Launching Current Flow State Fly Fishing

November 25, 2024 ☼ Community ☼ Published Elsewhere ☼ Fly Fishing

Greetings and salutations!

Here’s the bottom-line up front (BLUF): Since I last touched base, I’ve started building a fly-fishing instruction program at our local community college. To go with it, I’m publishing a weekly newsletter and series of instructional essays exploring the intersection of fly fishing and, well, everything else in the universe.

You should subscribe if you’re personally even remotely interested in:

learning about fly-fishing
hearing more from me in general
exploring the psycho-spiritual benefits of hobbies, community, the outdoors, and just general farting around

I would love to collaborate if you have so much as a soapbox for me to stand on:

on a mutually-interesting topic
in even a humble church basement
with the aim of sharing something cool and new with your audience

How it started

Portland Community College runs a robust Community Education program, and every quarter it sends tens of thousands of local residents a course catalog in the mail. You’ve probably got a similar sort of thing in your town.

Whenever the catalog drops through the slot, I fantasize about brushing up my conversational Portuguese, or charcoal sketching, or old-growth tree-climbing. In early 2023, I noticed a tiny ad: they were looking for sports instructors. Specifically, Zumba, pickleball, and fly-fishing. Well, amigo mio: I can do one of those things well enough to teach others. And it ain’t Zumba.

I packaged up my pitch to the administrators, told them aboutmy time as a volunteer instructor with Project Healing Waters, various other classroom experiences, and we were off to the races. I developed a three-session Intro to Fly Fishing course. The Intro to Fly Fishing course is designed to take participants from zero fly-fishing expertise to Zoom to the casting pond to catching their first fish in just a week. After that was successful for a season, we added an outing to the local mountain stream. Next year we might try to add a fly-tying course.

There are plenty of existing fly-fishing instruction programs, but they fall into two categories: 100% online, where you have to follow instruction without much feedback or back-and-forth, and through a local fly shop, where you have to know enough to get to the fly shop and get over the sport’s elitist / gatekeeping tendencies, and the shop’s desire to sell you stuff. There’s a lot of room for beginner questions about all the non-obvious, often arcane stuff that’s a barrier to the sport’s elegant simplicity.

My biggest goal for this, and what makes it different, has also made it a little challenging. I’m trying to coax people into the program who’ve maybe never even fished before.

Like the participant who grew up in Somalia on the Gulf of Aden but never had opportunity to fish, and now, with grown children, is exploring the hobby.

Younger people, who know the more time they spend outdoors the less anxious they feel, and are looking for a means to that end.

Folks whose partners fish, and want to be able to understand and be exposed to what makes them so obsessed.

Couples, who want to learn something new together.

The program is designed to meet these learners at the ground floor, to help them build confidence to venture out on their own, and use the sport to be more at home in the outdoors.

How it’s going

This is perhaps glossing over the fact that I find teaching these classes really rewarding. For much of my professional life I’ve had to be “on,” talking in front of groups of people, making stuff happen. I did a lot of presentations, workshops, etc. that required me to turn on that mode. Still do.

Maybe that’s how we know each other: Some sort of wave of shambolic charm and/or off-kilter humor hit ya when you least expected it and you signed up for this list in hopes of more of the same. I don’t know about you, but however fun those things may be, the bigger the stage, the longer I’d need to sit in silence in a dark room to recompose myself. Being on takes a lot out of you.

But this is different. I can talk about the nuances of this incredibly detailed sport for hours, and still have energy left. It’s the opposite of draining, it’s enervating. And, to successfully convey the stoke, to spread the spark of connection when participants put it all together and figure out how to load the fly rod in the casting portion, or catch their first fish, well, that’s the icing on the cake.

After ~100 or so students through the various courses in the first two years, I figured it was time to implement the next step of my diabolical plan, which is where we are today.

Out of a little bit of selfishness (I want to make it easier for me to just send resources to students who need more material) and a little bit of compulsion (how could I not package all this stuff up?) and a bit of professional curiosity (I should really keep my content-creation muscles from atrophying) I converted the half-ass fly fishing blog I’d been keeping at currentflowstate.com since 2010 into a Ghost-powered newsletter-cum-community, built around the alum network, but open to all interested parties.

