Yesterday was the Winter Solstice – that day when winter officially begins, and the sun shines the least it will all year long.

It’s a day you notice not because it promises any immediate relief from the cold and dark, but because it offers the faintest hope; from now on, each day grows a tiny bit longer instead of a tiny bit shorter.

With winter’s worst yet to come, progress of any kind makes a real impression on those of us who think light and warm and Green Drakes are better than dark and freezing and nothing.

Me on a small stream last summer. A repeat is many months away... (photo courtesy Jim Troyer)

And while surviving a mountain winter from the heavily insulated, nicely heated Trout Underground/Man Cave World Headquarters doesn’t exactly qualify me to write a Jack London-esque short story, sunsets at 4:30 in the afternoon do eventually take their toll.

If you’re a short-horizon type like I am – someone who tends to focus on the near-term situation instead of the long-term picture – milestones are the tools that keep you going when the light at the end of the tunnel is dim indeed.

Some fish even when the river’s too high (and going higher), and others decide that writing about something interesting is almost as much fun as doing something interesting, and hole up in their office and type.

Chris Raine – being neither – is (typically) scattered across a half-dozen different bamboo fly rod building projects, while the local guides either work hard on their businesses, or essentially take a few months off.

Others tie flies like obsessed shamans – wielding fly tying tools like talismans meant to ward off madness – and some fools even clean their fly lines and oil their reels for next year.

That we look to January as the start of the year is nothing more than a convenience borne of rigid thinking.

The real fly fishing year begins (and ends) yesterday, and what are you doing to get ready – or simply make it to – next season?

See you in the (growing) light of day, Tom Chandler.