By Mickey Dunaway

Reprinted with Permission by Currents Magazine | JUN 2025 | Cornelius, NC

Fishing. I have been doing it in one form or another since I could hold a limb with a line on the end. Then lots of Catfish and Bluegills caught on a limber cane pole with a gob of wigglers on the hook at the end of the line.  

When I was about twelve, I hinted that I needed to upgrade my equipment. I got myself a Shakespeare fiberglass rod and a Zebco 33 Spincast closed-faced reel for my birthday. Did you also know you can still buy a Zebco 33 for about $16 at Walmart and a Shakespeare rod for $20? 

That birthday fishing gear will still catch fish long after you forget it and leave it in the corner of the garage when you go off to college. Cleaned up, oiled up, and new line, and it will fish just fine. 

There is a very old saying about boaters. The two happiest days in a boater’s life are the day he buys a boat and the day he sells it. I lived that old saw until, finally, in  my late-seventies, I still had an overwhelming urge to go fishing whenever I crossed Lake Norman. What was I to do? Watching fishing videos on YouTube didn’t help. Just made it worse. 

So, last Christmas, when my wife asked me what I might want, I said I wanted to go on a guided trout fishing trip in the North Carolina mountains. So I did. And I took my wife with me, too! Two seventy-eight-year-olds fly fishing for rainbows and brook trout must have been a sight. I bet our guide, Ron, is still laughing!  Here is the rest of the story. 

With all the buying and selling of boats and catching fishing in our years in Mecklenburg County, my yen to go fishing never waned, and one day after crossing Lake Norman, I got an email from the local Orvis store in Huntersville. They were holding a free fly fishing school in a couple of weeks. With a little urging, my wife, Sandy, agreed to go with me, so we signed up.  

I won’t go into details, but we went and had a great time.  Lesson One was the basics of the equipment, which included casting it on the grass behind the store. Lesson Two was casting to bass and bluegills in a local pond on a Sunday morning two weeks after the first lesson. Lesson Three, if you were still on board at this point, was a guided trip to fish on Helton Creek in Ashe County about two hours from Charlotte. This part of the lesson wasn’t free ($275 per person), but it was worth it! The fishing on this portion of Helton Creek that ran on private land and was managed by the owner and NC Fisheries was heavenly.

Our chances were good for catching fish that neither Sandy nor I had ever caught before, and we did it thanks to our wonderfully patient Orvis guide.  We caught and released a half-dozen trout back into this beautiful portion of this mountain creek to be caught again. 

We are now bitten by the trout/fly fishing bug and spend time most days watching YouTube videos on the ins and outs of fly fishing. 

Seventy-eight—with a new, lot-to-learn diversion. Ain’t Life Grand!

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. – Henry David Thoreau.