Fly fishing is a thing seldom done well; the knowledge and experience required come much too dear for the sport to be classed as common.
Seldom does a weekend pass without either getting wet, or tying flies, but this does not make a good fly fisherman. It takes a good teacher and those are rare.
Mine was Joe Humphreys. Twenty years ago, when I first met Joe he was in his 70s and had more than 60 years of experience on the water. Joe taught me more in three sessions spread over as many years as I learned in my previous 10 years of chasing trout.
Humphreys would trek down from State College, Pa., to the old Foothills Fly Fishing shop on Pleasantburg Drive and hold court at the fly tying table and school out back at the casting pond.
The first thing Humphreys always mentioned was his teacher long ago on a stream in Pennsylvania. “Mister, would you please teach me to fish like you do,” Humphreys said as a child.
He’d seen the man making effortless cast after cast that brought in fish. Humphreys even as a boy had no patience with simply flailing about in the river, but he could be infinitely patient with his pupils.
The idea is not to chase a trout, but to catch one, and in order to do that one is required to develop skills that simply do not come naturally. There is lore involved, too, that date back to Roman times where the first mention of angling using “flies,” red yard tied on a hook, to fool a fish is mentioned in several places in the surviving literature.
Through the discipline required to learn the casts (presentation is everything in fly fishing) there develops a love of the species and a devotion to their preservation.
Something else happens along the way that changes run of the mill fly fishermen into something profoundly different from the weekend guys. Something as different from the fast boat crowd of bass fishermen as Picasso is from finger painting.
For most, the epiphany strikes one day on a crowded river; a place where “you have to bring your own rock if you want to fish,” as Chuck Patterson at Foothills used to say.
“There has to be more to this sport than standing in line to catch the same old tired fish that’s been caught 10 times today,” is the usual thought process.
Even if the fish is a 25-inch brown his pickiness is based not so much on instinct as a sore mouth. Then the fly fisherman starts to seek out places where other fishermen are not.
This takes the fly fisherman into the territories of fly tying and topographical maps. The good spots are not necessarily the ones that are written about. More often than not, if a stream has appeared in print, or online, it is a place too popular to be good.
Over time the fisherman develops the ability to read a topo map and make a good estimate of the fishability of any stretch of water. How good the fishing might be is an intangible that can only be solved by visiting the place.
The best streams are all at least an hour’s walk from the road. All of them are small.
It is at this point that obsessive behavior becomes compulsive and the transition completes from devotee to a good fly fisherman; someone who is just as happy with a 6-inch native fish as they are with a brown best measured in pounds.
