A couple of Decembers ago, during an unstructured and very unfishy few days in Scandinavia, I stopped in at a local fly shop. The owner was Swedish—a fact that does little more than provide the context that this took place in Sweden—and entertained my questions about the local fisheries, seasons, and techniques. As is custom after aimlessly bothering fly shop employees, I bought a hat. It had an extra-long brim, was all black with white letters, and used the contrasting colors to proclaim the title “FLY FISHING MASTER” across the front. The text on the back read “ONE CAST AHEAD OF YOU” with a little Swedish flag underneath. It made me smile as soon as I saw it, and was the only souvenir I brought back from the whole trip.
I go fishing for a number of reasons, and looking cool is not one of them, so I gave very little thought to the aesthetic consequences of wearing such a piece out on the water. I do, however, take my hats seriously.
I had a lucky hat in my early teens, and I wore it every time I went fishing. Some of my biggest breakthroughs and earliest successes in the sport came in that black New York Mets hat (the performance of the Mets during that time is a different story), as documented in the many cringey images from my early camera rolls.
Sunbleached and tattered, that hat currently sits retired in a box of old gear. I cycle through a few hats now, but I seem to only go back to the ones that I’ve had good days in. I can’t help but be aware of when I go fishing in a new hat—it seems like there is an extra seal that needs to be broken in addition to saving a skunking. I am even more aware of the bad days when I take a new hat off and wonder if my recent style decision negatively altered, on a quantum level, my performance that day.
That was the immediate problem with my new Swedish apparel—I wasn’t catching fish in it. Sure, it was still winter, and back in New England good days were spread far apart, but that couldn’t be why—it had to be the hat. My adorned claim as a “Fly Fishing Master” had removed me from the favor of the fish gods, pegged me as a cocky try-hard. That and the extra-long brim always disconnected the lanyard of my sunglasses every time I took them off. Either way, it would have to be burned.
I did really like the hat, though, so I decided to give it one more chance. I stopped wearing it for a few months (I caught fish in other hats during that time, of course) and broke it back out in early May. I waited only for the most optimal conditions—the first strings of solidly warm weather, high flows on the mountain creeks—basically a lock for constant action and high numbers in the native brookie waters. And in one glorious day, on a stream tearing through a reborn forest, spring sun straining through fresh overgrowth, I regained my power.
The hat had the right magic—I had proved that. It didn’t matter if the extra-long brim with my sunglasses continued to be annoying, or that the hat wasn’t actually that comfortable, or later that day when I slipped in the strong current, landed just right on the carabiner of my bag, and watched my net, tether and all, get whisked downstream and sucked under a deep logjam. That all has nothing to do with why I seem to pick a different hat every time I’ve gone fishing since that day. The most disciplined masters, I understand, only work with what they can control.
