I still suck at fly fishing, but I suck less. I still have a long way to go, but I’m getting there. I’m getting traction in a way that I began to fear would never happen. There are all these layers to fly fishing and it is hard to jump levels. First you have to get your fly in the water and get a drift before you can hook a fish. Then you have to learn how to hook it, then how to fight it, then how to land it, then how to handle it. None of it came easy to me, probably because I never went through a bait/spin fishing phase; in fact, I’m not entirely sure the difference between bait and spin fishing, I assume they use the same kind of rods, just the lure or bait is different?
I am a slow learner and don’t take instruction well. I need to fail at something, go and brood about it and come back. What I lack in intelligence and natural ability I make up for in stubbornness and a willingness to blow off work. The way I learn is to fail, get slightly better, plateau at that level for a long time, and then claw my way up to another plateau. I guess that’s how everyone learns, but I take years to work my way up to plateaus that some people figure out in an afternoon. Like I said, I’m a slow learner.
I didn’t suck at all of it equally. I got the idea of reading the water first. I think it’s because it’s a nerdy skill that requires no physical prowess. It just requires being a brooding lump staring at the water with a dumb look on your face. Reading the water made sense to me. Because I was able to read the water, at least a little bit, I started getting in to fish, but I missed a lot of strikes and lost a lot of fish. Like an embarrassing amount of fish. Give a man a fish and he eats for one day, but teach a man to fish and he very well might starve to death before he actually lands one.
But like I said, I suck less these days. Another penny has dropped and I feel a lot more at ease out there. Now, when I’m screwing up, I usually know what I’m doing wrong. When I first started, I knew I had to work on all of it, but had no idea what all of it entailed. Now I understand what I need to work on to improve.
The latest penny to drop was on fish hooking and fighting. I was losing a lot of fish, and I was losing every good size fish. I was fighting them too long and I was not keeping enough pressure on the fish. Perversely, I got it in my head that I was losing fish because I was fighting them too hard, so every time I lost a fish, I would fight the next one even more gingerly. If I hadn’t reversed this trend, but this time next year, I would have been trying to land fish by way of sly looks and innuendo.
My problem stemmed from something I heard that I misinterpreted. I think that happens to a lot of beginners: someone with experience says something and the beginner takes the exact wrong lesson from the advice. For me it was this piece of instruction: “keep your rod tip up.” I was fighting a fish and the guide kept telling me to keep my rod tip up: I kept letting out line until my rod tip was pointing straight up, no tension on the line meant that the rod tip pointed straight up, right?
What I should have been doing, of course, was keeping my rod butt section up, so that the rod forms a nice question mark shape, which lets the tip do a lot of the fish fighting. Keep your rod tip up is shorthand for a bunch of stuff that a beginner just doesn’t know. It’s a loaded phrase that assumes that the listener has some understanding of the underlying principles at work. Like I said, I’m a slow learner so I kind of slowly had to figure it out: keeping my rod tip up wasn’t working, but the people who said it to me clearly knew a lot about fishing, so I was obviously not understanding a key point.
I’d like to say that I figured it all out and it came to me as an epiphany, but that’s not true. Finally, the right guide gave me the right piece of advice. He told me to keep my rod bent like a question mark and I told him that then my rod tip wouldn’t be up and he had this “oh, you’re a moron” look on his face that didn’t so much as drop the penny as fling it from the top of the Empire State Building onto my head.
That was the latest piece to fall in to place. Now, it’s coming together. I’m landing more and bigger fish. I still have a long way to go, but I understand now what I need to do and assuming I can live to be 170, I might be a good fly fisher someday, but today I suck less.
First Fish 