While it’s still a little hard for me to believe, I’ve actually been fly fishing since Ronald Reagan was president. And the fact that I’ve been at it so long — I started guiding on the Henry’s Fork and the Madison in 1992, and writing about the sport on a national level a couple of years later — had me wondering what type of advice I’d offer myself if I could go back in time and slip a note in my younger self’s pocket.

So here, on the chance it might prove helpful to at least a few of you, is what I came up with:

My good friend and mentor, Professor Earl, straightens me out more often than a spring creek angler uncurls their tippet. Professor Earl, for example, taught me that bananas, tomatoes, and eggplants are berries, but strawberries and raspberries aren’t. He also showed me how the Bluetooth logo is made up of two Nordic runes, ᚼ and ᛒ, which are initials of a king named Harald Bluetooth. He taught me what a rune was, too, of course.

“Did you see that movie about the atomic bomb?” Professor Earl asked the other day. “Oppenheimer?”