River Fashion

I've thought about designing a new line of clothing for fisherpeople and calling it "High Water Mark". When we got here at the river we put away our cold weather clothes and brought out the wading shorts, t-shirts, long sleeved fav fishing shirt, and water sandals. It's become our fishing uniform. We brought a number of older items to wear out and throw away at the end of fishing season. You know, the slightly worn t-shirts with maybe a little spot of stain. And who cares that your shirt has a stain on it when you'e fishing? You should be looking for fish, not at my clothes.

After wearing our shorts for a couple days we started to notice a definite discoloration line, a high water mark, of river muck on our backsides. Although the river is at times crystal clear, there is muck in the water that discolors clothing, forming a high water mark. We wash out our shorts to try to keep the high water mark from becoming permanent, but I think my shorts are destined to forever be my fishing shorts. I also have a few old t-shirts that show how deep I've gone into the river. White is the worst to show the brownish-yellow high water mark. If I could design the clothing with the high water mark part of the design, you know, "it's supposed to look like this," then it wouldn't look like I'd waded into a muddy river.

We decided we're brought along too many clothes this time, so leaving a few pieces behind in the laundry room for someone else is not such a bad thing.

These guys with the umbrella boat insisted that the shade was only for the dog. It reminds Rick & me of the African Queen.
Just about anything goes on the river (fashion, I mean) and as you can see, most fisherpeople choose to wear waders. There are only a few of us who faithfully wet wade. It honestly doesn't matter what you wear or even if you land a big fish. Or what model fly rod you use or what your hat looks like. What matters is doing something you enjoy and having fun.

(The first 2 photos at the top of the post are of Rick. I love the 18x zoom on our Nikon CoolPix P80 camera.)