It's Doing, not Giving

A philosophy to consider

I met a great guy at a local hunting lodge last Friday. He’s wrapping up a summer working in New Zealand before heading back to Canada. We got talking about hunting and fishing, as you do.

With plenty of good water back home and summer ahead, he was hoping to start learning to fly fish before his pending departure. I agreed to help him out.

Wednesday arrived, calm and still. We headed to a lakeside bay. Four hours later he was roll casting, false casting and throwing dries into the rings left by stones I lobbed randomly into the still water to challenge his freshly learnt bag of skills. With this rudimentary introduction to casting and primed for action, he was keen to head into combat against a few picky local trout.

Thursday morning. We parked at a local river and wandered down the track. Me pointing out a few fish cruising the outside of some weed beds that hugged the river edge, and him getting excited about what could be.

My plan was to show him how I approach the water and present flies, and for him to handle the fly rod in real life conditions and learn a few basic line management techniques. Catching a rainbow and brown from here was an outside chance at best – an army of local and tourist anglers had worn numerous tracks along the banks over the season whilst getting rejected by these wary fish.

After a couple of hours clambering up and down the steep banks – with an ever-present upstream breeze blurring the quarry and challenging his casting – we eased into ankle deep water at the edge of a wide pool. Three fish were working a large eddy in a wide expanse of slow moving water, progressively showing themselves as they fed along the side of the submerged dark green oxygen weed bank.

My freshman fly angler, only a day after throwing his first ever cast, was charged with tossing line some 35-40ft out to these cruisers as the wind dropped and the sun burned down. With increased visibility in the now still conditions came the need to execute perfectly on each cast, whilst maintaining a statue-like presence throughout to avoid them scaring. As a regular on this river, I knew these frequently fished for trout would bolt at a dragged fly, a splashy presentation or any movement from us.

By patiently timing our delivery, we managed to drift a weighted olive damsel fly pattern past our targets a few times as they circled and fed, without spooking them, but without getting an eat. Then a small pheasant tail variant nymph, adequately presented, received the same treatment. After an hour or more of careful casting, they were still there. As were we, albeit without a hookup. It was still a great first day on the river for my colleague.

With the sun now past the yardarm, in an all-or-nothing decision I pulled a behemoth of a black and green fly out of the box. It was large, heavy, ugly and represented, well, nothing these fish regularly eat.

My undergraduate angler managed to lob out this leviathan without hooking either of us or the ever-present trees behind. It hit the water and sunk quickly, fortuitously away from the weed bank and with sufficient time for the fly to be jaggedly retrieved from the depths as a fish appeared into view. Unexpectedly, it headed straight for the fly and connected. Of course we had only completed two casting and fishing sessions, but not the requisite fighting and landing lesson, so from here it got hectic.

The fish managed to gain some line, dive into the weed bank and emerge to jump high in the air (on reflection, I reckon it smiled at us, even winked, during this aerial display). Then in a sudden burst, it broke the 4X tippet section against a heavy weight of accumulated weed. But not before my student had got to feel the weight of the fish and the hustle-bustle of the fight before it ended all too quickly. Exhilarating stuff.

I tied on new tippet and another of these ‘beast flies’. Next cast, we received the same treatment from another sporting fish. A brief connection this time before it managed to throw the hook, but success all the same.

Over afternoon beers in the Central Otago sun, we celebrated his progress and plans to continue fly fishing in Alberta. He was grateful for the opportunity and very thankful of my teaching time.

I suggested that, for me, this is not ‘giving’, but rather I see it as simply ‘doing’. Going fishing with him allowed me to share my favourite hobby and in this case – to test a new strategy on these wary, diffident local trout. “Doing is much better than not doing, right?,” I explained.

It’s now Friday and I’ve relived the takes of those two fish more than a few times already. Yesterday, the penny dropped for me on how to tackle these fickle trout on long summer days. The new strategy is to interupt them, show them a big potential protein hit, at their level in the water column, and in doing so, entice them to ignore the ever-present nylon and less than natural presentation that is the flaw in the fishing process otherwise. To zig big when other anglers are zagging and stepping down to thinner nylon and smaller flies or cicada on the surface out of desperation. It’s perhaps obvious in hindsight and is a typical treatment when fishing in other places. I just hadn’t had the opportunity to try this here, on this particular river. Taking my newfound friend out presented a chance to test this technique.

I’ll be back on the river in the weekend to test this theory out further and try to get a couple to the bank. I’m grateful and very thankful that this opportunity came along for me. Helping introduce a new fly angler to our sport is not giving, it’s doing, with benefit to both parties.

He messaged me this morning to thank me again: “I’ll make sure to take someone new out hunting when I’m back home,” he wrote.

How good is that.