The whimsey starts at the fly shop, really. I mean, this is where the initial brain bomb leads you. One minute, after looking at the calendar, you realize that in just five short months, you’ll be in the Yukon chasing giant northern pike. The next, you’re in the truck, navigating snow-packed city streets in order to pick up all the ingredients you think you need to tie the perfect fly for a fish that’s about as discerning as Fat Albert at the Chuck-a-rama.

Through a series of events as unlikely as finding a pearl in a brook trout’s mouth, I spent thirteen years in university administration—eight as a department chair and five as a dean.

“We have too many damn administrators,” one of my colleagues told me back then, seemingly oblivious to the title “Dean of Engineering” next to my name on the door he’d just walked through.

“How many should we have?” I asked.

“How’s that?”

Sometimes it helps to not know what you’re doing.

It forces you to mine your ingenuity — to fall back on what you do know, and use that filed-away information to solve the task at hand. For a lot of us fly fishers, that’s how we learned the craft. A bit at a time, learning lessons along the way. Trial and lots of error. And it never really stops. As long as we keep fishing, we keep getting better.