Quote Originally Posted by flyguy66 View Post


It's all about funnels.



I never thought of fly fishing as a funnel but it is a perfect description. I wish I had thought of it. Kudos to you.

Everyone starts a the same place, as a beginner. But I think your experience BEFORE you started fly fishing matters. In my case, I had fished ever since I was 7 years old. My father bought me the first Mitchell spinning reel before there was the Mitchell 300. After I took my first fly fishing course, it took me a full year to catch my first trout. That first year was frustrating, and it was difficult to stay committed to fly fishing when I could take my spinning outfit and catch trout at will. So my expectation of catching fish met the reality of knowing how to cast but not how to fly fish effectively. I needed a reason to change from spin fishing to fly fishing.

It was during my second year of fly fishing that I caught my first trout. It was a wild 16" brown trout from the Firehole River in Yellowstone Park right off the Midway Geyser Basin parking lot. I caught it with a fly I had tied and a fly rod I had built. It was an epiphany. My reason to change was not how many fish I caught, but how I caught them. That sealed the deal.

That single fish meant more to me than the the fish I had caught earlier that year with a spinning rod. I decided to put the spinning outfit away and commit myself to fly fishing.

I decided that if I was to commit myself to fly fishing I had better become a lot better than I was. There was no internet but there was the library. That winter, I read every fly fishing book in our local library. Books I did not have I bought and even those that the library had, I bought if I thought they were knowledge worthy. I was a better fly fisher the next spring. For example, I knew what insects hatched in Wisconsin and I knew what flies to use. That alone was huge.

Gary Borger had made his first video and he had been my fly fishing instructor so I got to know him. He became my mentor and my friend. Natural curiosity, a desire to learn, and access to personal coach has smoothed my journey. Not everyone can have a personal mentor, but now there is the internet which makes it a lot easier to take the first step than when I began.

So my answer is that I don't think that we are making fly fishing harder. I took a fly fishing class from Gary because I could not teach myself to cast. I tried it in Utah and I failed. Now there are many more places to learn how to fly cast. Our TU chapter does it for free for a youth outdoor sports gathering and for Women of The Outdoors.

I wish I had those resources. The basic casting skills are not difficult. It is harder to learn how to ski or to play tennis than it is to fly cast BUT the depth of knowledge that comes later is far greater in fly fishing. Fly fishing success demands more knowledge than physical skill compared to either downhill skiing or tennis, both sports that I did quite a lot of in my earlier years.

So I would say that compared to the 1970's when I learned to fly fish, it is easier now than then. The fly rod and fly lines are better. There were a lot of crappy fly rods in those days, and I made my own Fenwick HMG because it was so much better than the the Shakespeare rods. Now you can get a fly rod far better than the HMG for about $100.00

Access to knowledge, affordable quality equipment, and good instruction are three legs of fly fishing success. I would argue that all three are far more readily available now.