Remembering Jimmy Carter, our greatest fly-fishing president
Many presidents have fished, but few had the soul of an angler.
On president Jimmy Carter's passing, many have noted his role as our greatest humanitarian president. I'd argue Jimmy Carter was also our greatest fly-fishing president, of the many who have cast a line.
I’m certain he won’t ever be surpassed as the Fishiest President, unless Donald Junior hits the Oval while there are still trout chasing streamers.
As Mark Kurlansky writes in essential fly-fishing reading The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing, most presidential anglers picked up the sport to politick, but Carter was a true-blue outdoorsman from his boyhood.
When he became governor of Georgia, he stared fly-fishing in the Chattahoochee and became committed, including through his presidency.
One anecdote Kurlansky relayed:
We often landed in the helicopter at Camp David, changed clothes while the White House press corps departed to a nearby Maryland town, and then secretly took off again to land forty minutes later in a pasture alongside Spruce Creek in Pennsylvania for a couple of days of secluded fly fishing.
Whether or not there’s ever another angler as skilled in the White House, there probably won’t be as thoughtful an angling writer. Carter’s greatest hits on fly fishing are worth a read. Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, and Carter all wrote about fishing, but Carter had the soul of a poet:
To present the proper fly to a rising fish demands the greatest degree of determination, study, planning, and practice, and there is always something more to discover. In the woods or on a stream, my concentration is so intense that for long periods the rest of the world is almost forgotten.
His book “An Outdoor Journal” is well worth a read.
These images are from his Spruce Creek Diary from Fly Fisherman magazine, another great time.
After my week on Spruce Creek, I could see very clearly how far I still have to go to realize one of my goals in life: to become a good fly fisherman. But I look forward to the challenge—and to the excitement it brings.
Here it is in PDF format:
Even into his later years, Carter still got after big fish. Here he is fishing in Argentina in his seventies:
President Jimmy Carter
Tributes are pouring in. Here are a few more, testaments to a life well-lived, from Fly Fisherman, Trout Unlimited, and the American Museum of Fly Fishing.
