Thoughts On Fly Fishing

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Originally uploaded by ...olson family...

It has been a little over a year since I took up fly fishing. I feel that my background has helped me make the transition. At about age nine I was introduced to bass and walleye fishing while visiting my uncle’s farm in NW Pennsylvania. We moved to North Carolina when I was ten and I have since had many good times with my Dad chasing largemouth bass with a spinning rod. I also gained some insights into trout tromping through streams in Colorado with an ultra light and handful of spinners. When I bought my first fly rod last summer I didn’t feel I was learning a new sport, just a new technique.

One of the problems with fly fishing is that it is too often treated as an elitist pursuit elevated above other, supposedly less dignified, ways to catch fish. I believe that successful fly fishermen understand that fly fishing is an effective technique, but is merely a subset of the broader art of angling.

This sport is about fish, not expensive equipment, status, or anything else. Successful fishermen respond to the patterns of fish, not the latest fad, or marketing campaign. I have learned that fish eat aquatic insects so frequently that mastering fly fishing allows you to consistently catch large numbers of fish. I also remain committed to my spinning and casting rods to deliver big fish, particularly largemouth bass. While even billfish are caught on fly, the most effective techniques for getting bites from big fish usually require a spinning or casting rod. I often fish with a fly rod, a spinning rod, and a casting rod to take advantage of whatever I discover about how the fish are feeding at a given time.

I also believe that knowledge of a given technique will compliment other techniques. For example, bass fishing teaches an angler to vary presentation depth to locate fish and their feeding zone. This lesson is important to fly fishermen who are often obsessed with matching a surface hatch while ignoring the predominance of subsurface feeding. Nymphing, on the other hand, is a solid general angling skill attained from fly fishing. The skill needed to float a pheasant tail, or BH prince in front of a trout in a creek channel can be applied to deadly techniques such as floating a curly tailed grub in a river current to a smallmouth. These are a couple examples of what I hope to gain from learning differing techniques and applying the lessons broadly.

I was in a fly shop a few months ago and watched an aspiring fly fishermen drop about $600 on what he was convinced was needed to get started. I learned with a $30 combo and about $15 worth of flies from Wal-mart.