Ryan Brennecke / The BulletinFishing and wading downstream on the Metolius in the middle of a Saturday morning. Much of the 23-mile river is accessible by road or by trail. For best fishing, try early in the morning or late in the day.

A question nonanglers like to ask is, “Where is your favorite place to fish?”

I like to say, “Wherever I’m going next.” Last week, I looked forward to fishing the Metolius.

It was a Saturday morning in July. We walked upstream and began to work our way down. More than a mile of river stretched below us.

Quintin McCoy, the only 18-year-old left in America who has not downloaded the Pokémon Go app, tied on a Muddler Minnow.

Ryan Brennecke, a photographer at The Bulletin, blood-knotted a piece of 5X to his leader and terminated at a No. 16 dry mayfly pattern, while I rigged a heavy stonefly nymph and a San Juan worm.

We’d leapfrog down, hitting the best water.

We are creatures of habit; we are watchers and followers. When we go fishing, we often try to find out what is working for our fellow creatures, where they’re fishing and what they’re tying on. We end up at the same places, doing things the same way.

That’s why some of our waters get so much pressure, while other good fisheries go unnoticed and underutilized. That’s not a bad thing.

Those of us that hope for solitude or unstressed fish in Central Oregon’s famous waters can find what we’re looking for when we try to do the opposite thing. The crowd goes one way or another. Figure out what they’re doing then go the other direction.

Quintin waded in on the first run and cast the Muddler along a seam before he switched to a Stimulator with rubber legs.

Brennecke is not only good with a camera, he’s a thoughtful, accomplished fly fisherman. Remember when we loaded our cameras with film? He still does — for special circumstances. He has set a challenge for himself to take 36 exposures of film in the course of each 30 days. The light was playing on Quintin while mayflies and midges danced over the water. Brennecke set down his rod and picked up the camera.

After 25 minutes, I made my first cast, letting the stonefly nymph drag the San Juan worm down through the braided currents. Trout shifted, followed, drifted back. I waited, watched and cast again. On my 10th drift, a fish took the bottom fly and sent an electric jolt up through the line. He was there for a moment and then was gone.

The sun was well up now. I changed flies, opting for a small squirrel-hair streamer with a blood-red bead. For an hour, we worked down through shallow runs and long current seams. We used different flies and techniques, and we all touched fish. When my streamer swung through the tail of a riffle, a small trout grabbed and we had a brief struggle before I brought it to hand.

Hikers and dog-walkers stopped to pass the time of day. Families paused in midhike to watch us cast. Pokémon trainers walked with their heads down. I stuck my streamer in the top of an alder.

When we had waded so far that we ran into private land again, we pulled out of the river. That’s when it hit me. We’d fished more than a mile of one of the West’s famous rivers and hadn’t bumped into another fisherman. We had approached the river with a different mindset, looked at it a different way.

In Camp Sherman, we threw balls of money and captured roast beef sandwiches. People wandered around, looked down at their phones, seizing and training figments of someone else’s imagination. Augmented reality.

We stopped to look for rainbows under a bridge. The 18-year-old crawled into the shade below the structure and found a golden stonefly. He threw it like a ball at the water and no trout rose up from under the bridge to eat it. You can do battle with wild things, but they’re hard to train.

Fly-fishing: It is the ultimate location-based reality mobile game. Developed and perpetuated by thoughtful people like Dame Juliana Berners and Izaak Walton, it is the different thing.

— Gary Lewis is the host of Frontier Unlimited TV and author of Fishing Central Oregon, Fishing Mount Hood Country, Hunting Oregon and other titles. Contact Gary at www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.