Fishing is Metal, Choose Your Footwear Accordingly.
Posted in arriving in style, art lessons, Black Sabbath!, Bones!, Buster Saving You Money Everyday, Corporate Fly Fishing Still Sucks, Flotsam, Friends of Buster, SALT!, soul, Why do we make this so complicated?, You Won't Find This Shit On The Fly Fishing Rabbi on June 2nd, 2010 by SmithhammerI recently had the good fortune of chasing epic bones with Field and Stream, Angling Trade and FlyFish Journal editor, Kirk Deeter. You can tell a lot about a guy by spending a day fishing with him, and Kirk is the kind of guy I would choose to fish with anytime – easygoing, but ever vigilant and all business when it’s game time. 
Yet there was one thing about Kirk that left me wondering, and required followup – his choice of footwear for the flats. Far be it for me to shirk my journalistic duties, so I got in touch with Kirk to get to the bottom of this.
Q: As a well-connected industry professional, you could obviously pick up the phone and have any top-of-the-line flats boot on your desk in 24 hours. Yet you choose a pair of Chuck Taylors instead. ‘Splain, please.
KD: I had to wear special orthopedic shoes when I was a little kid…and now I think that most of the flats boots out there look almost exactly like those orthopedic shoes did. So I just won’t wear ‘em. For the record, I don’t wear a helmet when I fish either.
Q: Every flats boot I’ve ever seen seems to come in light colors. You went with black. Is that simply because black is the most fucking metal color of the spectrum? Have you noticed an increase in your hookup ratio?
KD: I like black Chucks because they seem to camouflage my feet in the clouds of silt I kick up as I wade the flats. Granted, the fish are usually freaked out by the clouds either way, so I can’t claim a hookup ratio advantage… but I take comfort in knowing that the fish never know WHOSE feet caused the clouds… follow? And yes, I believe fly fishing and heavy metal music (or punk music) go hand-in-hand, in that you either “feel it and get it” right away, or not. Some people equate fly fishing with bluegrass, which is total bullshit. Fly fishing is metal (or punk). Chucking spoons is disco.
Q: I asked our research department to do a little homework, and they found that you can get 5-6 pairs of Chucks for the price of one pair of famous-maker flats boots. Are the rest of us taking crazy pills here?
KD: Nah… to each his own. But… A) Chucks function better than most wading boots when you cast from the deck of a skiff, B) Chucks dry faster, and weigh less in checked luggage, C) You get the same sole
protection from coral for a fraction of the price, and D) You never know when you’re going to get back to the boat ramp and want to pick right up with a game of H-O-R-S-E or some heated one-on-one for guide tips.
Q: The sun and the heat can do weird things to a person in the tropics. Have you ever imagined while wading around that you are Joey Ramone in your Chucks and that the mangroves are thousands of your adoring fans? Have you ever thought of putting a whammy bar on your fly rod?
KD: I had an adoring fan once, but we got married. On the Ramones fantasy… yes, but it’s actually more of a “Dee Dee” thing. A bonefish reveals a glistening tail, and in my head, I hear the bass player shout out “1-2-3-4!” After that, it’s all bar chords and amplified feedback (which pretty much describes my casting style). If the song isn’t wrapped in about 2 minutes and 7 seconds… I know I fucked it up.
My fly rod is my “whammy bar.” What do you call yours?
For one of the best places on the planet to give your Chucks a workout, hit this.
