The Walter Mitty Fly Fishing Contest

1. Catch six fish species with a fly and fly rod.

2. All fish must be caught on same day.

3. Each fish must be UNDER 10 inches long!

This contest is to help get you through the runoff doldrums and to remind you all of the reasons you began fishing…and still love it. To enter, send me photos of your six fish (take photo of the fish in hand, so we all can see how small it really is!) and a short anecdote about your day on the water. Email them to me at jayzimangler@yahoo.com

Every entry will receive six free flies (of my choice…dictated by the tone of your entry) and have their photos and story published on the Colorado Fly Fishing Reports blog. Send your mailing address, as well…if you want the free flies.

I’ll kick off the festivities with my own entry. Here goes…. I woke up late on my last day off and found I was in the middle of missing one of the sunniest, most awesome mornings so far this spring. This didn’t necessarily pose a problem of neglected responsibilities…as I am a single dude living in a studio apartment with a cat, but it did mean I was situationally obligated to go fishing immediately. So I began reluctantly gathering gear…rounding up rods and deciding if it was a wet wading type of trip…or not. And I found that I couldn’t get myself excited about what I was doing. It might have been that it was the twelve thousand five hundred and seventeenth day in a row that I had woken up and prepared to either fish, talk about fish or fantasize about fish (and only a couple of those had anything to do with a hot dinner date at Sushi Tora). I guess I was finally burned out. I had been guilty of taking myself—and my fishing—way too seriously. I was far too programmed to stay at home and feel sorry for myself, so I rolled the windows down on my truck, found a good station on the radio…and drove around Boulder looking for inspiration— which got me as far as the irrigation overflow ditch behind some inexpensive CU student housing. I strung up a 4 weight and caught one tiny ditch fish after another…pumpkinseed sunfish, four inch largemouth bass, shiner, baby crappie, skinny catfish and bluegill. I left the ditch sunburned, dehydrated and as giddy as hell! I had not had that much fun since I was a kid playing in the creek by my parent’s house swinging wet flies to little creek chubs and pretending I was a well known river keeper and they were Atlantic salmon. Thus the conception of the Walter Mitty Fly Fishing Contest.

For all you beauty school dropouts…Walter Mitty was a character who would have routine heroic daydreams while going about his rather mundane life in a famous 1939 James Thurber short story entitled “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” . Google it or something…