8 is Great

The latest issue — number 8 — of the venerable online fly-fish read “This is Fly” has been published today. It’s a great, breezy magazine, and their design could be a harbinger of things to come in the mag industry.

The new edition has a few features on fly-rodding the Seychelles and Belize, as well as a dispatch on the unglamorous side of being a fish bum with trials tribulations from an excursion to Mongolia.

Check it out.

The Elitists Among Us

One thing that’s struck me in 20 or so years of fly-fishing is that the same “class” rivalries that exist in human civilization also pervade our hallowed sport. This isn’t necessarily a rich guy, poor guy, thing. It’s not entirely about income, although there are certain anglers in this corner of the fishing world that do quite well.

Some of us spout Latin and carry stream thermometers, others use old, beat-up rods and have never paid a few grand to fish somewhere for a week. There are a million subdivisions of the class flyus anglerus. I’ve seen all of us get along, and I’ve heard the streamside snickers and pot-shots made behind an unsuspecting fisherman out of earshot.

I heard a great lead singer say to an unruly audience member during a concert: “If you cannot live together in here, you cannot live together out there. Let me tell ya.”

I do a bit of fishing in upstate New York and like to keep tabs on what the outdoor columnists are writing about in different parts of the state. I’m headed up to the Lake Ontario tributaries in a few weeks to fish the dropback steelhead migration. While scanning the news from up north a bit, I found a piece in the Syracuse Post Standard about a fly rod builder railing against “elitists” in our sport. By his reasoning, the Latin-speakers and the $4K rod guys are scaring people away from fly-fishing. I personally think that’s a pretty divisive statement, and the logic is absurd considering the gentleman sells rods for a living.

Why is so much ink spilled on growing our sport? I can see where that might benefit the conservation groups in the fly-fishing world — more anglers = more members = more revenue for the good things fly-fishers care about. But the constant focus on the holy Fly Fishing Demographic — it’s buying habits, its median age, it’s penchant for microbrewed beer — sounds more like the inane scrutiny of a marketing research guru, than a legion of anglers ensconced in group introspection.

My point is, all are welcome here. I like nice tackle, but I also use some shoddy stuff. Am I an asshole because I buy some stuff at Orvis? Am I a peasant fly-fisherman because my salmon rod cost about a hundred bucks? There’s an elitist in each one of us, I think, for the simple reason that most of us would rather toss fur, feathers, epoxy and thread around than, say, slice up some bunker chunks and crack a cold Bud can. (That can be nice on occasion, as well).

If the guy next to me pulls up in a BMW, parks next to my mid-’90s Saturn, throws on an Orvis smoking jacket before stringing up a shiny new Loomis combo and offering an innocent, “Mornin’,” I’ll give it right back. I don’t look like him, act like him, or live like him. But I’ll sure as hell fish with him.

(Cartoon credit)

The Cobbler’s Fly Box

It’s the classic case of the cobbler’s children going without shoes. You tie up a bunch of flies and pass them out to your non-tying (but hopefully grateful) friends, and when a hatch comes off or trout cosmically tune into that one particular fly, you realize that you shouldn’t have been handing them out like candy the week before because there are none in your box.

John Berry, outdoor columnist for the Baxter Bulletin in Arkansas, relays his own version of the cobbler in a caddis hatch:

I pulled out my fly box and discovered to my horror that I did not have any green butts in my box. What hurt so much was that I had been tying them during Sowbug and had given away around 80 of them.

Berry offers this lesson to fellow tyers and anglers:

First if you know that the major hatch of the year is about to come off, prepare for it. Finally, if you are going to give away 80 flies, keep a couple for your self.

Ladies on the Hook

Growing up reading outdoor magazines, I recognized that women were usually portrayed as the disapproving, indifferent, or even openly hostile foil to the angling protagonist in most pieces. Fishing writers were are often quick to mention an ornery spouse, or a wife who took advantage of his time on the stream by going to a craft fair.

I always assumed growing up that there were no fishing chicks, and with a few exceptions that didn’t work out for me out West, I’ve been mostly correct. My wife enjoys fishing with me, but she’s never picked up a fly rod and doesn’t seem to have much desire to learn. I’m fine with that. Our fishing relationship consists of spinning gear, freshwater ponds and streams, or charter trips on the salt. When the going gets complicated, overly technical, or the time between fish stretches out, she’s content to find something else to do.

Gordon Wickstrom, the (Boulder, Colo.) Daily Camera’s bow-tied outdoor sage, took his life in his hands the past few weeks to write about women who fish and he offered up some interesting observations. Being out West, Wickstrom was able to find one of those fly-fishing chicks and marry her, so he has a unique perspective on the issue, although one that I don’t completely agree with. He outlined a few of the advantages women have over men on the stream:

Women generally will be content to fish more close in, more intimately in the water near them. They will take it easier. While men are punching out hard, angry casts to as far as the new carbon rods will allow and then some, a woman finds a good fish within 40 feet.

Women will tend to fish longer in the same stretch of water — no frantic, three-mile tearing upstream for them. Too often there is something frantic or even hysterical in the way a man fishes. A woman’s work is more lyrical, gentler, more reflective and content. She neither stumbles nor falls in anxious determination to get to a better spot as does a man. She tends to be quiet in the way that Izaak Walton found to be an essential aim of angling.

Wickstrom takes a shot at the convention I described above in noting advances in women’s fishing gear, as well as their keener sensibilities on the water.

But whatever may be the case for women, it is no longer that of “the little woman” left sulking at home, the eternal scold and insensitive wife, seen in so much of the stupidly unfunny commercial angling cartoon humor.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that, but it’s nice to see some folks thinking about an ugly stereotype that has plagued fishing writing for decades.