After finishing Derek Grzelewski's excellent The Trout Bohemia recently, "learning how to fly fish" almost made my 2014 list of plans. I often ponder digging out my fly rod and learning how to use it properly, but I think these days my Pflueger reel on my spin rod gives me a good excuse to stick with my current setup. I love that reel.
Another couple of things have added to the urge, though - my mate Jim has now got back into his fly fishing after a break from I'm-not-sure-how-many years. He bought a license a couple of years ago after I talked about looking for trout, but I think he went out less times than you can count on one hand.
His recent trip to his old haunts on the Ruakituri River seems to have fortunately rekindled the fire. When I ran into him on our walks before his trip up north, while we were both walking our dogs on the beach, he was talking of the flies he was tying for his trip; then he recently popped around for a visit and mentioned he'd be keen to get up the Wairau for a look.
I've possessed a fly tying kit for a number of years now - given to me as going-away gift from a previous job - so the potential learning to use that and my fly rod might be a good trade-off to showing Jim 'my' spot on the river that pretty-much always has trout. It's consistently a still-water stretch, so the fly fishing might be the edge I need to catch the wily browns.
Also, as Jim said when I mentioned my Pflueger reel being a reason for me not getting into fly fishing yet, "the reel is just to hold your line when you're not using it," on a fly setup, so it's obviously a completely different mindset - as much as I love the beautiful little spinning reel, the fly fishing is more about learning and fine-tuning a technique than appreciating the technology, as it is with my Pflueger reel - it almost feels wrong how easily it pulls in a feisty 4 pound brown once it's hooked...
The third factor in this was seeing a cheap copy of Fly Fishing For Dummies pop up on Trade Me, which I bought. How could I not become proficient with all of the above?!
