One day while digging around in the garage I came across my dad’s fly-rod. The fiberglass rod was packed away in a PVC looking plastic tube with a twist-off cap. The reel was an old auto-retrieve reel that failed more than it didn’t and I soon learned how to dissemble it in lightning speed and re-coil the spring that was responsible for winding up the worn-out line. I had no idea how to tie a leader or tippet onto the line so I left what was already there and ran it through the guides.
There was definitely a mystique to the concept of fly-fishing. Before my dad’s stroke or before he “became sick,” as my mom would say, we watched the men in the neighborhood as they grabbed their waders and fly fishing gear and headed down to the lake. We tagged along with our own spinning rods and would fish for pan-fish. After a while however, I would take a break and watch the old guys labor over throwing 30 or 40 feet of line behind them, wait for the rod to load, and then snap the tip of the rod forward in an attempt to shoot even more line out over the water. It seemed like a lot of work and I don’t remember them ever catching anything. I figured it was because most of the time, they had to stand too far away from the reeds so as to not tangle up the line they had laying all around their feet. Subsequently, they never fished where the fish were. “There must be something to this though,” I thought while I watched but just couldn’t figure it out.
A couple years later I’ve found the gear and after assembling the rod I walked out the door of the garage and looked out into the June sun. The clouds had just moved out from the last night’s storm and the puddles that always formed at the end of our driveway were still lingering. Our yard was very large and since half the trees we planted the summer before died, there was plenty of room to practice. The puddles became targets and after checking to make sure nobody was looking, I began emulating the guys I watched on the lake.
I started slow. Only stripping a few feet out at first, I brought the rod-tip straight up in the air, stopped, and whipped the tip forward. “Snap,” was the result, which I thought was what was supposed to happen and kept doing it; that is until I looked at the leader and noticed that somehow it kept getting shorter and filled with more and more knots.
After developing the right timing and force behind casting the rod preventing the snapping sound I began folding the line out in front of me, setting it down on the ground with the softness of the poplar leaves that fell in fall. I then began setting the line down in the puddles doing everything I could to not form ripples. Soon the line was settling more like feathers than leaves and I began taking a few steps back, stripping more and more line out until I was casting roughly 60 feet.
I took a lunch break and then returned to the make-belief fishing pond. The puddles were getting smaller and my casting was becoming more precise and although the blister on the palm of my hand was just about to break through, I decided to change my target from the open spaces of the puddles to the trunks of trees.
We had all types of trees from full-grown red oaks, to maples, to pines, to Russian olives. On some, the canopy dropped to just a few feet off the ground, which required a perfect side-arm cast to reach the trunk. I walked from tree to tree and imagined there would be a fish lurking at the base of every one. The goal was to hit the trunk on the first or second cast. Missing the trunk meant missing the fish.
By the end of the day I had realized a couple things. One, casting although tricky, was doable and two, too much play between the hand and handle meant a blister the size of Cleveland. Because of that it took about a week before I could pick the rod up again.
I spent much of that summer perfecting my casting on the trunks of trees, bleach bottles, puddles and occasionally, on White Sand Lake. I never caught anything and learned another very important lesson I’ve never forgotten; fly fishing is much more than just being able to cast.
I started slow. Only stripping a few feet out at first, I brought the rod-tip straight up in the air, stopped, and whipped the tip forward. “Snap,” was the result, which I thought was what was supposed to happen and kept doing it; that is until I looked at the leader and noticed that somehow it kept getting shorter and filled with more and more knots.
After developing the right timing and force behind casting the rod preventing the snapping sound I began folding the line out in front of me, setting it down on the ground with the softness of the poplar leaves that fell in fall. I then began setting the line down in the puddles doing everything I could to not form ripples. Soon the line was settling more like feathers than leaves and I began taking a few steps back, stripping more and more line out until I was casting roughly 60 feet.
I took a lunch break and then returned to the make-belief fishing pond. The puddles were getting smaller and my casting was becoming more precise and although the blister on the palm of my hand was just about to break through, I decided to change my target from the open spaces of the puddles to the trunks of trees.
We had all types of trees from full-grown red oaks, to maples, to pines, to Russian olives. On some, the canopy dropped to just a few feet off the ground, which required a perfect side-arm cast to reach the trunk. I walked from tree to tree and imagined there would be a fish lurking at the base of every one. The goal was to hit the trunk on the first or second cast. Missing the trunk meant missing the fish.
By the end of the day I had realized a couple things. One, casting although tricky, was doable and two, too much play between the hand and handle meant a blister the size of Cleveland. Because of that it took about a week before I could pick the rod up again.
I spent much of that summer perfecting my casting on the trunks of trees, bleach bottles, puddles and occasionally, on White Sand Lake. I never caught anything and learned another very important lesson I’ve never forgotten; fly fishing is much more than just being able to cast.
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