A FISHING PHILOSOPHY
Years ago when JC and I were teaching fly fishing classes we told our students that fly fishing has a place for everyone. There are so many facets to fly fishing that there is a niche for everyone. Each angler need to establish their own ‘philosophy’ about fly fishing practice.
What attracted me to seriously consider the sport of fly fishing nearly 50 years ago was the technical aspects. I grew up in upstate New York on my parent’s dairy farm, and although I had an uncle that fished with flies, I fished the local brooks and creeks with garden hackle for native brook trout. In my early teens we moved to Michigan and I began to fish the various lakes around our southern Michigan home for a variety of warm water species with minnows and garden hackle. Occasionally I caught a few fish on poppers fished on a fly rod, but mostly I used bait. It was a few years before I was introduced to the Au Sable River.
One trip to the Au Sable was enough to sell me on the idea of fly fishing for trout. What initially attracted me to the sport were the technical aspects. Bait fishing, while productive, was hardly challenging and the options for using bait were relatively restrictive. I was intrigued by the very act of catching fish on artificial flies. My fascination with the natural world proved to be a perfect match and soon I was immersed in matching artificial flies to specific hatches. Fly fishing open to me not only a new form of recreation but an entire world of fascinating possibilities. It became a lifelong obsession from which I have yet to fully recover.
Not only did I find fascination in the world of hatches and hatch matching but I also found a particular allure to the technical aspects involving the equipment and the act of presenting the artificial fly. Although I have never been especially enamored with fly casting as a competitive act nor have I ever desired to become a ‘certified’ fly caster, the act of accurately presenting a fly to a fish with a fly rod continues to be a source of enjoyment and challenge for me.
Thus, my personal philosophy of fly fishing was based on the premise the fly fishing is a lifelong pursuit of knowledge. While it might be possible to achieve a certain degree of expertise, success was never a given and even the most experienced angler would and could still find sufficient challenges to always keep the sport challenging. It is those aspects of the sport that keeps me continually excited about the prospects of a day afield with a fly rod.
That is my personal philosophy of fly fishing, but it is not the only one nor is it necessarily the one that every person that fishes with flies should adopt. At the time that I became enamored with fly fishing I had an older brother that took up the sport at the same time. Brother Robert liked to be outdoors, he loved camping, splitting wood for campfires, and he enjoyed catching fish. We spent many hours catching bluegills and crappie while sitting in a leaky old row boat and after we both started fly fishing we spent many hours fishing for trout with flies. However, Brother Robert was content with keeping it simple. He never learned to identify the flies that were hatching; in fact I doubt that he ever learned to tell a mayfly from a caddis. He never got into fly tying and his fly boxes contained basic patterns that you could purchase in any fly shop. One of his favorite patterns was the Royal Coachman, which he fished regardless of what might be hatching. He was willing to accept advice from me about what flies to use, and he would tie on one of my creations if we were fishing together during a specific hatch but without my prompting he would just tie on whatever suited his fancy. Despite his lack of hatch matching skills or much technical expertise in casting he always had a good time and usually managed to catch a few fish. Sometimes he even out fished his more technically skilled younger brother!
My older brother was never concerned about the so-called ‘finer aspects’ of fly fishing. He purchased his fly rods from a discount store; used Pflueger reels, Gladding leaders, and basic flies. He wore a canvas fly vest that might have had a total of ten pockets, [most of which were empty] and his fly collect was contained in a couple plastic fly boxes. He would wade down the center of the Au Sable slapping his flies down along the banks and under the sweepers and he just had a ball. Perhaps, thinking back, he actually was having more fun than I was because he was completely unconcerned that his casting was atrocious and his flies did not resemble any living insect.
Over the years I have met many fellow anglers like my Brother Robert. Their fishing philosophy is quite simple and uncomplicated. While they may occasionally bow to trying one of the latest fly patterns or even make a half-hearted attempt at ‘matching the hatch’ they are mostly content with tying on some old favorite pattern and seeing what happens when they put it on the water. It’s unlikely that they have ever thought about their personal fishing philosophy but in a word that philosophy would be ‘fun,’ and I can’t help but believe that fly fishing would be a better sport if more of its participants would adopt that simple philosophy.