It's a simple message.

There are outdoor experiences within a 30 min. drive of a place like downtown Seattle, or downtown Honolulu, or Chicago, or Denver, or NYC, that sync you up with a different kind of reality. Not the fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world of performance reviews and scheduling and kids and your retirement account, push notifications, congressional gridlock, endemic racism, terrorism. There are stories out there which are completely independent from our little human dramas, and when you go looking to play a part in them with a certain type of attention, they welcome you. This is not limited to fish, mind you! It just so happens that fishing is the focus of this blog, but the same can be said of any discipline of outdoor recreation.

Catching wild fish within a short drive of any downtown area is priceless. True, the activities of human beings affect how many fish I encounter, but for the most part, it's a section of my life that isn't driven by someone else's bottom line. When left to their own devices, wild fish happen by themselves. Waves, too. And powder. It's not in anyone's control. Getting close to those things, communing with them and syncing up with them, makes it a lot easier to keep up with the human side of the equation.

The opportunities for "Seattle Trout," that particular pedigree of high-brow, holier-than-thou fish, are not as numerous as I would like. After all, what can you expect from a creature who breathes water laced with traces from a $5 Starbucks latte? They don't hang around in big numbers, but I do love to chase them! During a recent Puget Sound summer I recorded my after-work trout sessions. Everything in this footage is within an hour of downtown Seattle, and most of it happened from 6 PM until dark during a few weeks in 2014. For those who know the area, I'm obviously not giving away any secrets here. The point of this post is that anyone with a set a regs and access to a map with little blue lines can find fish that put other metropolitan areas to shame. In Seattle, that means CUTTHROAT, west-slope and otherwise.

Fleetwood Mac-like YouTube Free Music Soundtrack

No, it's not New Zealand footage, nor Alaska, nor even the Missouri. If I could, I would fly half-way around the world and catch fish which are bigger, faster and stronger than any locals. It's what dreams are made of and those experiences are the best-in-class for a reason. I've helped convince local anglers that they should travel to these places so that they can catch exotic fish, and I've spend a ton of time dreaming about my trips as well. It's more than worthwhile, it's intoxicating! A trophy fish on the Deschutes is enviable, on the Skeena is a milestone, in Kamchatka it would pure glory (that someday I will know!). These fish fuel our dreams, and it's not just salmonids.

I'm no jet-setting angler, but I've found that you can get a lot of refreshment from an hour of cultivated activity close to home. It's remarkable how much of a sense of place you feel when you are connected to the land around you, not simply by an activity, but by the seasonal rhythms of the flies, tides, species and community.

It's the trophy fish that happens on your home water that should be placed on the highest pedestal. Not because that fish is the biggest or fastest, but because it's the hardest to catch and because it's the closest to home. Maybe it's the raging 'bow that hasn't been hooked all spring that goes ballistic when you set. Maybe it's the legit 20 in. sea-run cutthroat that hammers an early-morning popper in glassy water. Maybe it's that kyped brown nestled in a no-name stretch not far from where you are reading this in the American West. Or the 15 lb. South Shore bonefish. Wherever you are, it's the fish that you hook every now and then but hardly ever land. The one that you've lost before and bitterly cursed your careless mistakes. The local trophy makes you a better angler. It's the one you are looking for each time you present the fly. Will you be ready next time?

I was looking for my local trout trophy that summer, and I was trying to track down my trophy with specific techniques on specific days. Sometimes while tight-line nymphing, sometimes with particular dries. Can I get a nice fish on a skated caddis? What about an exact imitation of a stream -sample mayfly? How about on a 2-weight fiberglass rod? One summer, before I got my first GoPro, I fished exclusively streamers, and the motivation was the type of grab I got depending on the fly I was fishing! Yup, it gets strange when you really like to fly fish.

Despite the video record of some fun after-work sessions there is an inestimable gulf between the experience and the trip report.

Any outdoors person with an ounce of digital experience has felt this. What's going on in the moment is about 180 degrees different from what you capture on your GoPro, or your SLR, or your post-trip blog. A good photographer can take an instant of the experience, and with an alchemy of perception, change it into something sublime. And although I envy this ability, there's something disingenuous about this process if it's not executed in perfectly good faith.The best outdoor photos don't make something less-than-stellar into something glorious—they capture and amplify a part of what made the experience itself great.

Anyone who has had a good day on a guide trip has also felt this phenomenon. If you like to take photos throughout the day, the gap becomes even more apparent. The pics touch on single instances, but the experience, the totality, is obviously missing. This happens a lot during really good days on the water. We see the photo after the trip and say,"I thought that fish was bigger." Or you'll be recounting the day to another angler only to find that the reason the fish was memorable (huge streamer eat and genuine reaction including swear words!) is nowhere to be found in the photo (awkwardly angled trout long-arm). Sometimes the big fish don't fight that hard, and sometimes you remember the spots or fins of a unique fish but don't take a picture. There are a lot of photos on The Avid Angler which focus on the angler himself while playing the fish; I think this is a great way to keep perspective on what really counts.

Unless you are among a truly skilled elite, the photos or videos you take don't easily tell the story to people who weren't there. Even then, I think there is a massive temptation to take great photos in bad faith and call them authentic. What I mean by this is taking a photograph or a video which falsely portrays the experience on the water. Maybe the trip was terrible, the anglers were freezing, nobody caught fish, and there was tension in the boat. An artsy photo of a cast during a trip like this with a caption that reads "Living the Dream" is not necessarily in good taste!

Natural places are under assault. The need to communicate what really happens when we capture wild fish and ski backcountry powder and catch pristine waves has never been stronger. So how do you bridge that gap? What if there were a way to quantify authenticity? To capture it, to push it out, to amplify it, to harness it? To filter out the fake stuff, celebrate creativity, and focus on what really matters?

What if we could take the essence of our best days on the water and show it to others? Not in some grainy, fish-eyed video which pretty much always falls flat. Not in a hackneyed photo feed. And not in some idealized, unattainably perfect landscape photo with richer-than-life hues. Certainly not in sales-heavy exotic travel videos. But in real, human terms that cause whoever is listening or watching to get curious and learn more, right then.

I think technology can show us a new way to bridge this gap, perhaps even counteract the grip-and-grin tendencies social media has recently promoted.

The Puget Sound is not an easy place to fish.This is not apparent in social media feeds or blogs, but it's true. However, the rewards are outsized for those who put in the time to get to know the local waters. Bottom line, bridging the gap between the ideal and what's actually here is worth the time and effort.