Too Much Fun?

We all fly fish for a variety of reasons, but the one we have in common is the simplest: it’s fun. And fun is worth quite a lot, especially in today’s world.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if there’s such a thing as too much fun.

This summer has been a whirlwind of travel, fishing, and adventures. I’ve explored new fisheries, put thousands of miles on the truck, and I’m currently sitting in the Billings airport. I’m headed to Alaska to fish salmon, trout, dolly varden, and grayling.

And I’ll be honest—I’m exhausted.

Yeah, I had to get up at 3:30am to make this flight (living in the middle of nowhere has a few downsides), but I was beat before this trip.

To be clear, I’m not complaining. I’m extremely lucky that I get to make a living in the fly fishing industry, and all this travel has been (mostly) work-related. I’m just beginning to wonder if there’s truth to that phrase that too much of a good thing isn’t good.

Bouncing from trip to trip this summer, it’s been hard to enjoy the moment I’m in. For example, I explored a new-to-me river last month. The scenery was straight out of Middle Earth, and the fishing was spectacular. Big browns and cutthroat, with a few whitefish, eagerly taking stoneflies all day, makes for an excellent time.

I feel like I’ve only appreciated that trip in retrospect, though, because at the time I was worried about all the work that lay ahead. We were on that river not just to fish, but to film stoneflies hatching, and hopefully, trout eating those same stoneflies. We’d been chasing the hatch for the better part of a month, and we had another trip scheduled the following week to do the same thing with caddisflies.

It was an absolute blast, but stacking so many trips right next to each other made it all blur together, and it’s only now that I’m looking back fondly on those days.

There seems to be quite a bit of wisdom in the idea that too much of a good thing does exist, and it’s probably the hubris of youth that prevented me from seeing that.

A bit of space between trips is in order for the future, if only because I hope I’ll savor the moment more.