Slowly spring green is marching up the hillsides, and I actually opted to not take a jacket to work a few days last week. Harvested my first strawberry this morning from the little plants on my porch. I’m wearing a skirt instead of two layers of long underwear. And, for the first time in what seems like ages, I found myself sweating in my waders one evening last week.
Suddenly it’s mid-May, and things are in the spring swing.
Escaped from the office on Tuesday to go through instructor’s training at the Orvis Fly-Fishing School here in Manchester. It was a good day of dodging rain showers, teaching “students” (coworkers who came from Orvis HQ, the rod shop, and the flagship retail store) and working on my double haul.
Two weeks from now I’ll be chasing stripers. I’m a trout kid; double-hauling a nine-weight has not been in my vocabulary very often up ’til this point in time. And it somehow feels very posh to say I’m going to Martha’s Vineyard to fish for striped bass.
Yeah, life is weird like that.
I did, however, purchase my first stripping basket and within thirty minutes of ownership, had it appropriately stickered in Fire Girl style. Busy gathering gear and working out lighting ideas for midnight surf-fishing images.
Right now I’m camped out in a coffee shop in downtown Manchester, sipping an iced latte in the hope that I’ll go into caffeine overload and somehow all the work I need to get finished today will leap into warp speed and do itself. I have the feeling that’s not likely to happen, but hey, it helps, and the parade of New Yorkers in town for the weekend is pretty damn hilarious.
And I’ve discovered I can’t go anywhere in this town without seeing someone from Orvis. Ran into one of our web guys on a morning run, and just spent twenty minutes talking about the pluses and minuses of right versus left eye dominance when shooting clays with a project manager. In the middle of the coffee shop.
We got some weird looks from the New Yorkers wearing Prada.
I was very excited to see “Evolution,” a piece featuring Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard and his tenkara methods, come to print in Fly Fisherman magazine this past week. As always, the team at Fly Fisherman put together a pretty sharp spread, and, since this piece has been on the books since last fall, it’s fun to see it finally come to fruition. Thanks to the Patagonia team for their assistance with the piece, and to Yvon for being pretty damn photogenic.
The FGP editorial calendar is looking pretty crazy, filling up more and more each day. I’ve been running through pictures of the Ponoi (weird to think I was working there two years ago) and came across a few that made me nostalgic for the tundra, for heated conversations in a language I didn’t really understand, for dancing under the Arctic midnight sun, vodka in hand. Keep an eye out for a collection of these images; coming to a magazine near you.
Just found out I’ll be making the trip down to IFTD in July. Hope to see many of you there… should be some epic networking!
In the meantime, get out and enjoy the sun, evening fishing, and spring green.
