However, a few weekends ago at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, a fly-fishing store was advertising free, first-come-first-serve fly-fishing 101 classes to those who stopped by their stand. While I wasn’t interested in that stand, which looked to me like any other advertisement stand promising a one-in-a-million chance to win an all-inclusive fishing trip to Alaska if you gave them permission to spam your inbox with useless shit, my grandma Connie got to talking with one of the guys running it. She ended up signing herself, my grandpa, and me up for a free fly-fishing 101 class a couple weekends later. 

Thank God she did. 

Needless to say, I had a blast at that class. Not only was the class held before the store opened, which meant I was able to walk around the place in silence without anyone bothering me, but we were brought to the roof of the Cherry Creek Whole Foods parking lot to practice casting expensive fly-fishing rods at velcro fish, which seemed to come naturally to me.

Unlike spincast fishing, I discovered that fly-fishing was a lot more physiologically engaging. Instead of simply launching a heavy, baited lure into some weeds in hopes of luring out an invisible edible fish from under a log in murky waters, fly-fishing used light lures and emphasized launching those tiny things directly above or in front of a targeted fish, as trout, salmon, and other river-dwelling species like to stay moving above the rocks and logs. 

In other words, fly-fishing felt a lot like hunting to me. Only, instead of aiming and shooting a rifle or a bow at a target animal, I had to aim and “shoot” my 10-foot-long line at a target fish, which almost always got a fish to bite as the lure mimicked the impact of prey on the surface of the water (at least, according to the fishermen instructing the class). But, I've since fallen into the fly-fishing rabbit hole, and it seems like those guys really were telling the truth. 

Long story short, I was hooked (pun intended)!