About this blog
This blog is simply meant as a place to document my journey into and through fly fishing. Below I have included a bit of background on me (which I chose to write in the third-person for some reason) for those curious to get to know me a bit better.
Thank you so much for taking some time to read through my entries and take part in this hobby with me. As a beginner, I greatly appreciate any comments with support or advice, too.
About Joshua Cook
Childhood
Growing up, Josh played baseball and soccer on several local and travel teams. He has always loved the outdoors and animals, keeping numerous pets throughout childhood. Originally, he kept lizards he and his dad caught in the yard, but eventually he adopted a Bearded Dragon named Bob who lived with him until passing in 2013. In high school, Josh got into the saltwater and reef keeping hobby with a 28-gallon tank in his bedroom. He took this hobby to his first year in college by maintaining a 2-gallon nanoreef in his dorm room.
Education
Originally from southern California, Josh attended undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine earning degrees in biochemistry and molecular biology and in chemistry. There, he conducted research on the obligate intracellular protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii.
After graduating in 2017, he moved “back east” to earn his Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School. Early on in this program, Josh found his passion for programming and data science, and was able to convince his advisor to allow him to pursue computational biology for his dissertation research. Five arduous years later, Josh defended his dissertation Studying the tissue specificity of cancer driver genes through KRAS and genetic dependency screens and was ready to leave academia.
Current
Nowadays, Josh is a computational biologist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston, Massachusetts. With a proper “9-to-5,” Josh spends more time on his hobbies outside of work. In the last years of graduate school, he got into backpacking and has now made the time to go on camping and backpacking trips as frequently as possible. More recently, spurred by a fishing rod gifted from a friend moving back to Sweden, he is consumed with fishing…
Sunrise in Tonto National Forest, AZ.
Fishing Experience
Getting started
Josh first started fishing in the spring of 2023 with a 6’ Ugly Stik spinning rod. Other than a few sporadic outings when he was younger, Josh had no experience with fishing, but instantly loved the excuse to be outside and the sense of adventure.
Living in Boston, he learned to fish along the Charles River, first with plastics, then more complex lures include spinners and spoons. Outside of winter, Josh spends hours on the weekend and most spare moments of sunlight before and after work walking along the Esplanade trying new locations and techniques. It started slow, but Josh eventually improved and can now reliably catch a fish, though its often just a few blue gills or perch. He enjoys it nonetheless.
Trout fishing in Boston is limited. The most popular spot to target trout is Jamaica Pond which is stocked with rainbows and/or browns twice a year. It’s a heavily pressured, artificial body of water, but it’s the most accessibly trout fishing in the city. After many, many hours, Josh was finally able to catch a rainbow trout in the pond in the fall of 20231.
Adventures
Though new to the hobby, Josh has had adventures fishing in rivers and streams outside the city, near his parents’ home in Arizona, and even in Yellowstone National Park where he caught his first trout ever: a few juvenile browns, rainbows, and even a native cutthroat (which he returned to the river, of course)2. These outings to new, adventurous locations has solidified his enjoyment and interest in the sport.
The fishing spot I shared with a few elk in Yellowstone National Park
Fly fishing
Over the winter of 2023-24, Josh decided that he would pick up fly fishing in 2024. At the time of writing, it is early February with daily temperatures barely rising above freezing, but he is obsessed. He has the necessary gear to get started and is now looking forward to the spring so he can get after it.
The trick was switching to larger spoons, specifically a 1/4th oz. Acme Kastmaster which is still my favorite spoon. ↩︎
The cutthroat trout is the only native species to the Yellowstone ecosystem, but rainbows and browns were introduced during stocking programs in the mid-1900’s. Presently, the cutthroat is strictly protected, while anglers are encouraged to keep non-native species; you can read more about this here. Therefore, though they were small, I kept the four browns and rainbows I caught and cooked them for dinner that night. ↩︎