What isn’t fly-fishing?

The core principle around this started with a thought experiment I first heard posed in high school, from a chemistry-obsessed Jesuit: “What in the world isn’t chemistry?”

Over the years, I came to realize that my best work has always involved subjects that interested me, or — even better — subjects about which I’ve become interested, and even passionate about, through the very process of doing design work. I believe I’m still passionate about graphic design. But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can’t get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you’re interested in, the better your work will be.”

Yet another concept I’m grateful to Noah for making a connection to. It’s one we’ve gnawed on more than once during the ride back from the take-out on the Bitterroot after a fishy day.

The vision

Every thing like this needs an agenda, a thesis, an organizing principle, to make it meaningful.

The point of the publication is simple: the more fly-fishing we fit into our lives, the fuller our lives become.

I’m exploring how devoting more space—mental and physical—to fly-fishing can improve our lives, by talking about what angling is in broader strokes, already touching themes like problem solving, identities, intensity levels, starting out, and community. The possibilities are endless (or so my weekly newsletter topic teaser list seems).

Most of us aren’t full-time anglers. We maybe only get a few shots at it every year. I’m a busy dad, and worker, and have to fight the forces of modern life to fish. We want to build the skills to make it worthwhile when we do, so maybe when we retire, or hit the lotto, we’ve got the goods. But we also want to explore the mental territories that’ll help relieve stress now, or let us put our mind to the elements of fly-fishing more often, and almost act as preparatory for those later times.

There’ll be technical stuff, too. Practical tools and knowledge. Eventually the entire Intro to Fly Fishing spiel will be online, in text, maybe with video, and maybe even some nice illustrations. Not so much as to be overwhelming, but to make it easy for a visitor from anywhere on earth to get the confidence to pick up a fly rod and start exploring their local waterways, and, more importantly, to start wondering and being curious and approaching new experiences like an angler.

Maybe we’ll do a podcast, or a series of conversations with other anglers about pivotal moments in their lives, or how they approach fly-fishing as a practice, as opposed to a past time. Maybe one day I’ll sit down with Kimmel.

And, most interestingly, we’re going to start having group get-togethers, outside the boundaries of a classroom session, where folks can show up, fish, hang out, and get to know each other better. Fishing buddies are hard to come by. Hell, unmediated human contact is hard to come by.

And, you know, maybe we bring in some other folks doing interesting things, to share? To be able to put out a beacon to all the fishy or fishy-curious people in my life, to gather in a beautiful place and ponder the meaning of life is what the professional managerial class calls a “stretch goal,” but a worthy one nonetheless.

The big (little) ask

You’ve read this far, so you must be at least kind of interested. Finally, here, some details on how you can be a part of this.

Most of you I know professionally. We’ve rubbed shoulders at conferences, or working together on projects. But, of the 476 of you who subscribe, I’ve only ever fished with three(!).

I know there are some angling-curious among you. Maybe you’ve picked it up and put it down over the years. Maybe you’ve been going upstate more and more, and want to do more than just dip a toe in the water. You wanna maybe put on a pair of waders and get hip-deep. Join us!

Ignore the paid membership option for now. All that stuff’s a benchmark for later. If you’re interested and sign up, I’ll comp you a perpetual membership. I want you to be part of this.

Or maybe there are folks you know who are starting to explore fly-fishing. The creative community is packed with them. Don’t get me started on why designers love fly fishing. (Actually, that’s already a WIP essay, so I have already gotten started, but in the depths of Obsidian).

Anyhow: Your word goes a long way. Amplifying it would be helpful beyond my wildest dreams. Would you share this note, or the CFS site, more widely, with your audience? Are there ways we can collaborate?

Write me back!

OK, that’s it. We’re closing in on the attention limits of even this focused crowd, who appreciates a meaty read.

Even if Current Flow State isn’t for you yet, I’m interested: What’s new? Have you ever fly-fished before? Get in touch.

Wanna come out to Oregon and wet a line? Or maybe we meet in the middle, in Montana, sometime? (Prolly not technically the middle, but hey, once we get there, trust me, it won’t matter.)