Patience, as anyone that knows me will tell you, is not one of my most obvious virtues. I hate queuing, and red lights at junctions reduce me to a state of apoplectic hysteria.
I was at one of my accounts today, and the person I was dealing with, who was one of five on the shop floor, kept answering the phone instead of attending to the business in hand. There was coffee and there were biscuits, but they did little to stay my impatience.
Because of this particular character trait, people are often prompted to ask me why I fish, or how can I enjoy it so much as it obviously takes patience, or they even sometimes exclaim sheer disbelief that I actually fish at all! To them I simply say this (and I will put it in capital letters for effect): FLY FISHING DOES NOT TAKE PATIENCE - NONE - NOT A JOT. It takes perseverance and dedication. It takes skill and a lot of luck. It does not however take patience.
The beauty of fishing with the fly is that you are always on the move and the time between casts is usually short. This is especially true of running water, but even on the small stillwater, where it is possible, given buzzer feeding fish and a lack of an itinerant nature, for the keenest of anglers to take on a state that resembles a catatonic heron, patience is seldom needed as the one constant of fly fishing - and of any field sport for that matter - is eternal expectation, and the power that that expectation casts over one can be all enveloping. The side effect of this, inevitably, is that time flies by.
No patience needed.....................see?
