Smash that rate button like a hungry trout smashing a stonefly.

0:01 Pamala Alright, if you could say both of those lines two or three times with space in between them, that would be fabulous. And looking at camera, please.

0:10 Nick I'm Nick Parish and I know too much about fly fishing. I'm Nick Parish and I know too much about fly fishing and fly tying. I'm Nick Parish and I know too much about fly fishing. I'm Nick Parish and I know too much about fly fishing and fly tying.

0:31 Pamala Gorgeous. How do you feel, Eva? Good?

0:32 Eva Sounds great. Yeah.

0:43 Pamala Okay. All right. Everyone feeling comfortable, feeling good? I like your shirt you're wearing, by the way.

0:49 Nick Thanks. Beisty Floral Friday.

0:50 Eva Yeah, it looks nice.

0:52 Pamala Good.

0:55 Eva Podcast recording Friday.

0:57 Nick Yeah, how why not? Do you guys do this every f like on Fridays? Is Friday the podcast day?

1:02 Eva It ends up often being the day that people choose, I think, because maybe as a guest it's nice to just like block off this time and do it on Friday afternoon. We've done it a couple of times on Friday afternoon, but it's really whenever the calendar's open, whenever we don't forget to block it off because we're like on the run or on a train or whatever.

1:16 Pamala Yeah. Yeah.

1:25 Pamala Alright, so Eva's gonna say her last line that would be basically introducing and bringing you into the conversation. Okay. Energy. Let's go. Okay. Good balls, stupid. Okay.

1:33 Eva Ooh.

1:51 Eva Kamali starting?

1:53 Pamala No, it's your last line to bring Nick in.

1:56 Eva right. Sorry. I forgot we already recorded our banter.

1:57 Pamala We're doing great. We're professional. Professionals. Fucking professionals here.

2:06 Eva Okay, good. No, I can't stop laughing. All right. Okay, let's find out. Our guest is Nick Parish. Nick, what do you know too much about?

2:09 Pamala Yeah.

2:20 Nick I'm Nick Parish and I know too much about fly fishing.

2:24 Eva Live fishing. Love it.

2:26 Pamala Tell us more.

2:30 Nick Well, I think that I sort of was brought up to know too much about a lot of stuff and kinda maybe in a time when people still believed that you could kinda know everything. I think that was like

2:46 Pamala Who taught who was who was sort of teaching that to you? Or is that something that you'd like to do? Yeah.

2:48 Eva Who? Parents?

2:51 Nick I feel like when we before the internet, people believed that they could kind of know everything.

2:55 Eva Mm. I remember that time. I miss it.

2:59 Nick Like there was like there was like a sort of belief that you could kinda know it all. And maybe that was sort of part of like a classical education, or you know, like people kind of just had history and the history was there and they were like, Okay, cool, we can just know all this. And so obviously I realized pretty quickly that that was actually not possible and knowing everything was

3:06 Eva Mm.

3:16 Eva Mm.

3:21 Pamala Yeah.

3:30 Nick In fact, like a fool's errand.

3:32 Pamala that you tried though. That was good. Yeah.

3:33 Eva Yeah. And a valiant effort, I'm sure.

3:34 Nick I I think I pondered the possibility. Like, is it really possible to know everything? Because people didn't used to know a lot. People didn't used to know a lot.

3:38 Eva Ha ha.

3:39 Pamala Yeah.

3:42 Eva Is this finite? Yeah.

3:44 Pamala Yeah. yeah. Very yeah, l very academic. Yeah.

3:47 Nick We we kn we know more every day, really. And in fact, like we know more about the past every day. Now it's not just stuff that's happening now, like the present becoming the past. But like we know a lot more about what happened in the past than we did in the past. So like the knowable stuff continues to expand, right?

3:50 Eva Mm-hmm.

4:04 Pamala yeah. Yeah. The accessibility of it is actually probably quite overwhelming. I mean and

4:10 Nick Right. Like archaeology uncovers new stuff that we can know all the time, right? But I think th fly fishing th that's neither here nor there with fly fishing.

4:11 Eva Mm.

4:14 Eva Yeah.

4:15 Pamala Yeah.

4:18 Pamala That was just a warm-up. I love it. I mean, but did fly fishing come into your world when you were a kid? Were you curious about it? Did someone take you? How did you get into how did you get into fly fishing? When was it on your radar?

4:21 Eva Off to a great start.

4:36 Nick So I grew up in like the suburbs of Detroit in Michigan. and right on the edge of kind of the developed landscape where suburbs were meeting, the sort of first suburb out of Detroit, where suburbs were kind of meeting agricultural land and like forests and stuff. And we had a huge, I don't even know, probably five hundred acre forest behind my home. and like I was one of those kids where my mom had an air horn.

4:40 Eva Mm.

5:03 Pamala The playground.

5:06 Nick that she would hit and be like when dinner time was. Yeah. but I would be out in these the dinner or yeah. I would be out kind of putzing around in these creeks and these ponds and stuff as a kid. And you know, just beyond this expanse was a sort of strip mall that had a Chinese food restaurant, a video store, a party store, which is what we called in Detroit like bodegas, and a fishing store.

5:10 Eva Dinner time. Amazing. The dinner air horn.

5:12 Pamala That's brilliant.

5:34 Eva Mm.

5:35 Nick And so I would kind of like go up to the I mean everything you need really. Totally. It's great. I'd go up and buy these little things and I'm probably like twelve, thirteen and buy these little things and go catch fish in the, you know, in the woods basically. it wasn't until later that

5:38 Eva That's a strip mall. Love it.

