Friday, September 23, 2011

My First Ever Blog Post

Starting a blog sounds like fun and lots of people do it so when I decided I would start it seemed easy enough. But when you finally sit down and decide to post something that the world can see, its a little hard to get started, and I consider myself to be relatively private.
So for my first post I'm not going to write about myself at all. This picture is of Clark Strickland. Clark is one of my co-workers at Orvis. He has been fly fishing far longer than I have been alive and his passion for fishing is evident in the hundreds, probably thousands of stories he holds in his 86 year old mind.
He's originally from way back in the sticks in Georgia and told me that they were so far away from civilization that his dad didn't know what day he was actually born so when they brought him to get his birth certificate it was simply marked January 1st, 1925. He was raised mainly in Tennessee so his southern drawl adds a little intrigue to those stories. Its almost like something out of a movie; when you hear him talk about guiding famous people on rivers in Northern California.
Clark has an amazing collection of old bamboo rods and he sold me one a few weeks ago. I had never even casted a bamboo before I bought this rod but Clark kept insisting that I try bamboo and of course he was right. Its an amazing thing to cast a rod made from grass, especially one from circa 1940 that had never been used. I don't think I've had as much fun catching trout since my first rainbow about 13 years ago.
So here's to Clark.