Syracuse.com - Meet Skip Adams, CNY's fly fishing Episcopal bishop (video included)

[HuntingNY-News]

Friday was the kind of morning that try trout fishermen’s souls. Like every other stream in Central New York lately, Skaneateles Creek was way down and clear – the kind of water in which skittish trout can easily see and hear an angler coming. The Rev. Gladstone Bailey “Skip” Adams, on a rare morning off for him, invited me...

Dick Blume/The Post-StandardEpiscopal Bishop Skip Adams on Skaneateles Creek Friday.

Friday was the kind of morning that try trout fishermen’s souls.

Like every other stream in Central New York lately, Skaneateles Creek was way down and clear – the kind of water in which skittish trout can easily see and hear an angler coming.

The Rev. Gladstone Bailey “Skip” Adams, on a rare morning off for him, invited me to fish the stream, which flows out of the northern end of Skaneateles Lake.

Adams, 59, is the Episcopal bishop for the Central New York diocese. The Otisco resident oversees 93 churches in an area that stretches from Binghamton in the south to the St. Lawrence River in the north, and east from the Utica/Rome area to just before Geneva in the west. Before getting elected bishop in 2001, he was the pastor at St. James Episcopal Church in Skaneateles.

He said he still considers Skaneateles Creek as his “home waters” in the area. It’s the place where he caught his biggest stream trout ever – a 23 ½ inch brown on a nymph.

As expected, the fishing Friday was slow, but the conversation and warm, sunny weather more than made up for it.

“I love to fly fish and I occasionally work it into my sermons,” he said. “I’m always telling others to get out and try it. When they tell me they haven’t been out fishing lately, I tell them they have to repent. Unfortunately, I don’t always follow my own advice.”

This comes from a guy whose office at work has a fly fishing calendar and artificial flies on his desk, whose office at home includes a huge painting of a stream and a trout coming out of the water to take a fly — and who appeared in a recent issue of Fly Fish Journal, dressed in his bishop garb with a short, accompanying story that noted he’s “known to cast a fly in the center aisle of a cathedral where there’s plenty of room for some mid-winter practice.”

“And that’s true,” he said, laughing.

We started fishing Friday just after 8 a.m. After more than four hours on two different stretches of the stream, we had caught and released only two small trout and a couple of chubs.

I left, but Adams decided to keep at it. He had faith — and his calendar was clear until 4 p.m.

Shortly before 2, Adams called my cell phone. He had just gotten off the water. He said he had double-backed to one spot we had hit earlier.

“I saw a nice one rise in that pool. I let things calm down a bit and then I cast a parachute Adams (an artificial dry fly). I caught a nice, wild brown – just a touch over 15 inches,” he said. “It had big spots, a gorgeous yellow belly. It was beautiful.”

The following are excerpts of our conversations between casts that morning.

So, how’d you get your nickname?

I’m Gladstone Bailey Adams III. There is no fourth. I had two sons, but I didn’t go that route. Mom gave it to me when I was a kid. My dad had a nickname, my grandfather had a nickname. With a name like that you have to have a nickname. Since my mom knows me as Skip, that’s how God knows me.

How’s you get into fly fishing?

I grew up in Baltimore and grew up reservoir fishing, mostly for bass, bluegills and pumpkins seeds. I still have my old Mitchell 300 spinning outfit. I didn’t get into fly fishing until I was fresh out of the seminary in 1980 and assigned to a parish in Maryland. There was an Orvis shop there and I’d often go in there and salivate over the stuff I couldn’t afford. Eventually, I saved my pennies and bought a whole outfit — rod, reel, line, everything — for $92. The rod was Fiberglas. I still have it.

Who taught you to fly fish?

I mostly taught myself. It wasn’t that “River Runs Through It” stuff that got me going. I was doing it before all that. After the Maryland parish, I was assigned to a parish in New Hampshire, where I really honed my skills.

When you came to the Skaneateles Church in 1994, you must have a happy camper with all the fishing around here.

It’s funny, I can remember my first year people were constantly apologizing about the weather,. I’d always say, “You don’t have to apologize – trout live here!”

In addition, word got around somehow that I was into fly fishing and trout. Each spring, fishermen would call me right at church asking me what was happening with the annual brown drake hatch on the lake (an annual insect hatch that makes the fish actively feed on the lake’s surface). Some of those calls came from as far away as Pennsylvania.

Seriously, why is fly fishing such a passion for you?

Thoreau once said most people go fishing all their lives and it’s not fish they’re after. That’s the way it is for me. It’s about staying connected to the universe. Everything reflects the glory of God. When I’m in that environment, I’m close to God. My heart sings when I’m in those places where fish and water are.”

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog