Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1181: Adventures in the City with Marc Fryt

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Ep. 1181: Adventures in the City with Marc Fryt · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:06
[SPEAKER_00]: your listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for adventuring with us as we discover what incredible athletes and outdoor enthusiasts are doing all over the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now here's your host, Kurt Linville.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hi friends, Happy Wednesday isn't it fun in the middle of the week to take a break, listen to a great podcast about an adventure that you might have on the weekend or maybe when you go on vacation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But in today's episode, Mark Fritt shares with us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that we can do more things right in the cities we can do things that we might think of as wilderness activities right on the way home from work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe on our lunch hour we can do things close to home where they're accessible and tons of fun so stay tuned for that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I want to remind you the number one thing that you can do that helps the
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[SPEAKER_01]: is to share it with your friends.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you hear an episode you find interesting then share the episode with your friends and maybe grab a friend and try some of the stuff that Mark is talking about in today's episode.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for joining us today and now on with the show.
1:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey friends, welcome to the Adventure Sports podcast.
1:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I am excited to share with you today's subject and guest.
1:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be a little bit different.
1:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Kind of taken a detour off of the normal diet, which I think is always fun.
1:36
[SPEAKER_01]: In way of orienting you, we did an episode years ago with a world-
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[SPEAKER_01]: I guess a record holding.
1:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know about World Record because he can't do that, but a Appalachian Trail record holder for fastest, self-supported hike.
1:50
[SPEAKER_01]: But while she had started doing, was urban hikes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She started backpacking in the cities and she said that it was just the most wonderful way to actually see some of the amazing cities in the United States.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I thought, wow, now that's different.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're used to backpacking in the woods.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, today we're doing
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[SPEAKER_01]: for fly fishing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be talking today about urban fly fishing with Mark Fritt from Spokane and Mark is an author.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He is a fishing guide, urban fishing guide.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He is a photographer and he's here to convince us that urban fly fishing is a worthwhile thing to do so Mark
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we were talking before we hit record and I thought this always happens.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We start getting into it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: No, I mean, why didn't I record that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: We were having a lot of fun, but the idea of urban flyfishing, I think.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, people can imagine someone on a river or pond or a stream somewhere with a fishing pole.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But flyfishing, at least in my mind, I think in a lot of people's minds, flyfishing is out on the remote river, you know, deep somewhere in the wilderness.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So talk to us a little bit.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What got you into urban flyfishing?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and that's a great question.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And also kind of like mental framework to think through like,
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, when we picture fly fishing, yeah, the first thing that really comes to mind is an angler, a fly fisherman kind of standing in a river alone, maybe there's like a trout jumping out of the water, majestic kind of mountainous background.
3:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's definitely what I had in mind when I picked up fly fishing like years ago, back when I was in the army, I
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[SPEAKER_02]: wanted to kind of get away and get out into the mountains.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And it was perfect.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I went out and fly fished for trout, you know, day in and day out, hiking way into the backcountry, my little pup tent, and fly rod.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I couldn't kind of ask for anything better.
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[SPEAKER_02]: After getting out of the army, I moved to Columbus, Ohio, where my wife was finishing up her schooling.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I went from essentially like alpine backcountry wilderness to a Midwestern city of about 2 million people.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I still wanted to go out fly fishing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And the closest trout stream was about an hour away, but it ran through like corn fields.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so, what's thing I know I'm trying to fly fish for trout, and there's farmers plowing fields of corn.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Right next to me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I was like, well, this I just didn't feel it didn't feel the same any more quite honestly.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I kind of stopped fly fishing for a little bit.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I put the fly rod down put it into the corner of our bedroom and it was yeah something that that I kind of picked up every now and then I would travel out to West Virginia.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But it wasn't something I returned to until ironically enough, I was traveling out to Los Angeles to visit my brother for a week.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, okay, good.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm traveling to LA, let me see if I can get up to the Sierra's or, you know, the mountain somewhere nearby, you know, for, for a, a day trip.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The LA traffic had other plans for me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I couldn't get to the mountains.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I did a quick Google search of local flyfishing around Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And these photos kept popping up again and again and again, of these anglers flyfishing in the LA River.
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[SPEAKER_02]: like that we can all kind of remember the scene from the movie Greece where they're driving the car through that concrete channel.
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[SPEAKER_02]: That's where they were fishing and that was like okay this this has to be an April Fool's Duke or something but I looked at the map and I was 15 minutes away so I drove over there parked the car kind of scooted or right you know got out of the car scooted
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[SPEAKER_02]: look down into the river and it was kind of blown away because there were trees and bushes growing like in the middle of the channel, like in the bottom of this concrete river and all the
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[SPEAKER_02]: There was a fly line going through the air.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Somebody else is wearing their fly fishing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I was like, OK, so this, someone's not pulling a massive prank on me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Let me give this a shot.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So I walked down to the river.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And that was the first time I ever spotted a giant fish.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's called Common Carp.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And they're prevalent in all, pretty much all cities in the US and over in Europe as well.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I saw this fish, it was the biggest fish I'd ever laid eyes on and I spent the next hour trying to catch it and I eventually caught it and after that moment it was just like a lights on moment for me.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Being able to fly fish in a place where there was essentially more concrete than there was water, there were power lines overhead, there was traffic and I had this incredible experience
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[SPEAKER_02]: that just pulled me in and I completely just was absorbed by the whole experience.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I flew home when I was back in Columbus, Ohio.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I walked for the first time from our apartment over to the river.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It was like maybe a five minute walk away and I finally looked down into that river.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And it was carp up and down for as far as I could see.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And I was like blown away again, and I ran back, grabbed my fly rod, and kind of the rest of this history.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I just couldn't get enough.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Nice.
7:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I love that we're going to have to rewind a little bit and share what fly fishing is all about our guests.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I love the adaptability.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I have found that more and more and more,
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[SPEAKER_01]: people are finding ways to do some of their favorite adventure sports and places you wouldn't expect.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I applaud that because if it's doable, if it's convenient, if you can get there, you know, you can do it in places you wouldn't expect to do it.
8:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I've interviewed a lot of rock climbers that rock climb in places that you didn't even know there would be a rock wall.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But they've explored the area and found places and they're having amazing rock climbing experiences
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[SPEAKER_01]: but why not, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can hike anywhere, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can mountain bike anywhere.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There are places that we might call them, Mecca, you know, of whatever sport, for sure, but being able to do something a five minute walk from your house in the city that you thought you had to go to a wilderness for.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that's cool.
8:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very cool.
8:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Very cool.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That is very, very cool.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Let's rewind a little bit fly fishing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, let's not make any assumptions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're going to be people out there who are listening and we don't talk about fishing much on the Adventure Sports podcast.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it'll be fairly new, but they probably don't know the difference between fly fishing and in the other sort of fishing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So will you describe what fly fishing is for us?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, totally, and that's a great question.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So in fishing in general, there's several ways that you can go about catching a fish with a fishing rod.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You can, a lot of us, we might have grown up as kids, casting like a Snoopy rod, or like a Mickey Mouse rather than a little push button rods.
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[SPEAKER_02]: had a little bober in a hook and a worm on it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: That was a great introduction for many of us to get in a fishing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So that's kind of one example.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Another example of a fishing method is spin fishing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So you have
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[SPEAKER_02]: like a little spinner, it's like a little piece of metal, kind of has a treble hook, so like three hook points on it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You wind up with the fishing rod and you cast forward, and the fishing line comes off the spool, sending the lure out into the water.
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[SPEAKER_02]: All of these methods are pretty new, relatively speaking, like post-World War II, they kind of came into their own,
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[SPEAKER_02]: Fly fishing is a little bit different.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Fly fishing in one form or another has been around for hundreds of years.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Some historians of fly fishing will even trace it back to like accounts of Roman times.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, Romans were talking about essentially what we would
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[SPEAKER_02]: categorize as flyfishing today.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Even in hundreds of years ago in Japan they had a style of flyfishing called Tincara flyfishing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Tincara is also very much a part of it today as well.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The main difference with flyfishing and what I'll kind of call conventional fishing,
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[SPEAKER_02]: with flyfishing, we're using the weight of the flyline itself.
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[SPEAKER_02]: to send our hook out into the water.
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[SPEAKER_02]: All the other forms of fishing, they rely on the weight that we add to the hook, whether it's pieces of metal, split shot or bait.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And you have to rely on that weight in order to wind the rod up, like kind of tuck it over your shoulder and then cast forward.
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[SPEAKER_02]: With the fly line, there's actually weight built into the line and so as you cast the rod and as it bends back, it loads it with energy and then as you cast forward, the rod releases and then sends the line out there.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So the huge advantage with that is with flyfishing, we can cast out a hook that has essentially no weight to it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It could be, you know, literally the weight of
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[SPEAKER_02]: With conventional fishing, you have to have enough weight on there to actually cast it out into the water.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The only problem is that once it hits the water, it's going to start sinking and it's going to start sinking fast.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so you have to immediately start retrieving, reeling that line in, back towards you.
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[SPEAKER_02]: With fly fishing, I can make a cast that fly that hook and then land on the water.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And it can sit on top of the water and I don't have to move anything.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I can just sit there and wait.
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[SPEAKER_02]: with fly fishing as well.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I can also use fly patterns like hooks that have different materials tied onto them that have different weights as well.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so if I see a fish in the water that's chasing other smaller fish, well that's telling me I need to use a fly that kind of mimics what I'm seeing and cast out a fly that has weight to it that might look like a small fish and then that
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[SPEAKER_02]: pulled under the water and then I can again retrieve that through the water so the big advantage with fly fishing kind of to round this all out is that it is an incredibly versatile adaptable weight of fish.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I can see something that the fish are feeding on in the water and chances are really good that with the fly rod I can mimic or imitate what those fish are feeding on.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Whether it's a small little bug floating on top of the water or maybe it's a crayfish that's being chased by fish I can imitate all those things and everything in between and in urban areas fish feed on all sorts of wacky things so having a fly rod that that I can adapt to the situation is a huge advantage over conventional fishing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: that's fun.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think that most of us, you set it yourself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You've got the Mickey Mouse ride and you have a bobber and you have some bait and you're sitting on the, you know, on the bank and you're trying to watch the bobber.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Going cross-eyed, trying to watch the bobber.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Falling in my case, falling asleep, trying to get in the water because I can't stand to be on the bank and the heat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Why am I not swimming instead of watching the bobber?
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[SPEAKER_01]: as a kid that was fishing and I did have fun because I was with my grandparents a lot doing that, but the first time I got a fly rod in my hand and the line casting that you described take so much skill, so much practice and it's it's very active.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't watching a bobber anymore.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was doing something and I was doing something challenging and the end result is a better presentation to the fish and so I fell in love with it I thought that this is fishing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is something I can really get into and I've talked to or heard from like bass fishermen Fisher women
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[SPEAKER_01]: who try a fly rod for the first time, even fishing for bass, and they're blown away.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They're like, this is so fun!
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it really is.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's so elegant.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's an element, well, there are a lot of things out there in the Adventure Sports world that if you try to wrestle it by the horns, you're gonna lose.
15:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and fly fishing is kind of one of those.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You can't fight the rod.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You have to find the meter, the rhythm, the action, and flow with it, and that takes you somewhere different.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I really like that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You have to work with nature instead of trying to beat nature to death, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating, but maybe not.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe not.
15:46
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no, and talking about, yeah, casting and kind of that flow state, that meditative state, that really puts you in the moment, a hundred percent.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's really tough to be yeah, being able to stand in a river or stand in the ocean was like the waves kind of going past your legs and you're casting a fly rod almost like rhythmically.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it really kind of, that alone just kind of puts you, it connects you more with the place that you're you're standing in that you're that you're a part of and in a very kind of meditative mindfulness way and there's there's actually a lot of groups that kind of do like mental therapy and things like that or like a rehab with with just casting because it is it is that therapeutic side of fly fishing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I do want listeners to also realize that with flyfishing in general, but especially with urban flyfishing, you don't need any casting skills to start.
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[SPEAKER_02]: What's crazy is there's plenty of time, so I flyfished in a lot of different cities, big cities like New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Denver, and it was what's astounding is the number of times that
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[SPEAKER_02]: and we're walking around like we're not in boats like I mean I'm wearing sneakers half the time or flip flops and we're walking around in a downtown area and a lot of times there's like you know a concrete walkway or a pathway that's right up against the water and you're walking around
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[SPEAKER_02]: and all of a sudden you look down and there's a fish like maybe a few feet away from you.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You don't need, you don't need a cast at all.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You can essentially use the fly rod like a
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[SPEAKER_02]: Hold your arm out, dunk the flying to the water, just put it right in front of that fish, and often the fish will eat the fly, and that's all it takes.
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[SPEAKER_02]: What another funny story is to my wife, and every now and then we'll go down to downtown Spokane, we'll go have dinner in the summer, and then afterwards we'll walk over to the park, that's the river cuts right through the park and downtown, and we'll have a,
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[SPEAKER_02]: a fly rod with a certain car rod just kind of packed away and we'll walk over to the park and one of the evenings, she was standing on one of the foot bridges, just dunked her fly right into the water, at her feet, 19-inch trap took it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: No way.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It was like, I keep that just doesn't happen like, but it was, it was so cool.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I don't want people to feel like intimidated to get into
18:29
[SPEAKER_02]: this cast that you'll see like when you pull up a video and there's someone casting in that line is going overhead and back and forth you don't have to master that right away just to get into fly fishing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So don't let perfectionism hold you back from wanting to to explore
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[SPEAKER_02]: what flyfishing is.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Eventually, yeah, you'll want to figure out how to cast and things like that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a ton of amazing tutorials online about how to do that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But the other surprising thing is, like I mentioned, back at the beginning of the episode is,
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, if Romans and people hundreds of years ago were able to figure out how to cast, like essentially what is a flyrod without YouTube, I think in the 21st century, we can also instinctively pick these skills up as well.
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[SPEAKER_02]: We try to make it way more complicated than it needs to be and sometimes all it takes is walking down to a park like a grass lawn or something.
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[SPEAKER_02]: and just waving the rod around.
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[SPEAKER_02]: That's all I did when I first figured it out.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I just like, I don't know what I'm doing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going to go away this thing around and figure out how to straighten the line out in front of me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Mark, that so many things come to mind there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One is there are a lot of different fishing styles with a fly rod and maybe we should briefly list those.
19:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But another in my mind is, you know, fishing with the bobber sitting on the bank.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I already said that I got bored with that.
19:59
[SPEAKER_01]: But one thing I used to do is I would take a just a wound up wad of fishing line in a hook and I would hike into the wilderness where I could find a stick and I could dig up some grubs or worms and I would just fish the little streams and I would catch fish build a small little fire on the bank and roast the fish and
20:22
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and I thought, this is like the funnest thing ever.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't even have a fishing pole, you know, but you can do it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And people have been doing that forever.
20:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So like you said, the big fancy beautiful dry fly cast is maybe a way to think about it.
20:38
[SPEAKER_01]: It's fun to develop.
20:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a really fun skill to have.
20:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not great at it, but it's a lot of fun.
20:45
[SPEAKER_01]: But you don't have to be able to do that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My family helped with the world youth, flyfishing tournaments that came through Colorado several years back and almost all of the competitors were doing neuro-nimthing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's not the big cast.
21:02
[SPEAKER_01]: But it seems to be the way to catch the most fish in a hurry unless the fish are all rising after something that you can mimic really easily, I guess.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But neuro-nimthing described that to us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How is that different?
21:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so now we kind of get, so with within flyfishing, there's a bunch of other subsets of methods of how to flyfish.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And Euro Nymphing also known as tightline Nymphing, check Nymphing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It comes from Europe and was kind of born in the competitive era of flyfishing and it is mainly developed for trying to catch trout but it is also a really effective technique to catch bass, small mouth bass, large mouth bass, common carp, even bluegill and things like that.
21:50
[SPEAKER_02]: What you're essentially doing with that style of flyfishing is that you have an even longer
21:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're making shorter cast and what you're trying to do is you're trying to keep your fly.
22:06
[SPEAKER_02]: as close to you as you can with keeping the line off the water.
22:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's essentially just the fly that's in the water or on top of the water and there's very minimal like fishing line.
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[SPEAKER_02]: That's even touching the water.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so you get the, when you're in a river or a stream, you get these amazing drifts where the fly is just moving at the same speed of the water.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And that's mimicking a lot of the insects that are drifting through rivers
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so you're essentially, you're really, you're, you're mimicking those insects and that is what can then fool the fish into thinking, oh, you know, that's a piece of food.
22:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me, let me bite down on it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And, and let me, yeah, with, with fly fishing as well, you know,
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[SPEAKER_02]: I've already mentioned like a couple different species, you know, there's trout, bass, carp, there's an entire, you know, world of salt water, fly fishing.
23:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, people might think, oh, if I get into fly fishing, it can only be for trout.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Again, not true at all.
23:08
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're walking along, if you're in your city or your neighborhood and you're walking along and there's a
23:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Chances are really good that you could catch that with the fly rod.
23:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Some fish are easier than others to catch with the fly pattern because again we're not using bait.
