My new found pastime – Fly fishing
I began fishing when I was 5 years old. I used to put on my life vest, grab a bucket and my rod and go down to the jetty together with my cat and fish for baltic herring, just the cat and I. How many parents would allow that today I wonder? When my mother made dinner later at night I only ate the tail fins that was crunchy like crisps.
When I got older I began fishing more for pike but when we moved away from the sea in my teens, I kind of quit on fishing.
The road to a Hot Torpedo
Fast forward some 30 years or so to April this year.
We were going with our band Yakumbé on a four week tour, playing our music for kids in schools around in Sörmland, Sweden. One sunny morning, on our way to a school, we passed a beautiful lake that laid totally blank and I just got that compelling urge to go out and fish again. Said and done, a couple of days later I went to a lake stocked with rainbow trout and brown trout with my spinning rod and a new bombarda and began fishing without any luck. That same day they had a fly fishing theme at the lake so one could try casting with a fly rod and I tried it out. I found it hard but fun to cast. That made me research the net for fly fishing and resources on casting technique and I stumbled upon a site called Sexyloops.
The site looked a bit dated compared with todays standard but there was something really exciting with it. There was a section called The Experience. Here, there was this guy Paul, teaching Karen casting and used a relaxed approach with a language and humour much to my taste. I also found tips on fishing stillwater, which is what’s at hand here in Stockholm if you want to fish for trout and a lot of other good stuff. So I bought myself a cheap second hand but unused rod-set and flies from a guy at a swedish fly fishing forum and began to struggle to get my flies out in the lake, which proved to be a bit hard. I tied the most incredible knots on the leader without even touching it in some kind of magic way while casting. Needless to say I didn’t succeed in catching any fish for a couple of months.
Then I found out that this fly casting wizard Paul designed rods that was to his liking and according to the reviews I read, both on Sexyloops but also on a thread on the swedish forum where people named their best rods I understood that the Hot Torpedo was the best rod available! A couple of months after the tour with the band I got the salary from that and suddenly I had the money to buy this exceptional rod. But since I read everywhere that good rods weren’t for beginners, I contacted Paul and he told me that it would most likely improve my casting skills, so I went for a Hot Torpedo 6 and I made up my own colour scheme with my favourite colours on the whippings. It came to me and was super nice to look at. It was also so much nicer to cast, compared to my cheap rod that I haven’t used since.
Now I cast with much less magic knots and have actually managed to catch my first good fish on the fly rod! The first was a 3 kg pike in river Ljusnan though it was trout I was after. And a couple of weeks ago after so many days spent at my favourite lake this summer, I caught my very first sought after rainbow trout on a dry fly and I can’t describe the happiness I felt at that moment. I still have a lot to learn about casting, but now I have the best tool in my hands and I am positive I will have a lot of good moments together with it in the future!
End of ramble/ Piffen
