. We caught fish after fish.

All summer long I’d tried to comfort Ed and his fishless trips. There’s an old fisherman’s adage that you never count more than three. When asked, you’d admit if you were skunked. You’d say you caught one, two or three fish.

And if you caught more than three, that’s what you’d say: I caught more than three fish. To say more would be impolite.

To say more would be bragging. And surely the fishing gods would take note, and you’d go skunked on subsequent expeditions.

And all summer long each time we went fishing Ed would walk fishless with me back to my Jeep and ask how many trout I’d caught, and I’d say More than three.

After a few hours of bailing smallmouths that day on the Housatonic I went to sit on the bank of the river. We’d parked beer in a cold pool and I opened one and watched Ed fish for a while.

After a bit I said What a great day! Perfect weather, good friends, cold beer…

And we’ve each caught more than three fish.

Ed wasn’t having it.

!@#$%!!!! that noise, Feola. I’ve caught 16 — grunts, sets the hook in another smallmouth — 17! 17 fish!