5:39 Pamala Yeah.

5:46 Eva Mm.

5:53 Eva Wait, what what attracted you to the fishing ties versus anywhere else you could spend your money in the strip mall? That seems like a a choice.

6:04 Nick I mean, like I think so my wife jokes that the f fly my fly tying hobby is basically like a Michaels or a Joanne fabrics. because there's infinite like doodads and like little kind of fiddly bits and thread and feathers and hooks and fur and all this sort of stuff. fur, yeah, yeah, yeah. fur. I've got every kind of fur. yeah. the most exotic fur

6:22 Eva First? What kind of fur?

6:30 Pamala Is this like making it is is like photo albuming but for fisher fishing people? Yeah, it's kind of looking. Yeah.

6:34 Eva Scrap scrap booking but with fur? But to catch fish? What?

6:36 Nick It kind of. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. So so I'll back it up. like the fishing stores have all sorts of cool stuff, all sorts of fun stuff. It's just like it it's so many doodads. And so fly fishing takes all that a step further because in fly fishing, we tie our own flies to match aquatic insects, right? At various stages of their life cy life cycle. So if you remember like go back to like fifth, sixth, seventh grade biology, the sort of life cycle of a of a

6:40 Eva Okay.

6:44 Eva Mm-hmm.

6:50 Eva Yeah.

7:05 Nick A bug where it is like a like a caterpillar and then it becomes a butterfly. Aquatic insects are very similar where they live under the water for some period of time and then they come up to the top of the water and then they break out of their old body and then they dry off their wings and flutter away and and go make little bugs, right? for this unless they get eaten by a hungry fish. and so in fly fishing, we it's different than fishing with bait, like putting a, you know.

7:09 Eva Mm-hmm. Yep.

7:21 Eva Fly away. Hm. Unless they get eaten. Nice.

7:34 Nick nightcrawler or or like a minnow on a hook or you know, a big chunk of fish or whatever. We use fur and feathers and thread and, you know, deer hair and things like that to imitate. yeah, deer hair, to imitate these bugs in various stages of their life cycle.

7:45 Pamala So flare.

7:47 Eva Dear hare

7:53 Eva What aquatic insect do you use do your hair to imitate?

8:00 Nick you can use, I mean, so deer hair is among deer and elk hair are among the most versatile fly tying materials because they because they're hollow, because deer hair and elk hair are hollow and so they float.

8:06 Eva What?

8:07 Pamala Well it's okay so

8:10 Eva So they float? that's so cool.

8:17 Pamala So but the those insects insects don't have that fur. So are you using like a fur to like be an arm, like it's imitating a a leg?

8:25 Eva A leg or a wing?

8:26 Nick Well,

8:29 Eva A gill? Do insect do aquatic insects have gills? No.

8:32 Nick Pretty good question. They breathe, I think, through gill-like structures. Yeah, I don't think they're officially gills because they don't work the same way. But so we tie flies using fur and feathers and things like that to imitate the sort of different parts of the insect, like the legs, like the the thorax or the abdomen, or like the wing case, or the wings themselves, both from like a structural sense and also like a proportional sense. So like

8:37 Eva Crazy.

8:54 Eva Mm, mm hmm. Yeah.

9:02 Eva Okay.

9:02 Nick So you can see like the little legs hanging down, or you can just see the profile of a mayfly's upturned wings into a fish that's kind of squinting up at it from ten feet below. It looks up and it sees a shadow and it's like, that's a mayfly, I'm gonna go eat it. It pursues the fly.

9:15 Eva Right.

9:17 Pamala So fish are that in tune. They're like over centuries and decades and millions of years, they are very clear of like being able to spot an insect on the on the water. So you kind of have to imitate that very specifically. Right.

9:18 Eva Procool.

9:30 Nick yeah. It's sort of a life or death deal for them. And you know, what's interesting is that fish over time can learn to recognize flies. And they can learn to recognize artificial flies versus real flies. Yeah, so yeah. So fly anglers.

9:32 Eva Mm-hmm.

9:39 Eva Really?

9:44 Eva Because they because they're aging and not getting tricked or like how do they

9:52 Nick 'Cause they're getting caught and put back. And so they'll see something and they'll be like, that looks that looks good. I'm gonna try it. And they go eat it and they get a painful lip. Don't eat that.

9:54 Eva Hmm.

9:56 Pamala you're doing catch and release?

10:00 Eva And they're like, wait a minute, that's deer fur. That's not a delicious mayfly wing. What?

10:05 Nick Yeah, something something really weird happened last time and I came out of the water and I was in a net and some guy was looking at me and taking a picture for Instagram. Yeah, exactly. So I'm not going to do that again. So we constantly, when we're fishing in places that get a lot of fishing pressure, right? A lot of people fishing there, we change up the flies we use so that the fish don't see the same thing again and again, even though the flies may be representing the same kind of insect. There are probably 30 different, 40 different ways to tie a fly to represent a single mayfly.

10:11 Eva And that was not the vibes were bad.

10:21 Eva Mm-hmm.

10:34 Nick Of a single like sub-genus of Mayfly. Yeah, it's intense. There's a lot of like it's a lot of bug nerd stuff at the core, and it gets really crazy. But what I going back to it, what I love about fly fishing is for all these different parts, the bugs, the gear, the places to go, like the on-water contemplation. There are so many different like sub-genres of stuff to be into. It is fly fishing is a passion of relationships.

10:35 Eva Wow.

10:41 Eva Yes.

10:43 Pamala Sorry.

10:51 Eva Mm-hmm.

