An anniversary that I don't want to forget is that 20 years ago this summer I took up fly fishing. My father had died in December 1992 and my brother I found an assortment of fly fishing gear in his workshop. Dad had built a number of niche casting rods for friends and family who fished for crappie and bass on TVA lakes but my brother had no recollection of his ever using a fly rod.

"I do," I said.

One day after work dad took me, a Sears Ted Williams fiberglass fly rod, a wind-up automatic reel with green fly line and brown leader, and his regular dull aluminum tackle box with his name stenciled on the top, out to Melton Hill Lake, a relative newcomer among TVA reservoirs.

Dad's fishing had a theoretical bent. He subscribed to multiple outdoor magazines, read books about epic fishing expeditions to faraway lands, and posited ideas to his fishing buddies who would sometimes say "Yeah, Ben, that OUGHT to work."

The came the fishing experiments, persistently followed on days off and after work. Dad kept notes in about all his ideas and fishing experiences in handwritten draftsman's lettering, recording all the conditions including temperature, wind, lake conditions, and cloud cover. He meticulously recorded the variables, such as when he switched lures or added shot.

The object was to move the lure out farther into the lake - out where the fish lay in deeper waters. To do that without a boat took a supple rod with a lot of flex and some weight in the lure. That's if you were fishing for bass with a conventional rod and 8-10 pound monofilament line on an older model Garcia-Mitchell spinning reel. You cast a Rapala lure out over still waters and jigged the lure back to attract fish.

There are many exceptions, but for most dry fly anglers the trick is to cast a nearly weightless fly into a cold river or creek and land it quietly on a specific spot slightly upstream of a feeding fish. Skipping the boring charts and graphs, a significant difference is that fly anglers cast the line -- which is heavier near the tip -- and the fly goes along for the ride. Adding too much weight to the end of the line disrupts the nuanced mix of mass, flex, precision and balance that are the hallmarks of a fly fishing rig.

I am disappointed to report that I have neither his notes for this fishing trip, nor do I have the magazine article that inspired him to walk away from his usual casting rod and reel, buy everything it took to go fly fishing EXCEPT flies, walk out onto a muddy spit jutting into Melton Hill Lake, tie a heavy wooden treble-hooked plug on to the fly leader, and give the whole rig a mighty backcast.

He spent most of the next hour retrieving the lure from way high in a nearby willow, yelling at me to stay out of the deep mud. One cast. And then the sun set and we went home. He bought a boat later that year so that we could motor out to the deeper water and, as far as I knew until after he died, he never touched another fly rod.

In late 1992, I found the rod, another that was imitation bamboo, the still-rigged reel, and a lot of unused accessories and the butt-ends of a few long two-piece fly fishing rods, all ordered from long-bankrupt Herter's mail order catalog.

"It's a lot of gear for just one trip," my brother said. "Oh wait a second." From another corner in the shop he retrieved one of dad's custom casting rods and then matched it to the base of one of the incomplete fly rods. "The casting rod - it's the top half of the fly rod. He used fly rods as blanks to build those casting rods," he said. "That's why you could cast those things for miles. Guess he never got around to these two."

Or maybe there was one world left to conquer, something more than one cast into a willow tree, a follow up trip postponed too long by his arthritis and heart problems. And that second rod - had that been for me? Something to join us after my brother went to college? I looked at the rod and the old gear and resolved to conquer this world for him.

When it warmed in March, I took that Ted Williams rod, found a book on fly fishing, read about how to cast, updated the reel and line, and bought some real flies that, I found later, imitated nothing that any self respecting trout would eat. I took it all up to Great Smoky Mountain National Park and stood on a rock over a quiet pool on the Little River, let out some line like it said it in the book and gave the whole rig a mighty backcast followed by an overly energetic forward cast, which -- 20 years later -- still plagues my cast.

Beginners luck. The fly went roughly where I'd aimed it, floated for a while, and I tried again. A year later, with help from a couple of guides, a new rod and a new reel, waders and other gear, I duplicated the success of that first cast. Before that spring was over, on my 40th birthday, I pulled in my first trout. My feet were planted on the sandy bottom of the cold Clinch River, the primary source for Melton Hill Lake where many years before, my father had stood on a muddy streak of land and made his one cast with a fly rod.