Book Excerpt: The Zen of Flyfishing

High in the Andes

Although drinking and flyfishing are both pleasures, drinking while flyfishing is another story. Apart from the hazards of being tipsy when wading a river, hopping over jetties, or driving a boat, your cast is liable to lose some finesse. A drink after fishing, however, often feels well earned. For years I would finish a fishing session and trudge a thirsty mile back to the car from Long Island’s Connetquot River (the very same water where Daniel Webster caught his world-record brookie in 1828). On the way home, I’d always pull into the last gas station before getting on the highway and buy a long-neck Bud and a bag of spicy barbecue-flavored tortilla chips for the drive to town. Drinking and driving? “Well, it was just a beer, officer.”

My rules for cannabis and flyfishing are less stringent. Basically, I never start out fishing high or even slightly buzzed. You’re pretty much guaranteed to skip a guide or two while stringing up your rod or forget a fly box on the riverbank. Bottom line: If you want to get high while fishing, wait until you are in a groove. If things are going well and your cast is flowing, it can make a good day better; or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it can make that day good in a different way.

Case in point: a lodge in the Andes where, along with a group of anglers, we fished a glacial lake and the river that flowed out of it. On our next-to-last night, two anglers reported that they had been having a hard time managing the winds–a constant in Patagonia. On that day, however, the lodge’s program of rotating beats had put them on a sheltered cove of the lake where large trout basked in the white sandy shallows. If you placed a big Chernobyl Ant within thirty feet of the fish, they would often cruise over and suck down the fly.

“Best fishing we’ve had on the whole trip,” they said. According to the plan, I was to be on that beat the next day. But, since I was a guest of the lodge, and these two guys had traveled five thousand miles and spent a lot of money to have so-so fishing, I said, “Why don’t you take my beat tomorrow?”

The fishing that day was very good at the lake. The two anglers were ecstatic. The guests and guides had a farewell asado that night, and one of the guides, whom I’ll call Jeremy, told me his sister, a bartender in Montana, was about to arrive. Now that the season was done at the lodge, they were going to fish for a few days. Would I like to join them? he asked.

All season, as gales blowing off the glacier whipped the lake, the only fishable spot had been that single white patch. Guides and anglers felt fortunate that Providence had provided this little honey hole. Wondrous to behold when we arrived at the lake, it was completely glassed over without a breath of wind! There were white sandy patches everywhere and the submarine-shaped shadows of big trout on each patch–browns and rainbows, many of them over twenty inches. Was it a karmic reward for my sacrificing that spot the day before? It sure felt like it.

We caught trout after trout. I was in rhythm, Jeremy and his sister were in rhythm, the trout were in rhythm. When she produced a big fat joint, I saw no reason not to smoke. Damn, it felt good! We would cast, then pause as the fly settled, wait until the fish noticed (they always did), wait some more as the trout lazed over to the fly, and then, as they softly took, raised our rods just as gently and the fish came tight…every time.

We were blissed out, copacetic, blessedly entranced–in other words, happily high. We caught fish until we felt we’d had our fill. I clearly remember hearing John Fogerty singing “Down on the Corner” while we fished, so they must have brought a boom box…or maybe I imagined it.

Excerpted from The Zen of Flyfishing by Peter Kaminsky. Text © 2025 Peter Kaminsky. Reproduced with permission from Workman Publishing. All rights reserved.

Illustration: “Top of the Canyon-Malleo River” by Bob White.