Keeping It Simple: (A beginner’s guide to fly fishing for summer pan fish)
By John Luthens
For a beginner, the dainty art of fly fishing can rapidly degenerate into a tangled snarl of confusion before the first cast is even arched over the water. Leaders, tippets and knots; sinking line, floating line, wet flies, dry flies, nymphs, streamers and goofy-sounding insects – all of it running together into a tiny crossword puzzle of numbers and Latin mumbo jumbo.
A novice may have no clue that a number 3 wooly bugger attached to a 3-weight rod defies the laws of physics which makes the fly-casting game possible in the first place. A fly of this caliber could easily hook a great white shark square in the gills and weigh more than the 3-weight, itself. Number 24 blue-winged olives, on the other hand, (known amongst the secretive, Latin fly-fishing runs as Baetis tricaudatus) are perfectly suited to a small-weight rod, provided you have a microscope handy to tie them onto the end of your leader, and provided you can luck yourself into the right corner of the watery world where a hatch of the sneaky blue and olive critters happens to be occurring.
Pan fishing the lakes of summer is a golden opportunity to learn the basics of fly fishing.
Proper line matched with proper reel, silicone spray to keep dry flies twirling on top of the water, lead-core leaders to get the wet ones down to “where the fishes is” – the list goes on and on, and we haven’t even covered the basic fly-casting technique yet, not to mention the roll cast, S-curve cast, and the best way to shinny up a tree in order to retrieve the 5-dollar fly that the tackle store guy swore one simply had to purchase as a standard investment in any well-heeled, fly-fishing portfolio.
I’ve flailed from one end of the country to the other, fly-fishing down countless waters and casting myself far enough up in the ranks to be able to toss a personal hackle of wisdom into the hat of the beginning fly-fisher: Keep it simple.
Despite flipping through pages of insect encyclopedias – I still can’t mouth a lick of bug Latin. I have only the vaguest notion of what a blue-winged olive mayfly looks like, not to mention trying to fool any self-respecting trout into believing that I do. And when it comes to casting, it appears the S-curve will forever remain nothing more in my fly-fishing arsenal than a tricky section of back-road gravel that I find myself sliding down at breakneck speed after oversleeping for an early morning date with a fishing hole.
Looking back upon the boatload of flies I’ve floated over the years, perhaps the only the only things setting me apart from the fly-fishing novice is a ton of adventurous practice, many a late night spent watching experts tie flies and cast to monster fish on the You-Tube, and the fact that I’ve taught myself to shinny up a tree faster that a squirrel.
Keeping it simple is more than just solid advice for beginners. It’s a refreshing break for fly-fishers of any level. It helps one to keep in perspective the fact that fly-fishing should be whooping at the top of your lungs fun – sort of like how golf is supposed to be at its essential core, swinging away in the great outdoors without the added pressures of mortgaging your house for all the latest gear and trying to look like you know what you’re doing in front of your buddies.
A simple, foam hopper is often all it takes to match the hatch for summer bluegill.
Come the jungle green heights of summer, for instance, I toss away all my fancy flies and terminology and splash into the simple shoreline of a favorite lake while the sun sets golden. No need for expensive waders. They’ve long since started leaking from stepping through half-a-season’s worth of hidden barbed wire and they smell like wet socks. Peeling back the neoprene to get down to basics, cracked waders tend to get in the way of the lapping waves massaging my shins.
It’s is the perfect opportunity to string up a rod of unknown weight and origin that I bought for a dollar at a rummage sale, attaching a suspect reel that once meshed nicely on a 5-weight, but has long since stripped itself of any of those bothersome, drag gears, which, after doing the fly-fishing math, is likely the reason I’m still able to strip any line off of it at all. An inexpensive fly rod and reel combo set, perfect for any fly-fishing beginner, would positively put my cobbled rig to shame.
Fly selection is equally simple – A handful of foam hoppers and cork poppers which can be bought for a song at any tackle emporium. No need to fret about tangling expensive floaters in the streamside brush or the trees. A lakeside retreat not only provides the ideal environment for the fly-fishing beginner, it also keeps advanced fly-flingers from having to rip their swim-trunks in the branches to rectify an errant loop.
Pieces of foam and cork attached to a hook are more than suited to our fishy-looking quarry in this fly-fishing endeavor because, while what we’re scientifically chasing is known in the upper ranks of Latin-speaking, fly-fishing snobbery as Lepomis macrochiru – the wily, little rascals are better known in the backwoods beer halls and bait shops of my domain as pan fish, bluegill, or plain old “sunnys.” In my humble estimation, beginner or advanced, watching these colorful tugboats rocket from the weedy depths to smash a floating fly while you are comfortably sunning yourself in a lake is as close to the simple art of fly fishing perfection as it can get.
Casts need not be perfect, and a beginner working into the feel of the sport has a high probability of not only catching a nice lake tan, but also catching a nice brace of fish. Chasing spooky trout with a fly rod might takes tender line management, practice and many fishless days to master, but smacking down fly-line on a pristine lake shore in the simple interest of learning to cast seems to ring the dinner bell for any surfacing bluegill in a half-mile radius.
Tangled weed lines that always hold summer fish but are impossible to cover with hook and bobber are a slam dunk to probe with a floating fly, watching the swirl of a surfacing pan fish as it smashes to the surface is extremely addictive, hook removal is easy and, possibly simplest of all; the backseat of your car will never smell ripe because you forgot about the bait can you left baking there in the summer heat.
Of course, if you forget to take the stringer of fish you were planning to eat for supper out the car – they will likely smell worse than a can of worms after a couple of days whether or not you caught them on a fly rod
Don’t ask me how I know. Some of my hardest-won, fly-fishing secrets are so simple that they’re probably best left unsaid.
John Luthens is a freelance writer and fly-fishing enthusiast from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com