Remember this scene from the Karate Kid?

The tall, menacing, well-muscled master of Cobra Kai is up in Mr. Miyagi’s face.  John Kreese has hairy fore-arms, quintessential 80’s asshole hair, and a bad-ass tattoo.  He is bigger, stronger, meaner, younger and on his home turf.  Yet despite all these obvious advantages,  everyone in the theater watching this scene – even very young children – knows one thing for certain:  Mr. Miyagi could kick his ass without breaking a sweat.  When you meet someone who really knows their stuff it is obvious, the opposite is true as well.

The title of this article comes from my friend Dave Langan, and his observations that the people who are the most likely to get in trouble are those with a little knowledge.  A black-belt in Karate knows a great deal more than a yellow-belt, but probably the greatest knowledge comes from knowing how much he doesn’t know.

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
Socrates

Naturally this extends to all things, and is likely a source of difficulty for corporate America.  New supervisors come into a job with a little knowledge of it and a whole host of ideas on how to improve the process they believe they understand fully.  In my work for example, I have had six bosses in the last four years each one started thinking he or she knew the job 100% and left knowing they understood only a fraction of it.  It takes a measure of real understanding to know what you don’t know.  If you ever find yourself coming to the belief that you understand a process fully, odds are pretty good that somewhere along the line you stopped asking questions or paying attention.  This shouldn’t be a source of frustration but of happiness.  It fills me with joy to think that I have been fly fishing 30 years, I could have another 50 years of stick waving ahead of me with no fear of running out of things to learn.  Which is why it surprises me just how often I encounter people so keen on aggressively teaching me how little they know.

So a weekend ago, Dave calls me and asks if I’d like to fish with some guys from the Pacific Northwest – steelheaders.  Apparently these guys make an annual trip to Cape Cod, Dave knows them from a New England fly fishing forum famous for not being about fly fishing at all.  I can sum up the weekend with one exchange…

The Flyosopher:  I’ve never caught a steelhead I was thinking of heading out to Michigan to give it a try.

Pacific Northwest Steelheader:  There are no steelhead in the Great Lakes, and those things that they call steelhead they don’t fish for.

The Flyosopher:  Try that again…

Pacific Northwest Steelheader:  Their rivers are too small to fish properly.

Not sure what proper fishing entails…but for guys so proud of big rivers and long casts they couldn’t get a fly much further than 20′ from their feet.  They also were not shy when it came to voicing opinions.  They criticized my use of sinking lines, my fly choices, and at one point they seemed to complain that I lacked the ability to adjust the tide to the time of day they chose to get up.

They asked me to take them to a spot they had read about, and I was happy to do so because in general the spots you read about aren’t my spots.  Now this particular area has close to a 12′ tide, which is impressive to say the least.  It also means that at low tide there is no water, so the only time to fish the area effectively is on the incoming.

This presents a Catch-22 since the very best time to be fishing is exactly the time a wading angler should start to leave the area.  Kayakers don’t have this problem, although later in the season I have been known to just swim back to shore – the iconic “Swim of Shame” which is actually a lot of fun.

I informed these guys of this fact but they still wanted to fish there because of what they had read.  They also wanted to start at 6:30…despite tide charts predicting a low tide at 10…so fishing would be best around 11.

Now in the spirit of full disclosure, there is always a possibility of catching a fish, that can not be denied, but the difference between fishing the right and wrong tide is astronomical.  The right tide is like casting to a current seam as it swirls by a boulder in a stream, the wrong tide is like paddling out to the middle of a huge lake and blindly casting.

Now my favorite part of the story.

So we get to the creek (which is now little more than a tidal pool – think puddle) and the parking lot is full.  This spot is a nice place to walk your dog or take the kids but generally empty on an off-tide this early in the morning.  So we rig up, and I answer a mess of questions about fly choice.  Not that any of the four guys with me actually change their fly choices based on what I said…again no big deal, but why ask?  Finally we are ready, and greeted by one of the single most retarded sights I’ve ever seen.

There were close to a dozen other fly fishermen spread along the creek.  At this stage of the tide the water was ankle deep at best, the open ocean a good mile or more away on an exposed flat.  So you had essentially a quickly drying river draining into the ocean, bare sand for a mile, and finally the ocean itself.  These guys were fishing the quickly draining creek.

Had there been fish there, you could have seen them, and anything bigger than a pound would have needed more water to cover it.  So I led my group – with some grumbling – out to the ocean.  The Creek fishes best when the water starts to run back into the beach and the stripers will follow it like a highway.  Not that that happened this trip because the hardly Pacific Northwest Steelheaders were cold, only one fish had been caught and wanted to go back in after a couple hours of bitching that exactly what the “Local Boob” had predicted was coming to pass.  Also a huge mass of birds, bait, and fish were busting just off shore, staging for the incoming which generally brings all that activity into the creek.  Had they stayed it most likely would have been a productive day.  All but one of the other fly fishermen had left…the one is a guy I know and he likely just showed up to get in position to fish the sweet part of the tide.

And now the punchline…

Pacific Northwest Steelheader:  You really don’t have very good stream etiquette, since you marched us out there and we low-holed all those guys.  I was going to say something but I didn’t.

So I’d like to apologize to those guys I fished a mile away from, I didn’t realize the Atlantic Ocean was a “pool.”

The rest of the week that crew had booked guides and captains for themselves, apparently they did alright.  All in all I think they were ok guys…but there was a reason I referred to them as “Pacific Northwest Steelheader” and that’s because that is what they were, and all they wanted to be.  They knew stripers could be caught with their tactics (word to the wise any fish can be caught with just about any tactics in the right circumstance) and that is what they wanted to use.  They would have been happier to fish the empty Creek rather than have a chance in the ocean because their skill set was better suited to that style.

My only real complaint – missing a productive day of fishing for material is fine – was how they looked down on every other fishery.  Like striper fishing wasn’t worth the time it takes to learn, or that you catch a few saltwater fish and suddenly you are Jacques Cousteau.  But I wont complain because I feel I should thank them, for reminding me how much I have to appreciate.  I love the ocean and the stripers, but I feel pretty sure that if I did live in the Pacific Northwest I’d love and respect that fishery too…

At least enough to take more time to become an expert in it.