Rickard Gustafsson | Sunday, 10 November 2024
The seatrout season was coming to its end and I had started to look forward to giving the fly fishing thing a go. I started to get full of anticipation. How hard could this fly fishing thing be? Soon I would stand by the water and send out these beautiful loops. It was about to happen, I knew it. I had done the right thing, I had signed up for a beginners course in fly fishing that should get me all the basics I needed to get going. That's what I had read on the forums—that one should start with some instruction to get a good start. It gives a better start than to starting all by your self. A series of lessons would have been a better suggestion, but maybe also a bit discouraging.
Things aren't really that easy. During that lesson I would get to feel a lot of the emotions one can feel when handling a fly rod. It is like a fly rod amplifies things. Hooking a fish on a fly rod is more rewarding. Getting tangles is more frustrating with a fly rod, especially when the wind suddenly makes a total mess of all your loose line. When your loose line suddenly slips under your foot and ends up between your legs, and you cannot understand how. Walking with loose line and suddenly it is stuck everywhere even though it was just nicely stacked in your line basket. Things are amplified by different reasons.
The day of the course arrived. My good feelings about getting started dropped a bit as soon as we met up. The instructor said someting along the lines of "oh, so everyone did show up". Are we a bit over booked? Will I not get away from here with everything I need to know?
It didn't take long until I got to learn something useful. Stringing up a fly rod is actually harder than stringing a spinning rod. The line weighs something, and if you thread the guides with the end of the leader, it is quite easy to lose grip and have everything pulled out of the guides. Instead, grab the line, fold it, and thread the guides. If you lose grip of the line, it kind of locks itself into place. Feeling stupid in the first minutes. Cannot even put line on the rod. Just small things like that makes it worth taking lessons. Small things that could have taken long time to learn by yourself.
Then it was time to do some actual casting. We got the instruction to strip off a couple of meters of line, cast back and forth a couple of times and then put the line down on the ground nicely. As I remember it we didn't get much more instruction than that for the assignment. I tried, it was hard, it was frustrating, the shit didn't go anywhere I wanted to. Even though I was prepared with the important stuff I had seen mentioned on Youtube. Don't break your wrist, move the rod in a straight path. Well, that didn't help me at all! The line didn't go anywhere and putting it down nicely on the ground didn't happen either. What I got was a pile of line on the ground, not farther than the tip of my rod. My hopes and ideas about how nice this fly fishing thing would be just vanished there. It felt like it was impossible. This was the first minutes with a fly rod in my hand. Like I said a lot of feelings.
The next part of the course was to shoot line. Have about all the line out before it changed colour, a bit back and forth then release line and it should shoot out a bit. I didn't really feel ready for that, but who was I to protest?
Again, more discouragement. This thing didn't work well either, I did kind of expect it to not work very well but I did hope it would. At least that back and forth thing started to get a bit better. But I couldn't say that the line shot out at all. Mostly ending up in a pile again. But then suddenly something happened. I lost grip of the line, and it took off like a shot! At least that's how it felt and I remember it. It was magic, I wanted to do that again, didn't really happen again that day. That magic feeling where everything feels effortless. The feeling of that magic cast kept me going for the rest of that day. That cast was probably the start of everything that followed. It showed me the feeling I chase every time I have a fly rod in my hand. By the water, on the lawn. To me it was the introduction to the magic of fly fishing and fly casting.
POD: The first fish I caught on a fly rod and me. Also magic.