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[SPEAKER_02]: We're just using material that's tied onto a hook and so it takes a little bit more of trying to convince that fish to bite but I have caught all sorts of species of fish.
23:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything
23:43
[SPEAKER_02]: to like I said common carp catfish of cotton and a flyer out I've even caught goldfish and Sometimes like other weird aquarium pets that people release into ponds and urban areas and You know, you're you're reeling in the line and you're like man I have no idea what's on the end of this line and then you know It encourages out of the water and into your net and it's just like I
24:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, let me take a photo of that and then figure out what that fish is.
24:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So, fly fishing, yeah, you're catching all sorts of crazy things.
24:13
[SPEAKER_02]: When I was a kid, I grew up with Pokemon, where you kind of have that Pokeball and you're catching all these different Pokemon with a fly rod.
24:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I kind of think about it the same way.
24:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, the fly rod is like my Pokeball and you can just catch all these crazy species because it gives you that ability to adapt.
24:30
[SPEAKER_02]: to where to to the conditions in the situation that's in front of you, you open up your your your flybox and you can change out your fly and then really convince that fish to to bite down.
24:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a story that is really funny to me because I was there.
24:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll try to explain it in a way that people will get.
24:51
[SPEAKER_01]: But my son who became V-fly fisherman, he just absolutely loves it.
24:57
[SPEAKER_01]: We took him out when he was five, maybe.
25:00
[SPEAKER_01]: and we were in a mountain lake but not super high elevation and he was trying to fly fish but he hooks something and gets super excited you know because it's his first time to ever catch anything you know he's he's bringing it in he's bringing it in he lifts it out of the water and his eyes get his biggest saucers because what he got was the biggest crayfish
25:24
[SPEAKER_01]: that I have ever seen in my life.
25:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It will, and I'm not exaggerating, it was the size of a small lobster.
25:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It was definitely edible size.
25:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this thing was huge.
25:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It was probably over six inches long, maybe seven inches long, and it had mass to it.
25:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It probably weighed a half pound.
25:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, he lifts it out and he just screams, I don't know what it is, but it's got pinchers.
25:52
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's a little kid.
25:53
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just a classic moment, but it was such a surprise for him.
25:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's what hooked him on fishing for life because you pull something out.
26:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it is a complete surprise.
26:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
26:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
26:07
[SPEAKER_01]: But I could see how fishing in
26:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
26:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, when you're on a trout stream, you expect to get a trout.
26:17
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you're fishing in an urban environment, everything's in there, or things are in there that you may not expect.
26:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
26:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Cool.
26:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, to kind of, to kind of provide an example of, yeah, what you can, the adventures that you could have in an urban area and the things you can come across, there are, there are anglers that I spent time with in Los Angeles, and really, you know, they, they have a ton of fun fishing in their city, and what they'll do sometimes is that they'll go down to Santa Monica Beach,
26:44
[SPEAKER_02]: right there next to that pier with like the ferris wheel and everything like it's it's a popular area but they'll they'll they'll get down there first thing in the morning before anybody else is down there walk up and down the beach and they'll they'll cast their flyrods and they can catch you know different species of fish this might not ring a bell for for look for listeners but there's like Corbina
27:04
[SPEAKER_02]: surf perch, there's even a species called leopard sharks, and they can be like five, six feet long, and they'll be catching leopard sharks from the beach with the flyrod, and then they'll hop in their, like once, you know, other beach goers are out there by by mid morning, then the English will hop in their car, and
27:25
[SPEAKER_02]: drive over either to MacArthur Park or the LA River, and then try to catch a common carp or a large mouth bass or a green sunfish or a channel catfish, anything in fresh water.
27:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's a fun little challenge that they call the surf and turf challenge.
27:43
[SPEAKER_02]: and they try to complete it all in the same day, like right there in the city and you know kind of came across the same thing with like other anglers and different cities just exploring like urban, their urban waterscape and again like wherever they saw water they had to cast in there and they had to see okay is there actually fish down there and if there is like what kind of fish is it?
28:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's fun.
28:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So you got into your urban fly fishing kind of at a necessity.
28:15
[SPEAKER_01]: But now you guide it.
28:16
[SPEAKER_01]: You teach people how to do urban fly fishing.
28:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's really become a part of your life.
28:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, it was really kind of out of necessity with that trip that I took to LA, like years ago.
28:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And then it became a passion, like a really fun passion where in Columbus, Ohio, I was Columbus is a great city
28:37
[SPEAKER_02]: a ton of different ponds, reservoirs, and several rivers that run through the heart of it, and being able to walk down to the river, like hop off the walking path.
28:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I was first getting into urban, fly fishing, like there would be other people on bicycles or scooters or walking by, and I'd have a fly rod and I'm getting these sideways stairs.
29:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think you're in the wrong, and some people will even, would even say to me, hey, you're in the wrong place, like people don't fish here, you know, there's no fish down there, and but little did, did they know that like, just yesterday I caught like a fish that I needed both by hands to hold up.
29:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I was a little like self-conscious.
29:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, and I would like wait until nobody was looking and I would sneak through the bushes.
29:24
[SPEAKER_02]: and get into the river and then once it and it was like crossing this threshold to a moment ago a moment ago I was in the heart of Columbus Ohio bustling city
29:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I kind of squeak through this little gap and now I'm in this river and I'm feeling the water against my legs.
29:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm watching for signs of fish.
29:48
[SPEAKER_02]: I've instantly been transported into a different world.
29:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And nowadays, a lot of people will kind of even get upset like if they get into fly fishing and they spend all the time
30:01
[SPEAKER_02]: money to get to a place where they where they can fly fish for trout and they get there and it's crowded And they get upset because they think that oh, I should be alone and doing this by myself and and look I just travel the hours outside the city and now I'm surrounded by all these people and then here I am in the middle of Columbus, Ohio of city of two million people I'm the only one there and I'm fish that we're right 24 30 inches long
30:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
30:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And the fun the the funnest part was being able to explore my city through different lens and had these unique adventures where I would look down the river.
30:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And if there was a little bend in the river or kind of disappeared under a tunnel or a bridge, like, where does it go?
30:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, let me go, let me go explore.
30:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, what am I going to come across?
30:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And and such unique adventures.
30:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And every time, you know, I would step into the river or go to like a neighborhood pond or or the reservoir or anything like that.
31:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, it's always changing.
31:02
[SPEAKER_02]: There's always something different going on.
31:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was a shock to me as well, because we kind of
31:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there's really not a lot to them, but with a fly rod in hand, you're put in a different kind of mental landscape and these places just open up in a totally new world for you.
31:21
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so cool.
31:22
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's kind of parallel to deciding what to cast.
31:26
[SPEAKER_01]: You already mentioned it, but fish aren't super smart, but they kind of get fixated on eating what they're eating that day.
31:34
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's some sort of an insect hatch and aquatic insect hatch or something like that, and so they're eating that thing.
31:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's all they see.
31:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything else is something else, because that's what they're focused on that day.
31:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what you were just talking about is viewing the world through a different lens.
31:53
[SPEAKER_01]: right, and how fly fishing can do that for you.
31:57
[SPEAKER_01]: But even just trying to sort out what the fish are interested in that day causes you to view the world in a different lens.
32:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, what is nature doing right now?
32:07
[SPEAKER_01]: What's active?
32:08
[SPEAKER_01]: What's going on?
32:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not even noticed.
32:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And then something lands on your collar and you look down and you say, oh, look at that.
32:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to throw that pattern, right?
32:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Describe that kind of an experience, my
32:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I can make it even a little bit more relatable to pretty much anybody that's listening.
32:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So we, all of us have probably walked around a body of water at one point in time in an urban area or suburban area fed the ducks or the geese with with bread.
32:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And when you're kind of throwing out the bread or things like that or watch somebody else do that,
32:46
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll notice that fish also come up and start chewing on the bread.
32:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And so with fly fishing, there are some fishing regulations in urban areas that prohibit using any sort of bait.
33:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can't put, so what these regulations are telling you is that you're not allowed to put those pieces of bread onto a hook to try to catch that fish.
33:12
[SPEAKER_02]: FlyFishers, like urban flyFishers, they're pretty creative, they use their curiosity and their intuitions and their inventiveness to make their own fly patterns and they'll sit down at a table with their vice and they'll put the hook in the vice and they'll tie a pattern, a fly pattern that looks like a piece of bread.
33:37
[SPEAKER_02]: and so they're not using bread, they're not using bait, but it irritates that quote-unquote that hatch, that bread hatch that's going on.
33:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, we'll walk around a park, a city park, and you know, maybe the fishing is really slow, maybe there's nothing going on.
33:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And then all of a sudden, somebody comes walking down to the park with like a loaf of wonder bread,
33:59
[SPEAKER_02]: and they start throwing out pieces of wonder bread and you just get all these fish that are kind of going bananas and then there's your moment, there's your bread hatch.
34:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And you get to cast that, and you get to cast that and catch that fish.
34:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And now I've even seen some crazy examples of there was one, there was one pond that Angler took me to and he was like, yeah, almost every day, every day during the week and this this family will come down to the pond and we'll kind of walk around and the kid, one of the kids has a bag of Dorito chips.
34:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And he throws the reedochips out there and sure enough, you know, the family came out, you know, kid was throwing Dorito chips into the water like the little orange triangle pieces and the angular that I was standing there with he opened up his flybox and he had patterns that were tiny little orange triangles of foam tied onto a hook.
34:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And he was like, yeah, that's my Dorito fly.
35:00
[SPEAKER_01]: that's hilarious.
35:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's like you get to what's really cool about flyfishing is again just it being like a little neighborhood pond you can see things like that like like you can observe things like that occurring right in front of you and be able to to watch that observe it and then
35:21
[SPEAKER_02]: start solving the puzzle piece by piece by piece and it's really fun because then like like I said like you can you can if you get into fly tying or things like that you can then start to tie up these patterns that imitate whatever it is that you think the fish might be feeding on and it's just you know you're if you're
35:41
[SPEAKER_02]: If you have any ounce of creativity in you, like, and we all do as humans, like, man, you'll just keep following these puzzles as they're, they're unveiled to you on the water.
35:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a fun story that kind of parallels that we were actually in Rocky Mountain National Park on a stream.
36:00
[SPEAKER_01]: and i saw a small trout that was at a little pool and so i cast to it of course and it it ignored me and i thought huh so i cast again and again and again and again nothing and i thought okay we'll let me try a different pattern so
36:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I tied a different fly on.
36:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know what I was doing, right?
36:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I cast it, it ignored me.
36:17
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, just this went on for probably close to an hour and I finally found a pattern that was similar to what it was interested in that day, right?
36:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I cast, I cast it this thing dozens of times, but when I cast it immediately hit it.
36:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
36:34
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it was like, whoa, it was a mystery.
36:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I figured it out.
36:38
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't that the fish didn't want it to take something.
36:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I just had to find the thing that wanted to take.
36:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And for me, that's hard.
36:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll confess, this is the part of fly fishing that I find frustrating.
36:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a hard time seeing the monofilament and trying to get it tied onto the hook and it takes time.
36:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like I'm not fishing when I'm doing that because there's no line in the water.
36:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have to learn patience, Mark.
37:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, go ahead and take the time to work with that little beady tip it and try different things and that's actually part of the fun.
37:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and that patience with it.
37:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, to be sure, like, I've guiding here in the city.
37:17
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a pond that I'll take people to and I've taught, you know, especially with kids.
37:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Small, like you said, yeah, your son was about five years old.
37:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I've taken families with their, with their son or their daughter.
