Jeremy Foster grew up fishing in Utah the way most mountain kids do — not as a hobby, but as a given. Weekend camping trips with family. Cold mornings on his grandfather's boat on Strawberry Reservoir, bundled up in the Wasatch Range, waiting on a big rainbow that may or may not show. No particular method. Just water, time, and the people who took him there.
He didn't pick up a fly rod until he was an adult. By then he'd already left Utah, moved to the southeast, and started building a life on the Florida coast. The fly rod came through his girlfriend's father, who handed it to him and walked him out onto the Gulf flats and told him — with full conviction — if it ain't chartreuse, there ain't no use. The man fished a TFO Lefty Kreh. The source checks out.
That was three years ago.
Last summer, Jeremy and his girlfriend finished the Sprinter van they'd been building for a couple of years. They pointed it west.
The plan was Utah — the streams and reservoirs he'd grown up on, the water that had been in the back of his mind since he moved away. Except this time he had a fly rod. This time he knew what he was doing. More or less.
He fished every spot he could get back to. Streams he'd waded as a kid with spinning gear, now read differently — the seams, the structure, the way the current braids through a bend. At some point, on a small stream he'd first fished somewhere around age ten, he pulled a big brown on the fly. Standing in the same water, twenty-five years on.
He'll tell you he kicked himself a little for not finding fly fishing sooner. For all those years out West without it. But only a little. Because the trip wasn't really about what he'd missed — it was about what the rod had given him back. A reason to go again. A new way into something he already loved.
"It was such a crazy feeling," he said. "Old places in a new way."
Back in Florida, his life is organized around the conditions. He lives in Santa Rosa Beach. He fishes the Gulf side, walks the flats on Choctawhatchee Bay, drives up to Blue Ridge when he needs small trout water. When the wind goes flat and the beach lays down, word travels fast. Everyone drops what they're doing. You don't get many of those days, so you don't waste them.
He spent nearly two years before landing his first red. Long walks. Long days. A lot of empty-handed drives home. Never came close to burning out. Just went back each time more interested than the last — in the cast, in the read, in the stalk. The fish was the goal, but the goal wasn't what kept him going.
"The camping trips, the beach walks, the friends I've met — they're just as much a part of the reward as the catch I'm ultimately working towards."
That's not something you say after a good season. That's something you figure out after a lot of long ones.
He's got tarpon on the list this year. Trips planned, intent locked. A big jack from the boat would go on the board too. His heart still pulls back West — always more streams, always another bend to push around — but the time is harder to find now, with work and family pulling their weight.
When you ask him where he'd fish tomorrow if he could fish anywhere, he goes west first, then catches himself.
"The guilty answer is right here at the beach. I truly love how much fishing is able to be a part of my every day life."
Reds, pompano, bonita, blues, jacks. Sight fishing in clear water. Home for lunch.
He means it as a joke. Mostly.
There's a reason he clicked with fly fishing the way he did — he'll say it himself. He loves to go deep on things. Loves the feeling of a pursuit that won't let you fully arrive. Fly fishing gave him that in full measure: a craft with no ceiling, a community that welcomed him without asking him to prove anything first, and enough geography to keep chasing it across a lifetime.
The chartreuse line still floats around in his head, unprompted, the way a song does when you can't place where you heard it. A reminder of where he started. Who handed him the rod.
He still doesn't know if it's actually true.
Probably doesn't matter.
Sean Nguyen (@vin_nguyen)