The joy of being an indiscriminate fly fisherman.

The joy of being an indiscriminate fly fisherman is that the only thing one needs to do properly is hook a fish.

Not that there's any lasting fun in slapping the water on a backcast, or spooking trout out of a hole surrounded by more accomplished and suddenly angry anglers. There's something to be said for honing casting and fly-tying skills, and building knowledge of the stream ecosystem and habits of trout and other gamefish.

And while others are saying it, I'll be fishing.

Which is what I found myself doing Sunday evening for the first time this year, hip-deep in Oil Creek with the sun slipping over a high ridge and the promise of a grannom caddis hatch beginning to unfold on the water.

The fly rod was new, a warranty replacement for the Redington that snapped during an Idaho fishing trip. The chest waders were old and somehow hadn't self-repaired their leaks over the winter, nor had the felt sole reattached itself to my wader boot.

So I stood midstream, lop-legged and wet at one knee, throwing Mike Laskowski's green-butt caddis pattern at rising trout, alongside four common mergansers, my wife and seven other anglers engaged in the same wonderful waste of time.

Half an hour in a feeding brown trout took the hook as if I had done something to earn its trust. I imagine it thinking, if trout do think, that the fly had to be the real deal, because no fly fisherman would dare let it land that hard, in that coil of tippet, that many times without either finally getting it right or finally giving up.

I released the brown, made to cast again in the gloaming and heard a hiss and snap that's associated only with bullwhips and too-fast backcasts. I still don't know where the fly ended up, but I found at that point it was the only grannom pattern in my flybox. Had it been any earlier in the day I might have gone back to Mike Laskowski's shop, Oil Creek Outfitters, but he was a quarter-mile upstream, actually catching fish.

I moved on to my default fly, a parachute Adams, which is said to resemble so many insects that it makes a good all-around attractor pattern. And darned if I didn't attract another brown, which might have thought that little white parachute was whipped cream on its dessert. It devoured the fly, unraveling the hackle and making it unfishable.

Naturally it was my last parachute Adams, which I'd have known had I inspected the gear (see: leaky waders).

By this time a sliver of moon was out, the common mergansers were off and the hatch was on, not as thick as anglers had hoped, but respectable and bringing slurping trout to the surface in little dimples and great leaps. For the duration of the rise, until moments before the mink forded the creek and put down all the trout around me, I tried to thread a hair-sized tippet through a hair-sized eye on a fly I could not identify in the dark, and which I lost in the flowing water before wading to shore on a slick bed made more slippery by the absence of one felt sole.

I'll be lucky to have another day so bad the rest of the year.

MATT MARTIN, managing editor/sports, can be reached at 870-1704 or by e-mail at matt.martin@timesnews.com. For more outdoors coverage, visit www.nwpaoutdoors.com.