There are leaps in understanding when someone travels along the fly road. At least there certainly have been for me. Maybe its when you start to really understand the nuances of leader design, emotional moments of trial and error, or just an amazing video on YouTube. Maybe it's when you finally get that one cast ironed out in the grass, and now all of your casts have improved dramatically. Maybe it's when your ideas about fishing or fish behavior get turned upside down by observing a master. Sometimes it’s observing a blue heron wading and stalking fish the way you should. Other times it can just be a very lucky fisherman that is somehow constantly hooking up right down stream, and you haven’t even gotten a denial. When this type of revelation happens for me, it is usually linked to a person. One of these people is the man that taught me to climb trees, John Conits. 

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There is quite a waiting list on rod orders at the moment and things are a bit slow. Apologies for this. We are trying to speed things up but we never seem to be able to get ahead of ourselves. For two years now I haven’t been putting builds into the HT Owners Club. Quite frankly there is very little marketing going on. Why? Because I think the waiting list is already too long and marketing is going to make the list longer.

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Some time back I read an article about a study conducted on London taxi drivers by a psychologist. The research paper, published in a respected psychology journal, had an interesting conclusion that had caught the attention of the mainstream media. The author had studied the working hours of the cabbies, the amount of trade they were doing, the weather etc. and come to the conclusion that they were, on average, working very inefficiently. Quite logically the study found that the busiest days for taxi drivers in the city of London was when the weather is lousy, people want to get across town without getting their designer clothes wet etc. By contrast, the slowest days for the drivers takings were the balmy, sunny days when people were happy to take a stroll and be seen out and about. The interesting data on working patterns showed, however, that the taxi drivers worked longer hours on the slow days than they did on the good (rainy) days. I'm sure the actual paper delved deeply into the psychological reasons why the taxi drivers choose to do this (they are mostly self-employed so choose their own hours), however the conclusion was fairly clear cut; by not chasing a certain revenue on the bad days they could cut their working hours with no loss of income. If they put the long hours in on the high turnover days instead of stopping early (probably when they've hit their self selected daily target) they could in fact take the sunny days off completely without hitting their overall bottom line.

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This week I took John out again to get him on some maruta. As I mentioned last week I'm not that bothered about them, but they are easy to find, forgiving of a beginner's mistakes and the run creates a target rich environment.

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Sometime during the beginning of covid-19 I got into some back problems. After sitting down I became an old man. When I stod up I could not stand up straight. I had to walk around a bit with my back bent and slowly working up to standing fully straight. It didn’t happen for any apparent reason. I would guess that it had something to do with suddenly working from home and the change of daily activity it caused and that I went from sitting in a reasonable chair during the day to sitting on a cheap kitchen table chair. The chair felt comfortable thought but it is still a suspect in the problem. I also lost a couple of thousands of steps each day also. I did walk to and from work and that added a number of steps that I think I lost during that time.

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We drove up the Connecticut coast to Narragansett and took the ferry to Block Island yesterday evening and woke up to a blustery day. Jackie and I were invited by my son-in-law’s grandpa, Pete, and his novia Beth, to stay in their upside-down cape cod on the NW corner of the island. They live here year-round with the rest of the hold-over population numbering about 1000. Beth works for the Fire and Rescue Services here. Both of their families were among the original European settlers who arrived in 1661. Jackie had been here once in late summer approximately 10 years ago and stayed in the Barrington Inn which, it turns out, was originally the home that Beth grew up in. It’s a small world, everybody knows everybody else. It’s not an easy place to find work and many of the year-round residents also struggle to find housing in the summer as visitors are willing to pay premium rents. My daughter and her husband just bought a 27’ sloop and will live in it during the high season.

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