11:01 Nick Where we have relationships with the land, with the water, with the fish, with the other animals out there, with the birds that we watch to see how they're eating the bugs, with the bugs themselves and like with other anglers. And I get really excited by all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

11:02 Eva Mm.

11:12 Eva W I was gonna say with the other with the other anglers too? Wow. When did it ch was it a gradual descent or progression into being someone who is this passionate about reconstructing a specific genus of Mayfly, among other really deep fly tying bits? How'd that happen?

11:39 Nick It was sort of like going bankrupt, right? Like like slowly then all of a sudden or gradually then all of a sudden. so my dad came to the US from England in the 70s to work in the car business in Detroit. He met a lady from Michigan, my mother, who grew up in like a pretty like intensely sort of semi-rural setting in northern Michigan on a river called the Asable, which is one of the most famous fly fishing rivers in the world.

11:47 Eva Mm-hmm.

11:50 Eva Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

11:56 Eva Mm.

12:05 Eva Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

12:09 Nick And so when my dad came, he sort of married into this family that was quite sporting. Like my grandfather and all his brothers, you know, were at in these epic like Michigan deer camps for like weeks at a time in November. Like they were just sort of epic outdoors people. and my dad came from the UK where fishing is very restricted. There's no sort of public land there. You have to pay, you have to be a sort of noble.

12:09 Eva wow.

12:15 Pamala Yeah.

12:25 Eva Yeah.

12:33 Eva Mm. Mm-hmm.

12:36 Nick gentlemen and pay hundreds of dollars a day to go fishing in certain places, certainly for trout and salmon. And so he was overwhelmed by the opportunities to fly fish because that was just something that was just not available in the in the UK to him. and so he got he he he sort of was doing regular fishing with my grandfather. And then he got deep into fly fishing and kind of pulled me in. We both were radicalized by the Michigan Fly Fishing Club, which was, I think I owe very much of my like

12:42 Eva Mm.

12:57 Eva Mm.

13:05 Nick all of my sort of stature and my passion for fly fishing to a group of like I think a a group of very inter interesting characters. I was probably the youngest person at a lot of these club events by like several decades, at least two to three decades. And like the Michigan Fly Fishing Club was comprised of just like every sort of c character you can imagine across like a really wide range of like socioeconomic backgrounds and things like that. Like you had old retired high school shop teachers that were missing fingers and guys that worked the line at at Ford's

13:17 Eva Fantastic.

13:18 Pamala Amazing.

13:27 Eva Mm-hmm.

13:34 Nick along with like lawyers and accountants. And so the Michigan Fly Fishing Club would take a trip to Montana every summer for like a week or two. And it would rent out a ranch, which like is probably totally inaccessible now. But I think the trip was like four or five hundred dollars for like a week at like a ranch in like Island Park, Idaho. So probably an hour, 10 minutes from Yellowstone, West Yellowstone. and so we'd fish for like a week or two out there every summer. and

13:37 Eva Mm-hmm.

13:49 Eva Wow.

13:50 Pamala My dream. Okay.

13:52 Eva Yeah.

14:04 Nick That was sort of my baptism by fire because that is the the most difficult and most prolific place, in my opinion, to fish in the lower 48. We fished the Henry's Fork, we'd fish the Madison, we'd fish the Gallatin, we'd fish the Soda Butte and all these like intense Western creeks and rivers. and so that was, I think, really where like this became a thing for me, where it was like, there's so much here between the experiences outdoors and all the adventure and fun and the camaraderie with the club and all the

14:13 Eva Mm.

14:33 Nick people that were really eager to be mentors and share what they had learned.

14:39 Eva That's amazing.

14:41 Pamala Yeah, sounds and fantastic. I

14:44 Eva What what can you share with us, Nick, maybe that would surprise someone who who already has fly fishing or fly tying on their their radar? Is there anything you can share with us that that might be a surprise to them?

14:58 Nick It doesn't need to be hard. I think that the there's like a one of the things that bothers me bothers me the most about fly fishing is that there's a massive amount of kind of gatekeeping that is that goes along with the kind of like country club y kind of like like PJ, like you know, Caribbean trip type mentality. And like

15:01 Eva Mm.

15:11 Eva Mm.

15:19 Eva Mm-hmm.

15:25 Nick Where where I grew up or the the group that I grew up in, I was really lucky in that like nobody had like the fanciest stuff. And we were all kind of making and making a do of it, like kind of DIY style. and there's a lot of you can basically fly fish anywhere is something that maybe someone that's listening that might be thinking about, I'm gonna go upstate New York or I'm gonna go to the Sierras or I'm gonna go to Montana. I can go catch a fish with a fly rod like 20 minutes from my home here in Portland.

15:32 Eva Mm-hmm.

15:55 Nick in an urban creek and in like a like a town park lake. And like what nobody tells you is that it's just as fun as having a trout on the end of your line and sometimes bigger, more fun because the fish get bigger and fight harder. So there's fly you could the best fly fishing is everywhere and probably very close to you or closer than you think.

16:18 Pamala that's beautiful. Yeah, absolutely. I have I do have to say I have so many questions about the fly tie. Like, is there a gallery that you guys post to to say like this is my prettiest or my most accurate? Like is there like a sh like is there a is there a contest somewhere? Like how deep does this subculture go go?

16:19 Eva That is surprising too. Yeah. Beautiful and surprising.

16:27 Eva Yes.

16:38 Eva Yeah.

