I'm on the countdown to my first fishing trip using fly-casting gear.
I've gotten, sort of, the rudiments of fly casting from a three-session, nine-hour casting clinic provided by the Pasadena Casting Club - and very well done it was, too. Believe me, this is not as easy as it looks, not if you're going to do it right - getting the right-sized (small loop) in the line, not hooking yourself in the ear, or worse, and setting the fly down lightly where you wish to set it down.
There are lots of ways to cast badly. Naturally, I am proficient in all of them. But it's coming. To help myself a little, I'm doing an additional casting class with a local fishing store, if only to get a different perspective on the process. And also because more practice can only help.
And then, the PCC's angling stalwarts will take a bunch of beginners (at my age, it's hard to imagine being a beginner at anything, but there it is) up to the Eastern Sierra, probably lower Owens River, for a go at the wily trout.
But I learned something interesting yesterday. Many of the areas in the Eastern Sierra offer only catch-and-release fishing. What the rangers are doing, I was told, is going through fly boxes to make certain that the barbs are removed from the hooks on the flies those boxes contain. This is simple to do, though the flies are tiny, especially with my fumblefingers - see the photo, which you can enlarge by clicking on it, and in which scale is provided by a 25-cent piece: You just pinch the barb against the hook's shaft with a pair of needle-nose pliers and the barb breaks off.
The rangers check by pushing the hook through the material on a shirt sleeve. If the hook slides right back out, you're good. If it doesn't, you're busted and an expensive citation is the result. (It occurs to me that being barbless will also be helpful when one hooks oneself through a nostril, or similar....)
Now, I don't own the hundreds of flies that experienced fisher people own. I've got just a very few. But I don't need no stinking citations, expensive or otherwise. So my chore this coming week will be to sit at the table out in the back garden making sure that all my small collection of flies pass muster. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right.
-JFT