Trout are much like people. All ya gotta do is give em what they want. Think about it. It’s true! Sometimes your buddy wants to go hit the bars. Other times he wants to lay low. And, sometimes he gets so engulfed in things that he doesn’t even know what he wants. So, I call Greg early the other morning. Greg recently gave me a few business leads that panned out extremely well, so I owed him. More importantly, I wanted to spend time with him on the water like we used to. So, I call him up..”Hey Greg, it’s jer, do you have to save the world today?” Greg laughs a little and before he can even get another word in I say, “turn off your cell phone, don’t answer the house phone, pack your gear load your truck and I will be at your house in 30 minutes.” So, I show up. Greg is fired up and I raise the bar by having brought some real strong Starbucks in a thermos. So, we get in the truck, crank up the Sirius satelite radio, stop and get a cooler full of drinks and sandwiches, pour some strong coffee and head north. It was the start of a perfect day. We show up to the river and the run is ours. Greg brings 1 rod with 1 reel and a back up spool. I do the same. Greg starts off with fast sink line and a deadly cone head leach pattern. 3rd cast. BANG! Big Brookie! I work my way behind Greg with nymphs. Nothing..the fish were simply not interested in them. So, I switch my spool to fast sinking line and tie on a similiar leach pattern. WHAM! Monster Landlocked Salmon grabs the fly on the retrieve. Leaps out of the water several times and life is good. Then, Greg switches back to a dry line and ties on a long leader with an elk hair caddis size 14. I watched as Greg made the perfect long cast. He put the fly right where it needed to be in a seam across the eddie. The fly only had a few seconds to get the perfect drift, because the eddie between Greg and his fly was causing havoc on his fly line. In the final seconds of the drift. SPLASH! A nice fish whacked at his fly and Greg’s face lit up. “Did you see that!” I smiled and said, “Yeah, he was huge.” The day was a success and the trout/salmon that we were fly fishing for were much like Greg that day. They were not sure what they wanted. They had been feeding on smelt, then hendricksons, then caddis…and now hoppers and Golden Stones were coming off. They had too much on their plate and they were not focused on any one thing. They seemed to have lost track of what they really needed during all of the hectic feeding. Too much was going on! So, we needed to snap them out of their funk. We needed to throw something at them that they could not resist. We needed to open their eyes to what they really wanted. I think, the same could be said for Greg. I threw him a “fly” that he just could not resist and it was exactly what he needed! I expect that he will do the same for me when I lose my focus.