16:44 Nick I mean, anytime you put humans together and have them do a task, there's going to be some sort of competitive angle to it. there are fly tires that specialize in tying what I would call like artistic flies. and in fact, like a certain genre of fly tying, tying traditional Atlantic salmon flies, like borders into the I don't know how to describe it, like Baroque.

16:50 Eva Yes.

16:51 Pamala huh.

16:57 Eva Mm.

17:10 Nick maybe or just like over obsessive where you've got people that are sourcing materials that are ultra rare and in some cases illegal to trade. like yeah. yeah. There's like a dark there's a d there's a dark there's a darkness here. There's a darkness here.

17:14 Eva Mm.

17:22 Pamala What? Like what?

17:23 Eva Huh? Deer fur the Deerfer? No. What? Is there a black market? Joanne's fabrics for fly tying materi raw materials? What?

17:27 Pamala Are we like like ivory? What are we talking about? Yeah.

17:34 Nick yeah. I was at a I was at a fly shop upstate New York that shall not be named. And they had a sign that had a list of all these different rare birds that they had feathers for. and like it was like by inquiry only and it was kind of like tucked away. Scarlet Ibis and like Indian crow and like all these birds that you can't really sell. Pole I I have a patch of polar bear fur. like the the and that was probably harvested like

17:53 Eva my goodness.

18:01 Nick some decades ago and not something you can buy anymore. Like so

18:08 Eva I I'm speechless.

18:10 Nick The in the so in the olden days when we had a lot more species before we had fucking extirpated yeah, like before we had

18:18 Eva Hmm. Fewer protections for about to be endangered polar bears.

18:24 Pamala Yeah.

18:25 Nick Yeah, like eradicated much of life on earth. Like people would harvest different birds and there were just like Scarlet McCaw, like there was just a breadth of animals that had fur and feathers that were used in traditional fly tying. And we're talking about a hundred years ago, hundred and hundred, eighty to a hundred years ago. and now there are tires that sometimes use artificial materials to emulate these, the color, the consistency, the texture.

18:36 Eva Yeah.

18:41 Eva Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

18:51 Nick But oftentimes they source the real deal and they have to go through like these various channels to do that. and as a result, the flies that are tied with these very ornate, very hard-to-find materials oftentimes fetch like hundreds, even thousands of dollars each. that people people mount them.

19:07 Eva Lee.

19:07 Pamala What's the most expensive what's the most expensive tie you've seen?

19:11 Nick I don't know. I'm not like I'm not deep in that game, but I think that no, yeah. Like I am I am like a utilitarian fly tire. I I I spend the least amount of time and the least amount of materials possible. Like the fish doesn't the fish does not know Latin. The fish cannot tell the difference between a a like mm like a fake jungle cock feather and a real one. Like it's

19:14 Pamala Not that you've not that you've bought it.

19:15 Eva You're net that's not your game.

19:25 Eva Mm. Mm.

19:34 Eva Pl plastic. Yeah. Can you reuse a tie or is it gone once a fish catches it?

19:41 Nick So typically we'll so with some sort of flies, like big steelhead flies for like big fish that live in the ocean, anadromus fish that live in the ocean and then come back in the freshwater to spawn, like steelheaded salmon. Sometimes we'll use big, kind of like expensive hooks. And sometimes if the fly gets shredded, we'll reuse the hook. but for the most part, the the flies we try to tie them to be durable. but eventually they get shredded after you catch fish a lot of times. I mean, yeah, you can catch probably on a good fly like.

19:53 Eva Mm-hmm.

19:59 Eva Okay.

20:03 Eva Okay. Multi use. Okay.

20:10 Nick 10, 20 fish before it gets starts to get mangled. Yeah. like the I mean, I think that you know, like a thousand bucks is like like a special showcase fly. what's more likely is that you'll find like mounted like sets of flies, and those will be. I saw like a set of flies with a map. It's probably 20 flies tied by some expert tires go in an auction for like 25 grand.

20:11 Eva interesting. I didn't know that. How would I?

20:12 Pamala okay.

20:37 Pamala Gosh is like the variety pack.

20:37 Eva Can Yeah. and though but those would be a tie that's not that's just created to be an art piece or a collectible, not to be used. No utility there, just showcase.

20:40 Nick It yeah.

20:48 Nick Right. I'm trying to th I mean the the equivalent is the equivalent is like buying a piece of art created by or a sculpture or something like that created by a really skilled craftsperson or an artisan or an artist. they're one-offs. The like there are fly tires that don't r tie commercially. Like you can't buy their flies anywhere. They sometimes tie them for benefits, things like that, or for these auctions or things like that. So it's not like you can go down to the store and buy these. Yeah, exactly. A lot of times charity auctions will put up like a framed

20:59 Eva Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

21:10 Eva cool. to auction. Right.

21:10 Pamala Wow. Wow.

21:18 Nick Group of flies from Tire X. but you know, what's interesting about fly tying is that you can't mass produce these. they're all tied by hand individually now in places like Kenya or Thailand, which is funny and ironic that flies are tied in Thailand. but oftentimes you know, like in sort of factories in places that are not the US. But until recently, you know, fly anglers would make money.

21:25 Eva Right.

21:35 Eva Hey yo.

21:46 Nick by tying flies for the shops. It was like a little cottage industry. So they would fish and tie and fish and tie and you know, tie like thousands of thousands of dozens of flies a year.

21:49 Eva Mm-hmm.

22:00 Eva Wow. And who's buying those ties? Someone who doesn't have the time to tie them themselves or the skills? Or some combo. Yeah. Okay.