37:30
[SPEAKER_02]: to this pond, and there are five, six, seven years old, and especially with kids and some adults.
37:38
[SPEAKER_02]: You really want to help them to get a fish onto the line quickly, because then they'll kind of lose interest or things like that.
37:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So going to the pond and catching blue gill or green sunfish is an easy way to do that.
37:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, that patients will eventually have to be learned and accepted as well, that things won't come to you, just because you're casting a hook out into the water, like fish might not be there that day or they might not be feeding.
38:09
[SPEAKER_02]: and sometimes it takes repeated trips to the water in order to finally catch something.
38:15
[SPEAKER_02]: When I traveled city to city, fly fishing with other anglers, talented, talented anglers, there were some days that they and I, we struggled to catch anything.
38:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Like whether it's a fish or a wet sock floating through the urban river.
38:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And but we, but what was really fun about that adventure even even in those moments where it was like our patients was being tested was as a group, you know, there'd be like two, two, three, four, five of us kind of exploring urban waters together and the moment that somebody at least got a fish on to the line.
38:54
[SPEAKER_02]: was just a massive celebration for all of us.
38:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And we were all there, we were all just kind of helping to do what we could to help them land the fish.
39:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And then if that fish slid into the net, I mean, it was a party for everybody.
39:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was success for everybody there that day.
39:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you're not alone in those moments, which is nice.
39:12
[SPEAKER_02]: I do enjoy fly fishing by myself and having those moments to just
39:17
[SPEAKER_02]: decompress, cast, forget about the immediate world all around me and just focus on what is right in front of me.
39:25
[SPEAKER_02]: But with urban fishing, there are those wonderful experiences that you can have with family members, with friends, heck with complete strangers.
39:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I've hooked into fish and I'm trying to net it and then the fish swims under a bridge or through a culvert or something
39:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And a stranger, a complete stranger is walking by or writing their bike and they're like, hey, do you need help?
39:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm like, well, yes, yes, I do.
39:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll either hand them the net or I'll hand them the fly rod and be like, ah, yeah, just just keep the fish on the line and
40:02
[SPEAKER_02]: and all that the fish, and then there it's like this cooperative moment.
40:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Talking about, yeah, another thing with patience, there's a notoriously difficult fish here in Spokane that I am still, I mean, it is an enigma.
40:18
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a puzzle of a puzzle to try to figure out what fly this fish wants.
40:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's a fish called, it's a weird name, but it's called a large
40:31
[SPEAKER_02]: and it's a fish that that lives in our urban river here in Spokane and there's a spot in downtown where it's a bunch of concrete steps that that go into the river and so all walk down to the bottom to the bottom step and these fish are maybe six feet away from me and they're feeding on the bottom of the river they're maybe like
40:53
[SPEAKER_02]: to feet under the surface of the water and they're feeding along the rocks on the bottom of the river.
40:59
[SPEAKER_02]: They're eating algae and kind of decaying organic material like on the bottom and it's really, you know, as flyfishers, we don't think, oh, that things ever going to take a fly.
41:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And there was one day I thought that I had picked like the right fly pattern and I you know I didn't even cast I kind of held by the the rod out and I dumped the fly into the water and it and it sunk down to the bottom and that fish was just kind of acting like a vacuum cleaner along the bottom of the river and it eventually got towards my fly and was maybe an inch from it kind of looked at it and paused.
41:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And then it finally took the flight with its mouth and I was like, oh my god, after like maybe you know like a good like six, seven months of trying to figure this fish out, it finally bit the fly.
41:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And then ironically enough, after I released that fish into the river, I hear this voice behind me and he's like, hey, and I turn around and it's a security guard.
42:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's a public area, I'm a lab to fish there.
42:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's like, hey, I've noticed that you've been trying to catch these fish.
42:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm like, yeah, yeah, and he goes, you should try coming like an hour earlier in the morning.
42:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, well,
42:15
[SPEAKER_02]: What?
42:16
[SPEAKER_02]: He's like, yeah, so he has the security cameras and he's watching the fish on his little television screen like in the building that he's a security guard for and he's like, yeah, I noticed that they kind of act differently earlier in the morning and they're swimming around a little bit more and he was like, I think that they're feeding more and so you should probably come like an hour earlier and I was like, okay, one, thank you.
42:41
[SPEAKER_02]: and two like okay like let me let me come back the next morning and sure enough like the fish they just looked way more active and they looked like they were feeding you know more readily than when I had been coming up you know going down to the river and and then that that day yep caught another one because it took that fly pattern with more readily than the previous day and I kind of
43:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Short-circuited the patience a little bit because that security guard kind of, you know Some tips as well, but, but that's also like fishing in urban areas.
43:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you take what you can get because sometimes the the deck of cards is stacked against us and you Yeah, you'll you'll take any sort of tips that that are kind of thrown your way
43:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Mark think about this for a minute.
43:26
[SPEAKER_01]: You've written for fishing magazines and things like that.
43:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is a, but you can look at these articles, blogs, what you have a blog to, and they'll tell you, you know, a hundred different ways to catch this species of fish in this location.
43:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is what works.
43:42
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you don't get a lot of that probably for urban fishing.
43:45
[SPEAKER_01]: No one's out there saying,
43:47
[SPEAKER_01]: This is how you're going to catch the sucker fish on the bottom of the steps.
43:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
43:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
43:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And so that's so when I wrote my book, I realized that as well.
43:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's so many different species of fish and trying to give readers like specific fly patterns and specific conditions to look for.
44:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it would be like an encyclopedia of for all these different fish.
44:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Rather than then relying on that, a lot of fly fissures, they rely on other skill sets in order to catch fish.
44:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And so these different skill sets are called, one of them is called reading the water.
44:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So reading the water is, you look out onto a body of water.
44:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, whether it's a neighborhood pond, a creek flowing through your neighborhood,
44:38
[SPEAKER_02]: a beach, maybe you're on a boardwalk going around like, you know, the Boston Harbor or something and you look down into the water and you just watch it and you can pick up on these patterns, you know, these things that the way the water is moving or not moving and you start to interpret, okay, what might be going on under the surface of the water?
45:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you start picking up on other visual cues as well, like maybe maybe there are bugs that are flying around and landing on the water, maybe you do see a crayfish that's kind of crawling around the rocks, or maybe you look down in that boardwalk that you're standing on maybe has bridge pylons, and then down near the base of the pylon, you see schools of a small fish that are kind of curled together.
45:27
[SPEAKER_02]: So those are all kind of like leading you in the right direction of like, okay, those are lower down on the food chain.
45:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So maybe the fish that I'm trying to catch might be eating some of those things.
45:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe you look out and there's birds that are diving into the water.
45:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, they're probably feeding on something.
45:44
[SPEAKER_02]: You're reading the water, you're interpreting all of those visual clues in order
45:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, if you're lucky enough to be in a spot where you can see the fish, well, then there's another skill set that we all have instinctively.
46:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's just watching the fish's behavior.
46:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Watching what is it doing or what is it not doing?
46:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it stationary?
46:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it moving?
46:14
[SPEAKER_02]: How fast is it moving?
46:15
[SPEAKER_02]: is it chasing other fish?
46:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it coming up to the surface to feed on something?
46:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Or like that large scale sucker?
46:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it acting like a vacuum cleaner on the bottom of the water?
46:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And so again that's telling you okay the behavior of the fish is going to give you ideas onto like where you should cast and then what fly you might want to try and then once you cast your flying to the water
46:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, then you watch how that fish is behavior changes in the moment.
46:48
[SPEAKER_02]: You're now interacting with that fish.
46:50
[SPEAKER_02]: You and the fish are kind of having like this negotiation in real time.
46:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And that fish is going to respond to your fly in so many different ways.
47:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe it gets scared and it flees.
47:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe you cast it right on top of that fish and it just got spooked and it swam away.
47:08
[SPEAKER_02]: or maybe you casted away from the fish and you pulled that fly closer to the fish and once that fly pattern got within, you know, once that fish was actually able to see it, well then that fish stops and then it turns towards your fly.
47:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And then it starts swimming a little slowly towards your fly.
47:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's when your heart rate starts going up.
47:29
[SPEAKER_02]: So you're like, oh my gosh, I think it's finally going to take the fly.
47:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And you have to, you know, you have to kind of stay as calm as you can.
47:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Like don't let your nerves get the best of you.
47:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And then that fish can swim close to it and then grab the fly and you set the hook.
47:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, you did everything right in that moment.
47:45
[SPEAKER_02]: What I guess what I'm trying to let listeners know is there's a ton of fantastic books out there There's a ton of fantastic videos blog articles.
47:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I've written plenty of articles for different magazines and blogs Getting into the very nitty gritty details of how to catch specific fish in specific ways, but you really don't
48:05
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't need all that stuff just to get into flyfishing.
48:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I said, like a lot of these skills are intuitive to us as human beings.
48:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Even though that many of us have been living in urban areas, maybe for the past, especially as urban areas, like really kind of grew and expanded over the last 150, 200 years, it's not like human beings,
48:27
[SPEAKER_02]: for how to go fishing in that time span.
48:30
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just a little push to the side.
48:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's crazy being able to grab a fly rod, go down the water, and then these instincts just awake inside of you in these moments.
48:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's like, well, where did that come from?
48:44
[SPEAKER_02]: That's cool.
48:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you just described as connecting with nature.
48:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, there's so many ways you can do it.
48:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And it doesn't have to be fishing.
48:56
[SPEAKER_01]: But when people go on a hike and in an urban area is around the front range of Colorado, people like to go to the foothills and go on a hike.
49:03
[SPEAKER_01]: They hike up, they hike down the getting the car, they go home.
49:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I walked somewhere in the woods.
49:07
[SPEAKER_01]: The reason I bring this up is if they took a moment to look at a tree,
49:12
[SPEAKER_01]: and say what kind of tree is that and what is it trying to tell me or what can I learn from it or you know you might find all that tree was struck by lightning a deer was not you know dragon the fell off of its antlers right there um this tree had a virus and it grew in a funny way or you know there are all these sorts of trees have maybe a hundred years of of history yeah
49:36
[SPEAKER_01]: that is evident.
49:37
[SPEAKER_01]: If you look at the tree, they tell a story, suddenly you've connected in a different way.
49:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just a tree anymore, right?
49:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what you're doing with urban fishing.
49:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's beautiful because any time that people can connect with nature, I think we're connecting with something more primal, more ancient, that is a part of our epigenetics.
49:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It's part of who we are, and it's really good for us.
50:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Mark, it's really good for us.
50:03
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so good, and yeah, it's that sense of, well, especially with fishing, where it's, I mean, it's a literal connection with these fish.
50:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you are tethered by a very thin fishing line.
50:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's so striking when you are in a very urban area, like I, I fly fished with with the guy in New York City in Manhattan in Central Park.
50:30
[SPEAKER_02]: and talk about dense urban areas and to be in that area, to be in such a dense city and the moment you cast that fly out and something hits the fly and you feel that that that line start to shake and strum like a guitar string and
50:50
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean it just gets your heart going because there's life down there and it's calling out to you and it is just It's like a wonderful sensation and then all of a sudden you look around and and there's all these massive skyscrapers and yet You're having this this incredible beautiful moment where you are kind of forming this like new Like relationship with this aquatic world that's right there in front of you
51:17
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of the anglers that I spent time with, they're incredibly dedicated urban anglers, and they do it for a variety of reasons.
51:25
[SPEAKER_02]: We all can have our own personal reasons of why we go fishing in our cities.
51:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Whether that's spending time with our family, maybe we want to go fishing more, but it's tough because we have our kids that are young, and so we can't take them, we can't always go out into the mountains or something like that.
51:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And so being able to spend time
51:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Fishing together, building these memories is a great way to, yeah, to experience like this adventure together.
51:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Other anglers, yeah, they love fishing so much that just keeping it as a weakened activity isn't enough for them, like they wanted, they wanna do it before work or during their lunch break or after a, on their commute home, they pass by a body of water and they're gonna pull over,
52:15
[SPEAKER_02]: in two pieces in the trunk of their car, they're going to pull it out, cast the line for 15 minutes and see what they can get.
52:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Other anglers, even in today's era, a lot of us also want to do what we can for these habitats, these ecosystems.
52:32
[SPEAKER_02]: We want to have a better way of relating to nature and to do what we can to kind of bring about a healthier environment and things like that.
52:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And urban, urban fishing is a gateway into that realm as well, and it provides an avenue for
52:51
[SPEAKER_02]: for people who didn't know that that they could be advocates in stewards of these rivers, of these coastlines.
53:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And they can do that where they live.
53:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Since getting into urban fishing, I now dedicate a lot of my time to essentially doing like quote unquote conservation right here in my own city.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Like 15 minutes from my house, 10 minutes from my house.
53:15
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm down there.
53:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm doing, you know, helping out with different organizations.
53:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm doing trash cleanups.
53:21
[SPEAKER_02]: water monitoring, like taking samples of water, I'm looking at different bug life, different things in the water and trying to interpret like what those are telling us.
53:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm speaking at different meetings in town and kind of letting people know like, hey, yeah, like there's all this other stuff going on in the river and kind of bringing that to people's attention as well.
53:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I, yeah, in many ways myself and so many other anglers in various cities like
53:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we're we're we not only love catching these fish, but we also love being a voice for these habitats and for the fish and and for all the communities also, you know, that rely on these places.
54:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Mark, I love it.
54:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It's beautiful.
54:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So the name of your book is the guide to urban fly fishing and where can they get that.
54:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can buy it.
54:14
[SPEAKER_02]: So one night, I encourage listeners.
54:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, by go down to your local bookstore, they should be able to order it.
54:21
[SPEAKER_02]: You can also buy it at bookshop.org.
54:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And then it's on Barnes and Noble Amazon and any other place that that you can, yeah, purchase online.
54:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So find it at your local shop first, is that what you said?
54:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
54:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Support your local shops.
54:37
[SPEAKER_01]: We need that.
54:38
[SPEAKER_01]: That's always great.
54:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and currently you might if I just touch on one last thing about five-fishing real quick to to rapidly go for it.
54:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of listeners, they right now, they might have gotten motivated to get into this.
54:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And the last kind of like barrier that I'd like to dispel is, five-fishing does not have to be expensive.
54:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I just mentioned that a lot of times when I'm fishing, you know, myself and other anglers, when we're fishing in urban areas, we're wearing sneakers and flipflops, so we don't have to have waiters necessarily.
55:08
[SPEAKER_02]: There's times we're all even go waiting through water when it's warm enough with that without waiters.
55:13
[SPEAKER_02]: A fly rod, there's a lot of great companies out there nowadays that
55:18
[SPEAKER_02]: they'll sell an entire setup so it comes with the rod, the line, and the reel for around $100.
55:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And it gets delivered to your house and it's ready to go.
55:30
[SPEAKER_02]: All you have to do is tie a fly on and you're into fishing.
55:33
[SPEAKER_02]: So there are those companies out there.
55:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't feel like you have to buy that $800 fly rod.
55:39
[SPEAKER_02]: No, you can get into fly fishing for around $100.
55:44
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was in a fly shop and a sales rep was showing us all the the latest fly rods and I mean they're beautiful, you know, you can really get into it $800, $900, I mean it's just I was like, holy cow and he goes, you know what the difference is between this $900 rod and that $100 rod right there, I'm like what he goes, five feet.
56:04
[SPEAKER_01]: you can cast five more feet with this nine hundred dollar rod.
56:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So get the cheap rod and have a great time.
56:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
56:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
56:11
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no reason.
56:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you can get into this sort of thing as deeply as you want to, but you can have just as much fun without doing that, too.
56:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's great.
56:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can, if you save the money and you just kind of work on your own skill, you're, you practice casting and it's easy, you know, like I said, you go down to like a city park and you find an open space on the grass and just cast and have fun figure out what works and what doesn't work and you're going to save yourself hundreds of dollars that way.
56:43
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a lot of fun you also have a blog the triple haul and I was laughing because I thought I know what a double haul is, but I don't know what a triple haul is.
56:52
[SPEAKER_01]: What's that about?
56:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so yeah, this is more and more nuanced and fly-fishing.
56:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So for listeners, there is a specific cast called the single hull.
57:02
[SPEAKER_02]: There's another cast called the double hull.
57:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And the double hull is especially kind of a tough cast to learn.
57:09
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like padding your head while rubbing your stomach.
57:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's not easy, but it's a really fun cast to eventually develop, there's no such thing as the triple hall cast.
57:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I named my blog that just kind of as a tongue-in-cheek.
57:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's kind of like having fun with it.
57:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, on my blog I have a lot of instructional articles on kind of how to get into fly fish, how to get into like urban fly fishing and things like that.
57:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, yeah, listeners are interested.
57:40
[SPEAKER_02]: They can head over.
57:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the triple TRIP LE Hall HAUL.com.
57:49
[SPEAKER_01]: The TripleHall.com mark.
57:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for your time today and for sharing with us something we can do on our own backyards even if we live in the city.
57:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
57:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I really appreciate your time.
58:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thank you so much, Kirk, for having me.
58:01
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been a blast.
58:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's been lots and lots of fun.
58:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So everyone, this is another way that very simply, inexpensively, you can get out there and connect with nature and have some fun.