 |
JAY ZIMMERMAN
The first time I talked with Jay he was writing an article on old flies and taking photos of the first flies he ever tied. Aspiring tiers will be encouraged to find out that Jay, who is now a contract fly designer, started by cobbling together raccoon hide and turkey feathers on massive rusty hooks. At the time he was eleven years old and had started fly fishing a couple months earlier when he discovered an old rod and some moth eaten flies at his northern Ohio home. His father, an avid hunter and fisherman, gave him a few rough pointers and Jay set off down the road to the closest farm pond. Minutes later he held an eight-inch large mouth bass with a yellow popper in its lip.
“I lost my soul somewhere in that murky water, and I never got it back.”
Jay didn’t have anyone around to show him any of the basics or subtleties of the sport, so he had to discover techniques that the rest of the fly fishing world took for granted. When he was in high school a bunch of buddies went on hunting/fishing trip and stayed in a cabin in western Pennsylvania. Stuffed somewhere in that cabin was a box full of dusty old fly-fishing books. For a kid who had never received any type of instruction on a hobby that was bordering on obsession, that box might as well have been filled with gold. While his friends ran around, drank beer and cooked bacon, Jay sat in the corner and read as much and as quickly as he could. While he was in the service he carried a few hooks and leaders in his wallet and fished whenever he could, including using MRE gum as a makeshift worm on the streams of Panama. He started passing on opportunities to go to schools or move up ranks in order to make sure he was stationed wherever he would be able to fish the most. In fact, Jay can’t look back on life and point to many decisions that weren’t influenced at some level by fly fishing. He eventually realized that his choices were to embrace fishing and make it his life, or let it destroy everything he tried to do instead.
Jay has made fly fishing his life, and the sport is better for it. He ties and designs flies professionally, works as an instructor and guide at Rocky Mountain Anglers in Boulder, and his writing includes blogging for Colorado Fly Fishing Reports and a book: In Neck Deep: Stories From a Fisherman. If you’re impossibly addicted to fly fishing and looking for someone who understands, talk to Jay: standing in streams still makes his pulse races same way it did standing on the banks of that farm pond twenty years ago.
http://coloradoflyfishingreports.blogspot.com/
|
