QUESTIONS - Neil - Sep 5 2016

QUESTIONS


Several years ago, for a local publication, I wrote an article entitled "Finding The Challenge." The gist of the article was directed at on ongoing controversy, which still continues today, centered on fishing for spawning trout. Like most of the serious articles that I have written over the last several decades it was intended to stimulate discussion and cause the reader to think about the issue. I always try to inform and make the reader think. It is my considered opinion that thinking about what we are doing and why we are doing it is a practice that is all too seldom undertaken. In my two plus decades as a municipal judge I became keenly aware that many of the folks that appeared before the court would not likely have been there if they had observed those two maxims.

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Originally Posted by rtidd

QUESTIONS


Several years ago, for a local publication, I wrote an article entitled "Finding The Challenge." The gist of the article was directed at on ongoing controversy, which still continues today, centered on fishing for spawning trout. Like most of the serious articles that I have written over the last several decades it was intended to stimulate discussion and cause the reader to think about the issue. I always try to inform and make the reader think. It is my considered opinion that thinking about what we are doing and why we are doing it is a practice that is all too seldom undertaken. In my two plus decades as a municipal judge I became keenly aware that many of the folks that appeared before the court would not likely have been there if they had observed those two maxims.

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I liked your article. It was quite thought provoking. Being a long time fly fisherman for warm-water species but only getting a chance to trout fish a few times a year I never even thought about using an indicator vs. not using one, although I have done both intermittently.
(Just catching trout at all IS a challenge for me at times.)

I just took indicator use as something normal as I had read about and seen it done so much on the internet and youtube. I think I will re-examine my thoughts on that and try it without an indicator more often. Not sure I will permanently or ALWAYS NOT use one but I can see the challenge (plus it would keep it much simpler for me!)


Thanks.
Respectfully,
Jay

For me, the challenge comes from catching a fish with a fly that I personally tied and preferably one of my design. As for techniques, I let the water dictate what is required. It may be on top, it may be tight-lined with lots of weight, it may be with an indicator or a sink tip with added weight to dredge deep runs. Likewise on still-water i may be a weighted streamer, bassbug or #18 bead head nymph under a popper. Whatever I need to get to where the fish are. But I let the water tell me what I need. Fact is, my favorite type of trout fishing is prowling pocket water with attractor dries. But not because of perceived challenge, its because I enjoy it the most. Which is the reason I fly fish to begin with.....the enjoyment. Not the challenge.

The article was definitely thought provoking, but there a couple assumptions in it that I think are not entirely correct.

First, I don't believe that fly fishing was historically invented for purposes of being deliberately challenging, or for leisure for that matter. I doubt that the Macedonians that Aelian saw fly fishing in the second century were fishing for leisure, but for food. Certainly James Baillie, who showed Stewart his spiders, wasn't fly fishing for leisure; he was fishing to support his family by supplying trout to hotels. When I was in in grad school, I didn't eat the last week or so before payday if I couldn't catch enough bluegills or crappie on my days off to fill the freezer. And I used a fly rod because it was the easiest way to do so.

There was a long history of using live mayflies for bait; making artificial ones was done for the convenience of not having to go out and catch some every time an angler wanted to fish. (Taking some of the challenge away, you could say.)

We perforce have to view the history the fly fishing through the eyes of those who wrote about it. And the people who were fishing just to eat didn't have the leisure time to write (if indeed they could write.) It's Dame Juliana (yes, I know, she didn't write the Treatyse, but some literate person did) Sir Charles Cotton, etc. They were fishing for their leisure, but that doesn't mean the majority of anglers weren't simply fishing to eat, and that fly fishing was a convenient means of doing so.

Secondly, it doesn't follow that just because we fly fish for leisure (and I think it's safe to say today most of do) that we're necessarily looking for a challenge. History would indicate that we're looking to make things as easy as possible. We don't forge our own hooks anymore, as the Treatyse taught to do nor fish with a rod not longer that six yards with a butt the thickness of your wrist (as Cotton pointed out, you could possibly get tired fishing all day with a longer rod), nor use horse hair line knotted to the end of the rod (not even tenkara fans use horse hair.) We don't have to soak gut leaders before we fish, nor rely on snelled flies, because we now have eyed hooks. Each advance in fly fishing has made it easier to catch fish and less of a "challenge."
And the dry fly wasn't invented for the sake of conservation; it was invented to catch fish during those times when a sunken fly wouldn't. It's a bit hypocritical to say that the challenge has to be exactly what it was whenever we started, that all the changes before that time were perfectly legitimate and none made since that time are. (As much I feel that way myself.)

The third assumption if that it's easier to catch fish with a nymph under an indicator. I seldom fish that way myself because I don't enjoy it and it seems to me to be too much like bait fishing, which I don't enjoy either. That doesn't mean it's not a challenge to fish in that manner. If I were to be truthful with myself, I would admit that among the reasons that I don't like indicator nymphing is because I'm not very good at it and tend to catch fewer fish. People who are good at it have developed a legitimate skill.

The final assumption is that simply trying to catch as many fish in a legal manner isn't a challenge in and of itself.

In spite of all that, hypocrite that I am, I find my challenge in fishing tackle and techniques that were around when I started out in 1963. I fish mostly cane and fiberglass rods, and try to limit myself to flies that existed back then. No beadheads, no indicators, no wooly buggers (although I think Russ Blessing invented the latter about that time), no foam (although I'll allow myself a beetle from time to time), no flash except tinsel. How I supposed to compare myself with the writers whom I read vociferously when I was a child if I'm playing a different game? (And let's do away with the DH rule in baseball. Hey, you kids, get off my yard.)

You know what? I still catch plenty of fish.

Thanks for the comments since it means that someone is actually reading this stuff. As I indicated in the article one of my main purposes for writing much of this stuff is to make the reader think . Perhaps I should have used the word "purpose" rather than "challenge" to make my readers think but it apparently caused some of you to think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. We certainly can disagree on some of the historical reasons since we do not have the ability to go back and ask those individuals why they did what they did but the reality that it is more difficult and time consuming, therefore more challenging, to catch fish using artificial flies has to be a given.

Thanks for all your comments. Keep fishing and keep enjoying what you are doing.

I think that if it were not a challenge, it would diminish much of the enjoyment.