The February dinner meeting of the Fly Casters Club of Boston, held in the venerable Union Club on Park Street, featured a cash liquor bar, an open oyster bar, a well-grilled lamb chop and the conviviality of anglers who told fish stories and had pictures to back them up. It was a treat to be in the company of these men (and they were all men) but the greatest pleasure of the evening turned up in the after-dinner conversation with one of my tablemates.

My host, Cambridge realtor Richard Diamond, had invited me in December but a major snowstorm altered my plans. On the appointed Thursday in February, the weather was slightly more benign, though still raw and spitting snow, and the evening's entertainment was provided by members rather than paid speakers. One member regaled us with tales from a Bahamian bonefishing trip when he and three other Fly Casters had stayed at Crazy Charlie's Bang-Bang Club (a resurrection of a former hunting club) and caught bonefish, it seemed, from dawn to dusk. Every other photo was of an angler with a bending flyrod; every other picture was of a bonefish. Another member took us down Oregon's fabled McKenzie River in a drift boat (a McKenzie boat, of course), hoisting rainbows from every run and riffle; and a third straddled the continent with one foot in small Montana streams which produced brook trout and cutthroats, and the other in Buzzard's Bay where striped bass abounded. It was enough to make me want to rise at the crack of dawn, pull on my waders and go fishing somewhere, for something -- anything -- in defiance of the calendar.

But the highlight for me was my conversation with the gentlemen on my left, a Newton resident named Bob Guttentag (I neglected to ask if he was a fellow Swede). When I mentioned that my home water was the pool at Upper Dam, Bob told me that as a young man he had fished in Mooselookmeguntic (which drains through Upper Dam into Upper Richardson Lake) with Herbie Welch.

Herbie Welch! The man is legend in those parts. Though his friend Carrie Stevens won wide acclaim for her streamer flies, it was Welch who virtually invented the streamer for catching trout and salmon in the Rangeley watershed. Herbie Welch came to the Rangeley area in 1903, according to Graydon and Leslie Hilyard's wonderful book Carrie Stevens, and established himself as the region's premier guide, fly-tyer and taxidermist, the latter skill enhanced by his training as an artist in Paris (France). From the look of Herbie, in the photo on page 55 of the Hilyards' book, he must have singlehandedly swelled the ranks of female flyfishers who no doubt fought over his services. (As a guide, of course.) Herbie was still keeping shop at Haines Landing when I first fished in the area, but I never met him. Yet here at my table was a man who had fished with Herbie Welch! Guttentag said Herbie yelled at him for having an unorthodox tackle rig and was generally difficult to please (you had to please a guide like Herbie, and not vice-versa) but a great man to fish with.

Every summer I walk across the dam to make a small quiet pilgrimage to Camp Midway, where Carrie Stevens created her famous Gray Ghost streamer. I re-read the bronze plaque honoring Carrie and draw a cupful of cold, clear water from the well opposite the camp and think on the history of the place and the anglers who came before me. This season I'll have a new memory, a living link to the great Herbie Welch.