Master Of The Striper Fly

That was it.  I decided at long-last to just do it, even setting a reminder into my phone's calendar.  This time, I wouldn't forfeit to the coming, onset, and passage of yet another winter season in having never acted to redeem opportunity sunken beneath the darkening depths of flowing time ebbed years prior.  Some long-running tide showed hints of slowing, perhaps even coming to slack, such that with any coaxing gravity of my motive, would soon reverse state, flooding entirely anew.  I could no longer float some buoyant, subtle sense of regret left otherwise unchallenged by action or remedy.  After all, the solution was quite simple enough.  Every January, for a sudden and swift three days, the man from Massachusetts conveniently makes himself accessible to one-on-one, vis-à-vis visitation within the very state I live.

A Wawa coffee was poured, an address entered into GPS for easy E-ZPass passage up the GSP, and with the smeared ink applied of a rubber stamp rolled against the back of my hand, I strayed for the first time about an aircraft hanger-sized venue in peripatetic pursuit of a renowned author and Striper fly-fishing authority by the name of Rich Murphy.  Somewhere among the vast commercial channels of vendors and churning volume of shoulder-bumping passersby sweeping through aisle inlets, he was here, poised and positioned at a table blanketed by a sheet of white poster paper being tattooed with a graffiti of illustration.  At a trade show workstation, weighed-down by tying vises clamping at the hooks of his original, hand-tied creations, precise foils of feather and flash posed on-display and buttressed end-to-end between stacked hardcovers irrefutably recognized the sport over as the man's distilled, encyclopedic anthology of experience, here bound as the inviting inventory of his weighty book, Fly Fishing For Striped Bass.  It was then, that a saltwater fly-tyer and expert stalker of M. Saxatilis lifted his downward-turned eyes away from the attention of his working fingers to curiously glance above a plastic rim of bifocals where he focused instead unto a Fly Fishing Show attendee who suddenly appeared standing before him.

Rich Murphy's tying table at the Edison, NJ Fly Fishing Show.  His 2007 publication, Fly Fishing For Striped Bass, is widely recognized as "encyclopedic" in coverage; an "immediate bible" on the subject of Striper fly-fishing strategy.  Angling author Dick Brown penned it as "the distilled wisdom of an expert stalker of Striped Bass.. a celebration of one man's love affair with a great game fish."  Agreeably, the book's comprehensive and prudent content promptly won my heart.  That afternoon, after a smile and handshake, Rich's parting words to me were "everything in it is the truth."         

RM's Conomo Special, a large streamer fly that proved innovative in its inception at the imitation of the Clupeidae family of finfishes (alewife, blueback and Atlantic herring, Atlantic menhaden, threadfin, gizzard, and hickory shad).  It's Rich's #1, single-most productive, and universally-adaptable Striper fly pattern, named after Conomo Point on the Essex River in Essex, MA.        

The venerable vanguard of the vise was quick to use a pen in illustrating on his table how the profile depth of the Conomo's spreader cone could be manipulated with finger pressure into a shape that bears to appropriate an overall length-to-height ratio to the cross-sectional body profile of prey a tyer intends to imitate.

For some time, I had finally stood present, in-the-flesh, before the enthusiastic character of a man whom some distant six winter's time earlier, I grew to know only in my mind, page by carefully turned page, under the illuminating light of a reading lamp.  Having been befriended by a printed wisdom of words that flood his 457-page saltwater atlas, this same hardcover that I awoke from its bookcase and deliberately accompanied to the show, I imagined it reasonable to possibly personalize our friendship with just a few more - those that I would value as penned-privilege of a master's autograph.  His inscription advancing one last personal cast of wisdom - "Let the big ones go."  Five simple words that mean so incredibly much, and serve equally as important as the backing packed deep onto your arbor, waiting for some day to be revealed to the silence of night as you turn hard to stop your personal best from running-off without first inscribing your excited eyesight with the size and color of her splendor.

"Without this book, an angler can still catch Striped Bass.  But with it the reader will gain a hard-earned advantage in the quest to catch a knee-knocking trophy striper.  The author and I both started fly fishing for this magnificent fish at about the same time and with the exact same tackle.  He became a true gourmet, while most of us are only gourmands.  Rich rose from student to professor.  Now all this knowledge is at our fingertips." - C.M. "Rip" Cunningham, former editor-in-chief Salt Water Sportsman magazine

The event's encompassing parking lots were generously-stocked of clever, fish-inspired vanity plates.  Clearly, this last one I chanced upon, served as a rendered reminder of Rich's drying penned message within the bound covers I carried.  Just do it.