Erik Eisele: Fishing, in two bites

I wish I could write a fly fishing column. I’m no authority — thus far in my adult career I’ve caught exactly two fish — but it seems a romantic subject, the sort of topic both philosophical and inclined to humor. If you write about fishing, you never run out of things to write. It is endless, a tumbling mass of stories just keep going and growing, stretching in an unending stream.

Unfortunately, I’m not that kind of fisherman. Like I said, two fish. One was in Madison, a stocked trout barely the size of my palm in the pond adjacent the shooting range. It was my first time fly fishing and one of my very first casts. A colleague from the newspaper had given me a quick lesson and lent me his rod, so I owe him thanks for 50 percent of my lifetime fishing success. The remainder of my casts wound up tangled in weeds and trees behind me, but from the start I knew catching fish was possible.