North 40 Fly Shop eMagazine August 2016 | Page 6

Answer…Focus and Anticipation. Legendary steelheaders always seem to swing up a few after nine that other guys didn’t even have a sniff at. Why is this? I don’t know – at all. What I do know is that fishing is a life-long learning process. As soon as you think you know a lot… someone comes along and throws a wrench in all your theories, proving decades of work to be useless. For me, this is why I love fishing. It is the un-known, the anticipation of that perfect moment, with the perfect friend, in that perfect place. 1. PART FOCUS Theory #1 created 7/20/2016 at 10:41 a.m. – Why do 10% of the steelhead fishermen catch 90% of the fish? So now that this “story” is officially as scatter brained as my head, I’ll get to the point. From my observations, steelhead fishermen who are meticulous and focused, are the fishermen that rank highest on the success list… and I remember fishing a particular day with Harry, Sand, Kate, and Justin. With all that was going on around him, Harry never looked up from the run or his line, until he was ready to step out of the water. Meticulously covering every inch of water, step by step, cast by cast, he put the fly where he felt a fish should live. While observing this, I thought to myself, what self-respecting steelhead wouldn’t eat his fly? An eagle could have landed on his head and fed him fresh sashimi and he still wouldn’t have looked up.