22:05 Nick Yeah, anglers, like yeah, I tie a lot, but I still buy a lot. And like fly shops, if you ever walk into a fly shop, you'll see they have thousands of flies arrayed in many different hook sizes and colors and things like that. Oftentimes the same pattern. The flies are tied according to a pattern, which is not in like a recipe in a book where you can follow the recipe exactly or you can kind of freestyle it a little bit. even though there's a pattern.

22:20 Eva Mm.

22:30 Nick I may have six or eight different flies that are slightly different colors or slightly different sizes that follow that same pattern to try to match what the fish are eating that day.

22:41 Eva it's so cool. I wanna see I wanna see them all. Yeah.

22:42 Pamala Do you yeah, I wanna see a whole display of these. Yeah, definitely. Do you have any let's see.

22:46 Nick So well good. So just like as an example, this is one that was close at hand. These are all salmon flies. These are all meant to imitate a very specific type of type of bug that hatches here in Oregon.

22:48 Eva Wow. Mm-hmm.

23:01 Eva W so the flies are named for the fish, not for the insects.

23:06 Nick The that's a perceptive judgment or a perceptive question. salmon flies, I don't know why they're called salmon flies. I think perhaps because of their underside that is salmon colored. They are not eaten by salmon. we don't use them to catch salmon, but they are called salmon flies. There are a variety of there's a lot of like arcane weird shit in fly fishing that tends to like put people off a little bit and be very confusing.

23:19 Eva Yep, okay.

23:23 Pamala What? What? That's the worst marketing I've ever heard.

23:32 Eva Yeah. Yeah.

23:34 Pamala Okay.

23:35 Nick Salmonflies are a salmonflies are a sort of subgenre or subgenus of stoneflies, which are a major, the three kind of major insect categories in fly fishing are mayflies, caddisflies, and stoneflies. So salmon flies are kinds of stoneflies. These are all stoneflies. And so I have everything correct. Unless I maybe they are sometimes. Usually trout. trout eats salmonflies.

23:51 Eva But they're not eaten by salmon the fish.

23:56 Pamala What are you using them which fish are you using them for? Okay. Totally I was gonna guess that. Mm-hmm. I was gonna totally say that.

24:00 Eva Trout eat salmon flies. Obviously.

24:03 Nick So we have everything from like a super small like nymph. This is an aquatic. This guy lives underwater, and like I fish this underwater. Everything for that, from that to like a bigger, this is made of foam. This one's made of like foam with a hair wing. So these are quite big. these are the kind of biggest bugs, which is why people like to fish salmon flies because the bugs are big, they're easy to tie on to your.

24:06 Eva It looks like jewellery, it's beautiful.

24:10 Pamala Yeah.

24:12 Eva So cool. Mm-hmm.

24:22 Eva yeah. Those are beautiful.

24:23 Pamala wow, yeah.

24:32 Nick Your leader or your tippet. on the other side are so yeah, here we go. in fly fishing, the difference between fly fishing and regular fishing is that in fly fishing, we don't have any weight on the end of our line because the flies are so dainty. They're so tiny. They they weigh practically nothing. And so if you've ever been regular fishing, you know what you do, you put your thumb down on the thing and then you

24:36 Pamala What's a leader or tippet? Yeah. Yeah, what?

24:36 Eva What's that what? Yeah, what do we

24:49 Eva Mm-hmm.

24:51 Pamala Yeah.

24:59 Nick Whip it out with your wrist and the weight of the the thing on the end kind of shoots it all out, right? When we don't have any weight on the line, it doesn't work. So fly lines are made of like a thick polyvinyl chloride. They used to make around a silk. they're like thick, heavy lines. And the thick, heavy line is what loads the fly rod. If you've seen someone cast a fly rod, you know it's a very sort of dramatic motion, right? It

25:09 Eva Right. It's just like

25:26 Eva Dramatic lasso vibes, yeah.

25:29 Nick It's dramatic because we can't just flick it with centrifugal force. We've got to like put energy into a whole system to make it work. It's much more like a golf swing or a tennis stroke. So that's another crazy subgenre of fly fishing, which is casting a fly rod.

25:42 Eva Okay.

25:47 Eva The k jee. Okay. Getting getting deeper as we go. Mm-hmm.

25:50 Nick Yes. Get getting the getting the bugs out there, like actually performing casting a fly rod is the physical act of fly fishing, right? In the same way that if you golf, sure, you can go to putt putt, right? And maybe you technically, philosophically speaking, like a taco is a sandwich and putt putt is golfing, but like it's not really golfing, right? And if you're going golfing, like you've got to be able to swing the golf club. Otherwise you're in for just a long, miserable hot walk.

26:02 Eva Mm-hmm.

26:07 Eva Not not really. Yeah, yeah.

26:09 Pamala Don't don't cause worry, yeah.

26:19 Eva Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

26:19 Nick Right, with maybe some beers and a hot dog after nine holes. So you've got to put some time and effort into learning to swing the golf club. Well, fly fishing is very similar.

26:23 Eva A not sandwich, yeah. Mm-hmm.

26:31 Eva That makes sense.

26:31 Nick So anyway, back to what a leader is. The fly line is thick polyvinyl chloride, right? It's like, it's let's say it's like this thick, right? Number one, you can't get this in yeah, exactly. Like you can't get this in through a hook that's on a tiny little bug. So a leader and tippet step this down. They basically take the circumference down to the size of maybe like a hair, right? And then our ultimate.

26:39 Eva Mm-hmm. Looks like a shoelace.

26:47 Eva Right.

26:52 Eva Okay.

26:55 Pamala Verder.

26:57 Eva wow.

