There’s a brook four miles from my house that I’ve fished maybe two hundred times. It’s small enough to step across in most places, it holds nine-inch brook trout and a lot of alder brush, and I could tell you where most of its pools are with my eyes closed. I have driven past it on my way to the Pemigewasset more times than I can count.
I don’t do that much anymore.
The fishing internet runs on distance. Somebody’s always posting from Labrador or the Henry’s Fork, and after a while your own water starts to feel like a consolation prize. For about five years I organized my season around trips: two weeks in Maine, a long weekend in the Adirondacks, a list of famous rivers I wanted to say I’d fished. It was fun. It was also a lot of driving, a lot of money, and long dry spells in between where I didn’t fish at all because the local water didn’t seem worth the effort.
Then a couple of things happened. Gas got expensive. My knees got older. And I started fishing the brook on random Tuesday evenings after work, mostly because it was there.
It turns out a small river close to home rewards a kind of attention a destination never does. You learn which pool holds a fish after a rain. You learn that the bend by the culvert is a dust bowl in August and comes alive in October. You learn the hatches, the year classes, the deadfall that moves every spring. After a few seasons the water is legible, and you catch fish on evenings when the guy driving up from Boston with a thousand-dollar rod gets nothing.
I still take trips. Last September I fished the Rapid River in Maine and it was exactly as good as advertised. But the trip is the treat now, and the brook is the fishing. Six hours a week on familiar water beats six days a year on famous water, for me, and I say that as somebody who spent half a decade believing the opposite.
There’s a financial argument too, and I won’t pretend it’s small. Local fishing costs me a license I already buy and the gas to drive nine minutes. The Maine trip cost me eight hundred dollars all in. Eight hundred dollars buys a lot of Tuesday evenings.
So here’s the unglamorous advice. Pick the closest fishable water to your house, the one you’ve dismissed as nothing special. Fish it hard for one whole season. Keep notes. Learn it the way you’d learn a piece of land you own. If after a year you still hate it, fine, drive to the famous river with my blessing. But I’d bet on the brook.
The fish don’t know they’re unimpressive. Mine don’t. They’ve been eating my flies since the first Bush administration and they’ve earned the loyalty.