A friend and fellow guide once said, far more eloquently and effortlessly than me, that once you had caught and released a fish it was like it had never happened. That the release was followed, both immediately and forever, by a genuine need to experience it again. In a roundabout way the words are his but the sentiment belongs to us all, because he is so very right.

I can’t improve on the words, but I would add that we are chasing every moment, both the epic and trivial, that we discover somewhere between the anticipation of the outbound journey and the exhaustion of collapsing into a chair at the end of the day. Some, like the 5lb brown that mauled your blowfly, will smack you in the face but others won’t be that dramatic or attention grabbing. You will have to be open to them, you will have to look for them and with this heightened sense of awareness will come a greater appreciation of the whole experience. This recognition of the small stuff doesn’t require the unlocking of a ‘force-like’ ability to sense the natural world, it comes from slowing down.

Slowing down seems easy enough to do right? After all you’re away from the fast paced everyday, you’re in the “living” part of that line you trot out every now and then, “I work to live, not live to work.” In reality, it is very easy to get so focused on what we are doing that its possible if not probable that we miss out on the ‘big picture’. This picture is the time you took to sit and appreciate the time away, your good friend on the far bank and the jaw aching laughs you shared the night before. It’s the watching, the waiting, the breeze at your back and the warmth of the sun on your face. It’s the gadgets, the dangerously warm ham sandwich you ate for lunch, the irrational emotional attachment to inanimate objects and it’s the shunned baby seagull that spooked a hard stalked trout. It is everything, it is the ‘big picture’, a visual collection of sometimes unrelated short stories that, when read together, form some of the happiest of all days.

Fly fishing offers the devotee the opportunity to completely immerse themselves in the game, the environment and the company. I believe that in order to fully appreciate the time and extract maximum return for the investment of that time, one needs to soak up every element, every connection, every feeling, to fully sink into the moments, big and small. So take notice of everything from the hills at the visual limit of your world to the wet footprints of your companion leading the way ahead. You might think that you are taking it all in, but next time you make time, just slow down.

You will be glad you did.