I grew up with fish, flies and water. The summer of 1972 found our family standing on the banks of Squaw Creek in Montana's Gallatin River drainage. As my father surveyed the creek, he spotted the tell-tale flash of a nymphing fish. Handing me his rod, he excitedly pointed out the location and told me to cast. My two-handed, two-year-old compliance was not exactly graceful, but it put the fly were it needed to go. The fish moved again, my father shouted to set the hook, and soon I was clutching my first trout on a fly rod, a 13-inch rainbow. From that point on, fly fishing was always a part of my life.

The summer of my fifth year saw me in the mountains of New Mexico's Vermejo Park Ranch, exploring the wild places and the wild fish found there. It was the first of many Julys spent at Vermejo, and it was also where I began my formal fly-fishing education, listening in as my father taught his annual schools. Watching him teach, and listening to his lectures, instilled in me a desire to pursue fly fishing as a profession as much as a pastime.

My father published his first fly-fishing book, Nymphing, when I was nine years old. Seeing all of his long-hand and typewritten effort bound so neatly into 192 pages inspired me to want the same. Four years later, my first real article was published in Fly Tyer magazine. That article started me on the road to regular writing and illustrating.

Around the same time as that first Fly Tyer article, my father produced the instructional video, Nymphing. Seeing the 16mm cameras, the boom mics and the dailies, I was again smitten: I had to do something like that. My desires became reality in 1986, when my father and I hauled our Video-8 equipment out to Montana and shot The Fabulous Bighorn, the tape that kicked off the Skills of Fly Fishing series. Such productions continued through my high-school and college years, ultimately driving me to study film as my major.

My educational backgrounds in both fly fishing and film melded in 1991, when I worked on Robert Redford's silver-screen adaptation of Norman Maclean's famed novella, A River Runs Through It. The film seemed to bring me almost full-circle — the main fishing-scene locations were only a couple of miles from where I caught my first-ever trout on Squaw Creek.

After River, I began to focus intensely on fly-casting methodology. My mind-set towards casting eventually became the impetus for a book. The end result, Jason Borger's Nature of Fly Casting-a modular approach, was released in late 2001.

In 2004, I joined the newly formed Fly Casting Institute as the Education Director. The Institute has provided further opportunity to add to the fly-casting knowledge base, from both mechanical and medical aspects.

For me, fly fishing is a never-ending journey. Fly fishing has taken me to the most wild and beautiful places and shown me the deeply involved rhythms of water, land and fish. Fly fishing has opened doors, and has created an arena where both the artistic and technical sides of myself can meet. Fly fishing is part of who I am.