Month: June 2015

 

Few things on Earth have pleased me as much lately as my just-turned-eight year old son turning out to have the fly fishing gene.  He’s a machine.  Powers through weeds higher than him.  Keeps score.  Because the score is important.  Creek chub cower at his passage.

James engages with a Nissin Fine Mode Kosansui 320, which earlier this year TenkaraBum was selling as his kid’s starter set.  He has a pair of youth chest waders that are a bit big for him and a Moonlit Fly Fishing vest which is way too big for him, but he likes it.

It’s startling how he’s taken to it.  He casts a 3.5 level line and puts flies where he wants them to go.  He can identify fish species.  He releases most of his fish himself, except when they’ve taken it a bit deep (common shiners are bad for this) and I step in with the fine nosed pliers.  Most of all, he just goes and goes and goes.  We don’t push things, obviously, because he’s only eight.  But there’s no real compromise involved – it’s two dudes fishing.  He gets snagged and his tippet gets snarled.  But I get snagged and my tippet gets snarled.  Pretty much as often.  Days on the stream with my son feel sort of achingly precious.

 

So, having tumbled back into hopeless fly fishing obsession after a nearly 30 year break, I guess I’m going to document my foibles.  Shortly after the new year it dawned on me that I don’t actually have that many years left to do stuff.  So I decided to do something I’d been mulling for years: ultralight backpacking.  I started making gear lists, reading reviews, planning trips.  And I bought a full load out of gear.  At some point, somewhere (I think at Backpacking North), someone mentioned tenkara.  I googled it, found Tenkara USA, and that was that. I have managed to go on one major ultralight trip, a week spent doing a 40 mile loop hike in Utah’s Dark Canyon Wilderness.  But the tenkara fishing started at the beginning of April.  Five rods, a vise, and too many orders from J. Stockard and TenkaraBum later, I basically live to fish again.

My first flyfishing career was long ago, during high school in northwestern Alberta, Canada.  My friend Dean and I fished the freestone streams in the wilderness (“bush” in the local parlance of the time) southwest of Grande Prairie.  Every minute we could, between the time they ran clear at the end of June and the time they froze in November.  The main targets were Arctic Grayling, Rocky Mountain Whitefish, and Dolly Varden trout (/char, but more musings on what those words actually mean in a later post).  We were using western fibreglass rods.  I had a cheap Canadian Tire vest but some UK relative gave me a beautiful Wheatley compartmentalized dry fly box.  The grayling were suckers for a #12 Royal Coachman dry.  In those days I used to carry a spin rig with me loaded I think with small Panther Martins for the dollys, something I don’t think I’d do now.  Anyway, I moved away east for university, fished the next two summers when I came home, stopped moving home for the summers, and that was that.  I didn’t really decide to stop, though I retroactively told myself that I didn’t really like annoying the fish and that hiking in wilderness and just being at a stream was enough.  That turns out to be…inaccurate.

I knew that there was trout fishing in Iowa when I moved here from the UK in 1999 and I kinda sorta had plans to explore it.  But I was a brand new academic with tenure on my mind and I didn’t take the plunge.  I would pass by the local outdoor shop with its fly fishing section and occasionally think wistfully about it, but never acted on it.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure that fishing in Iowa could really compare to fishing in the Canadian wilderness.

But now here I am, shopping for Trout Bum license plate frames.  I’ve been keeping a fishing journal since falling back into it, and it occurred to me I might as well put it in a blog instead.  So, trip reports, musings, gear posts (though I have absolutely no expertise, so gear reports based on amateur subjective impressions).  Trout don’t exactly fear me (note, e.g., the dayglo orange fleece, since traded for a TenkaraBum woodland camo t-shirt; trout were probably nudging other trout and saying “You gotta see this…”).  But I’m working on it.