26:58 Nick piece of tippet at the very end is maybe just has like a breaking strength of like six pounds or eight pounds, very small. And we can tie a tiny fly on there. So the totally. But part of the part of the measure of the angler is how large of a fish you can catch on how small of a tippet. So can you catch a hundred, hundred pound fish on a 10 pound tippet frequently done with tarpon fishing, where they're catching a hundred, a hundred and fifty pound fish in the ocean.

27:04 Eva Hm. F for the trout. Okay.

27:19 Eva Damn.

27:22 Eva Jesus.

27:28 Nick on 10, 12 pound test tippet. So line that's only rated for like a 10 or 12 pound weight. How do you corral a like prehistoric beast like a tarpon that's 150 pounds of pure raging energy that does not like the fact that it has a hook in the side of its mouth with just 12 pounds of breaking strength between you and and nothing. That is the skill.

27:36 Eva That's

27:50 Eva And that kind of fish is what you need a an exotic bird feathered, deer fur, fly tide for?

27:59 Nick Well, need. Need is very subjective, even. You need. I mean, you can tie tarpon flies with, yeah, you can tie tarpon flies with carpet fiber. I could, you know, that's the thing. I could take that I could take that blanket and some carpet fibers and like dog hair and tie a fly. a lot of this is just the sort of effort and energy the angler wants to put into it.

28:01 Eva Sure. Okay.

28:07 Eva Anything. Garbage bag.

28:15 Eva Okay. Yikes.

28:21 Eva Yeah. And that's part of it, right? And a little bit of love and attention and you'll attract better, bigger, more delicious fish. Do you eat the fish that you catch when you fly fish? Yeah.

28:23 Nick Sure. Yeah. I mean

28:31 Pamala I

28:33 Nick That's usually the first question people ask. no, I don't I don't tend to eat fish I catch when I'm fly fishing. I put back 'cause I like to catch them again, which is maybe a little bit more fucked up. But I there's I don't know. I mean, there's an old saying that game fish are too valuable to only be caught once.

28:40 Eva Okay. Mm.

28:50 Pamala Mm.

28:50 Eva Mm, that's nice. I've only been fishing once and it was catfish and it was so delicious. But that's my one experience. my goodness. Yeah.

28:57 Nick Catfish are are delicious. Yeah. I mean, I eat fish. When we go fishing in the in the Columbia or the Willamette for Chinook and we use we're in a boat and use big tackle. We'll keep those fish. And like, but I think when I'm fly fishing, when I'm walking, when I'm by myself, when I'm alone, when it's, you know, the end of the day or the morning, I'm more interested in it in like an encounter with a wild animal than I am in like putting food on the table.

28:59 Pamala I got.

29:04 Eva Mm-hmm.

29:08 Eva Yeah.

29:18 Eva Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And communing together. And they can survive a a typical catch, generally? More than one?

29:30 Nick Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of we yeah, certainly there's documentation, huge amounts of documentation around the same fish being caught again and again and again. there are some safe handling protocols that you know you tr always try to keep the fish in the water, always try to fight the fish quickly, never fish when the water temperature is above 68 degrees. like there's we always use

29:38 Eva That's cool.

29:44 Eva Mm-hmm.

29:50 Eva Mm. To to keep the the fish alive. This is all meant to as part of that. Supporting that.

29:57 Nick Right. Colder water has more dissolved oxygen in it. Warmer water, it's it's harder for the fish to basically catch its breath because there's less oxygen in the water. They build up lac lactic acid the same way we do when we exert ourselves when they fight. So really we're helping the fish to to breathe and and to not be sort of exhausted. we use special nets that don't harm the fish's coating, protective coatings. We use barbless hooks. We kind of cramp down the barbs on our hooks so that the

30:04 Eva Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

30:13 Eva Be calm. Mm-hmm.

30:20 Eva Yeah.

30:25 Nick Fly can come in and out really quick. And if we catch each other like accidentally, we can just kind of pull it out and it's not cause to go to the hospital. all that stuff.

30:30 Eva Ooh. Ouch. Ouch.

30:36 Pamala What is the, you know, in this hobby, what is the wildest thing that it's that you've done or stopped doing because of this?

30:46 Nick Wildest thing I've done or stopped doing.

30:50 Pamala Yeah, the change of habits or the maybe the craziest thing you've bought or the craziest thing you've made or things that you just see in your civilian life that you're like, I need to I need to incorporate.

31:06 Nick I don't I don't have campfires anymore.

31:11 Eva Because of

31:14 Nick Because of recreating out west and having to deal with wildfire smoke a lot of the year and like worry about wildfires. I don't do campfires anymore. I don't do fires at home because of the air quality issues. I've gotten like pretty attuned to air quality issues. what have I stopped doing? That's probably one of the biggest things I've stopped doing. we'll do fires sometimes.

31:34 Pamala Yeah. So when you go on fishing so when you go on fishing trips, you were like we're doing a no fire like yeah.

31:40 Eva You eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches only? Yeah.

31:41 Nick Typically in the summertime, almost always in the summertime. we w I mean we still cook our food on like propane stoves and stuff. We just don't do campfires. in the shoulder season when it's rainy here, yeah, it's okay to have a fire in the winter. It's okay to have a fire, but between maybe like April and October, we don't really mess with it anymore. I don't know. I I think like I I conserve more water than I used to. I think again, like out west, like we were dealing with like

31:49 Eva Nice.

32:01 Pamala Yeah. That's good.

32:10 Nick eredification and like perpetual drought. And so thinking about how to like have a water conscious landscape at my home, even here in Oregon where we get a lot of rain in the Willamette Valley. thinking about conservation of water and like how fish and other animals that l use and live in the river are affected by like lack of water is something I'm pretty conscious of. Yeah.

