Time and the Fisherman There is an old Aggie joke about the yuppie who moved to the country. Every day as he drove into work from his new place he passed by an Aggie's farm. The Aggie was out in his orchard using a sling and hoist to raise pigs up into apple trees. After several days of observing this remarkable sight the yuppie could not stand it any longer. He parked off the road, hopped the barbed wire fence and approached. "Hey" he remarked, "I can't help but notice that you are out here every day hoisting pigs into these apple trees. What's that all about?" The Aggie replied that he was hoisting them up so that they could fatten up on the apples; that due to the quality of the apples they could not be sold so he was using them to fatten the pigs. The yuppie asked, "doesn't that take up a lot of time?" At which the Aggie said in a condescending tone, "man, what is time to a pig?" What is time to a fly angler? Speaking from my point of view only, I have a family, a single income and lots of bills to wrangle as well as two boys. I volunteer at my church whenever I can and do my best to back up my wife who currently has a full time job as a mom and housewife. (Please never say that a mom and housewife does not work!) So my fishing time is precious to me. I posted a thread in the Fly Anglers Online Warm Water Forum very recently http://www.flyanglersonline.com/bb/Forum20/HTML/001132.html which brought me to realize that I have been managing my fishing time all wrong, at least to me its all wrong. I have found that when I get out on the water, that I tie on a fly, start chunking and stripping it and to hell with the consequences! I am fishing and that's what I came here for. "Combat fishing" to coin a phrase, "spray and pray" to steal a phrase. There has been little or no time for observation , evaluation, or introspection. The concept of taking each section of time as a brand new unit of time, not as a blur with every other unit of time, has been missing. I have simply been trying cram quantity of fishing into each minute as opposed to quality. What do you do with your fishing minutes? How do you allocate each precious minute of time on the water? That is the question I have posed myself. I humbly submit it to you, my fellow angler, in hopes that the asking thereof might improve your quality of life.