Joseph Monninger Quotations

Biologists have determined brookies to be indicators of ecosystem health and have been recently campaigning to get the word out. If brookies inhabit a stream, the odds are good that the waterway is in excellent condition.

Bears are extremely human, even down to their footprints. But I am also a fly fisherman, so I have fished beside brown bears in Alaska and was once charged by a black bear. I love bears.

I've taken a mail packet boat along the southern Newfoundland coast and spent some time on St. Pierre and Miquelon watching the seal colonies. I like pine trees. I like cold rivers.

I've never liked the moment of seeing something beautiful - a sunset, a moose, an elephant - and then raising a camera and trying to capture it for some future moment. That's always struck me as strange.

I usually fish a Hornberg or a Muddler Minnow, a deer-haired streamer that comes in a variety of sizes and colors but replicates a sculpin minnow or a grasshopper. Even if a trout doesn't take the larger streamers, it can usually be counted on to come up and give a look, revealing its location.

I once owned a home on an island off the coast of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

I'd love to do more woodworking, and maybe will someday, but I wasn't brought up in that environment. My wife is better at woodworking, and most around-the-house skills, than I am.

I actually believe in simplicity as a way of life. My wife and I are considering moving into a yurt!

Fishing the small streams of New Hampshire is a pastime that combines hiking, map reading, and bushwhacking - plenty of it.

As someone who has moved around a fair amount, I wondered what it would be like to stay rooted to one place, one community.

When a trout rises to a fly, it does not swim as much as tilt its fins and jet skyward.

I am almost certain fishermen posess a peculiar bend to their makeup. Fisherman are optimists, and the fish in the future is always preferable to the fish at hand. Even the best fishermen catch fish only a small percentage of the time, which means we persevere in a sport that features failure as its main ingredient. Truly great days, when the fish hammer the fly as soon as it lands on the water are rare.

I learned to look up suddenly from a hatch or feeding frenzy and find myself momentarily removed from solid earth. I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself

I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself.

I live in a beautiful part of the world - western New Hampshire along the Baker River - and my family and I spend a lot of time outdoors.