32:12 Eva Mm-hmm.

32:19 Eva Yeah. Yep.

32:36 Pamala Makes sense. Alright, well

32:39 Eva Thinking about those exotic birds.

32:43 Nick Yeah, so the one of the books that I'd love to recommend is called The Feather Thief, if you're at all interested in this. So The Feather Thief, The Feather Thief is a story of a young man who was a symphony, I think he was an oboist or a flautist. he was a savant musician who became obsessed with fly tying. And specifically this very ornate style of Atlantic salmon fly tying.

32:48 Eva Yes, please.

32:49 Pamala Okay.

33:03 Eva Mm-hmm.

33:12 Nick And he went to live in the UK to play in in London to play in a symphony orchestra or to go to school for something. I forget exactly the twist and turn. But he essentially led a robbery at one of the British National Archives of a Historic like the British National Historical Museum and stole like hundreds of rare bird pelts from an early expedition. it wasn't Darwin, but it was Darwin's sort of

33:40 Eva Whoa.

33:41 Nick Shadow familiar, whose name I'm forgetting right now, but it's the story of his to yeah, to sell on the fly fishing black market. And so it's the story of starting from this theft that he committed, to how they began to try to track down this feather thief. so very interesting. It goes in detail to like all this subculture.

33:45 Eva To create ties?

33:54 Eva Mm.

34:00 Eva Ooh.

34:04 Eva it sounds so cool. I'm gonna read it.

34:07 Pamala Do you have any ties that you would never use?

34:12 Nick No. I don't have any flies that I have sentimental attachment to.

34:17 Pamala Okay.

34:17 Eva Your utility all above all else.

34:20 Nick Yeah, for the most part. I mean, I think there's like there's like a couple in like the the like I don't know what you call it, the head head zone. I don't know. I have a couple in my truck like stuck up in the top part that I just as fish that I've caught that were like meaningful and like they have like a little bit of sentimentality attached to them, just reminders there. I don't have anything tied by anybody famous or like

34:34 Eva Mm, okay. As decor.

34:34 Pamala Okay.

34:40 Eva Mm.

34:40 Pamala Yeah.

34:44 Eva Hm.

34:47 Nick You know, things like that. I have some flies tied by my dad that I'll probably keep around for a long time and yeah. But like nothing that nothing that is so sentimental I wouldn't use it. You've

34:51 Pamala Aww. I've got a I've I've got a stuffed fish. I have a stuffed fish coming my way once my fat my father moves on. I grew I I grew up deep sea fishing with my dad and

34:54 Eva I love that.

35:02 Eva dear.

35:02 Nick wow.

35:05 Eva Ooh.

35:07 Pamala None of those conservation methods were in place and very different type of fishing. but I think one of my favorite parts of it was just listening to them all tell their fish tales. And I would love at I'd wanna be like in the bar at the restaurant or at the lodge with you all as you guys are all talking about your fish tails and your fish ties. Like I think that would be so much fun to just be a fly on the wall.

35:11 Eva Yeah.

35:18 Eva Mm.

35:24 Eva For that.

35:30 Nick there's some stories. What kind of fish is it? Pytails.

35:31 Eva Your tippet and your tie tails.

35:35 Pamala Yeah. It's like a marlin. It's like very typical.

35:37 Nick Nice. Yeah, you can catch those with a fly you can catch those with a fly rod too. You can any fish you can catch, like pretty much except for like bottom fish and stuff like that. Yeah, there's a guy in San Diego named Conway Bowman who catches Mako sharks on a fly rod. Yeah. You can catch sailfish, you can catch marlin, you can catch tuna, you can catch anything.

35:38 Eva Ooh, yeah. Really?

35:41 Pamala Really? Wow.

35:51 Eva What?

35:51 Pamala Whoa.

35:57 Pamala See, that would be a great bar story.

35:57 Eva Yeah, what's the c what's the craziest what's the craziest thing you can catch with a tie?

36:06 Pamala Or with fly fishing?

36:06 Nick Cra the craziest fish you can catch fly fishing. I mean, there are people that are really pushing the boundaries that are going to the upper Amazon basin for these like super toothy parana, like all sorts of crazy different, like intense river fish that have, you know, crazy jawy mouths and things like that. Like

36:08 Eva Yeah. Yeah.

36:32 Eva Fangs and

36:33 Nick Yeah, like fanged fish. You can catch rooster fish off the beach in Baja, these enormous rooster fish. I mean, any fish that you can pretty much see you can catch with a fly rod. Yeah. somebody caught a whale a while ago. I saw Instagram video. I don't think it was AI. Somebody was fishing for sharks and they hooked a whale. They didn't land it, but like Yeah, it's you know, like one of the famous inventors of a famous fly.

36:43 Eva Dream up, yeah. Huh.

36:54 Pamala Yeah. Wow. Dang.

36:57 Eva Right.

37:03 Nick said that he caught like over a hundred and forty maybe different species with that fly.

37:08 Eva Mm.

37:10 Pamala That's good test using the same fly, seeing what you can do with it. Interesting. I like it. Well, how do you like convert us? So what would you say how why should everybody fall down the fly fishing hole with you?

37:14 Eva Multi species. I like it.

37:25 Nick Well, it's an amazing way to like achieve multiple benefits. I love one of the things I love about fly fishing is it requires a lot of focus. It's not like sort of sitting on a bucket and like throwing the bait out and throwing it out and reel it in and throwing out and reel it in. If you're dry fly fishing, so the fly is on the top of the water, you've got like a laser focus on that fly, waiting for the fish to come up and eat it so that you can set the hook. So when you focus like that, like life just goes.

37:30 Eva Mm.

37:55 Nick Away. and all that matters is what's happening between you and the fish and the fly. so it's a wonderful way to like really just push out other stuff. And meanwhile, you're waiting in the water, you're not in nice cold water up to your waist. Like it's a very sort of primal, sort of fetal kind of experience.

38:16 Eva Mm, mm.

38:19 Nick Meanwhile, it happens, fly fishing tends to happen in cool, remote places where you can watch birds. You can watch, you know, I fish in a river here called the Deschutes. You'll hear kind of clattering stones, and you'll look up and you'll see like dozens, like a huge family of antelope up on the top of the ridge, or mountain goats running around, or bears, or like cool birds. so you can experience nature in neat ways, and then you can just kind of get away from it all. Like a lot of places I fish, I don't.

38:36 Eva Ooh, beautiful.

38:48 Nick have service. I don't have to worry about people bothering me. I can file like a flight plan with the family and be like, okay, if I'm not home by X time, like call the sheriff. and then and it's good. It's a way to get away. and it, you know, yeah, totally. It's a good like self care. I think that's what they call that these days.

38:56 Eva Mm, mm. Yeah. Get time to stop for you. Mm-hmm. Very chill.

39:06 Pamala Sounds beautiful. Yeah. Sounds beautiful. Well, thanks, Nick. This has been so I I kind of love it. I I didn't know really anything about I've always had this daydream of like just being in Montana, fly fishing, like a river runs through it. But had no idea yeah, yeah, we've got fit, but had no idea like all of the other beautiful elements to it. And that it's so much more accessible and universal than I thought. I did not know you could fly fish anywhere.

39:12 Eva I like it.

39:24 Eva With Brad Pitt, right?

39:35 Eva Love that.

39:37 Nick Yeah. And you know, another cool thing about about fly fishing, so my six degrees of Brad Pitt goes through fly fishing, in that the guy that was Brad Pitt's casting double in a river runs through it was my father's casting teacher. so that's that's my that's my like sort of couple degrees of separation. one of the coolest things about fly fishing is like the the stars, quote unquote, are just super accessible. Like when I was going to Montana as a kid.

39:44 Eva Course.

39:49 Pamala my gosh!

39:50 Eva what?

39:55 Eva Too. Love it.

40:01 Eva Mm.

40:04 Nick I would go into a fly shop that was owned by this guy who wrote all the books about how to fish in the area and he was just there. I could just talk to him and he gave time to like a like idiot kid from Michigan. Yeah. I'd spend like hours talking to this guy and then then buy three flies with my allowance and blah, blah, blah. like you can just access these people in a in a very fun and meaningful way.

40:13 Eva Then I bet he'd love it. A a young whippersnapper coming

40:15 Pamala That's so sweet.

40:20 Eva Yep. Best life.

40:27 Nick but if people that are listening, so I teach I teach community education fly fishing here. I've done that for the last three years. I love it. I've we've had over 400 students come through and for many of them, it was their first time ever catching a fish with a fly rod, and some catching a fish at all. so I've taken what I've taught, what I teach essentially the curriculum, and I've built like a free course. It's like a 10 email course over the course of like two months where people can sign up and just kind of get started. and it's available at

40:32 Pamala Yes.

40:33 Eva wonderful.

40:42 Eva Mm.

40:50 Pamala So cool.

40:54 Eva amazing.

40:55 Nick currentflowstate dot com slash immerse I E R S E. and then I I get a lot of emails, replies to some of the courses and people ask me, Well I'm here, where can I go? And so I'm always happy to point people in the right direction.

40:58 Eva Awesome.

41:09 Pamala Man, you've been you've you've become the teacher. Yeah.

41:12 Eva So generous. Do you take your kiddo fly fishing yet?

41:16 Nick Yeah, she started when she was six. she caught her first fly on a fish on a fly rod when she was six. sh she's you know, she's a she declares it like she morphs into a wild summer girl. and so fishing is sometimes a part of that, sometimes not. Sometimes we just play in the sand and swim in the river and look for turtles and stuff like that. so it's here when she wants it.

41:24 Eva Amazing.

41:32 Eva Mm-hmm.

41:42 Eva Mm-hmm. Also important. Love it.

41:43 Pamala Love that. That's awesome. Yay! Alright, well thank you, Nick. let's see. Alright. Well, that's today's episode of You Know Too Much. Thank you so much, Nick. Now we know way too much about fly fishing and fly tying.

42:04 Eva And if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a glowing, shining five star review, share this with someone who'd love it, and you can explore more episodes, maybe check out Shantae's guide to how to poop outside while you're doing the fly fishing now. check out more episodes behind the scenes content at you know too much.media.

42:27 Pamala And follow us wherever you get your podcast. Yeah, and follow us wherever you get your podcast to keep the obsession going. Thank you, Nick.

42:27 Nick Yes, mah.

42:34 Nick Yeah, smash that rate button like a hungry trout smashing a stonefly.

42:38 Pamala Yeah. With a salmon fly. This was great. Yeah. Yeah. I was dope.

42:39 Eva Exactly. that was so great. Nick, thank you so much.

42:47 Nick You're welcome. I'm so glad to talk to you both. Even under the auspices of a media thing. It's nice to chat and connect.

42:52 Eva No. I love it. Yeah. It's so good to see you.

42:55 Pamala Good.

42:57 Nick You should go five.