Bent Poles, Happy Souls

One of the most frequent concerns voiced to me from people who are contemplating the sport of fly-fishing, especially in the Midwest, is the lack of places there are to go fly-fishing. Some of the folks I talk to, automatically assuming fly rods are the exclusive domain of salmonoids, will typically ask, “But how many places around here can you flyfish?” My response often times is “Show me a flooded wagon rut and I’ll fish it with a fly rod.” Of course, anything that has gills, eats and swims, can be caught on a fly rod and it’s just a matter of properly educating them on the subject which I eagerly do with some follow-up conversation. Bass fishermen are especially skeptical because they may have had great success in the past catching bass with any number of bass lures on the market today, and just don’t see how a fly-fisher can duplicate that success with flies. But of course, we can. And if there is one thing we’ve been taught as fly-fishers from the beginning, it’s learning how to match the hatch. Using that same time-tested strategy for catching trout, let’s change a few words as we get into warmwater fishing and begin talking about mastering the concept of “matching the plug.” James Heddon has been given credit with the idea of creating bass plugs for the mass market. A passionate whittler and fisherman, one day he was sitting near a pond whittling on a plug of wood. When he finished, he casually threw it in to the water only to see a giant bass savagely engulf it like it was a frog or dying baitfish. He thought to himself, hey I may be on to something here and soon after, became the Henry Ford of the fishing lure industry. The Lucky 13 lure that he would later begin to mass produce, looked very similar to that tossed piece of whittled wood and soon became the fishing lure industry’s Model T. Since then, lures of all shapes and sizes have been developed to imitate anything a fish might view as prey. Warmwater fly anglers can learn a great deal from our conventional fishermen brothers and sisters in their approach to catching fish on those familiar hard bodied lures manufactured by the major companies. We just have to be a little creative in designing and tying our flies, since many of the patterns that are typically found in the fly shops and mail order catalogs are not designed to imitate something that has a built-in wiggle. When I get what I feel is a “dis” from a dyed-in-the-wool bubba bass fisherman who thinks fly-fishing is only for bluegill in small farm ponds or trout in streams, I will typically challenge him to a dual; him with his bubba gear (spinning or bait-casting rigs) and me with my 8-weight fly rig and we’ll fish for bass at some neutral site and see who is the more productive fishermen. I’ll only do this if I sense a condescending attitude on his part. I haven’t had many such opportunities, or takers for that matter, but I’m always ready to show Bubba the power of the long rod. I don’t particularly enjoy these outings, because it means competition, and competition tends to take some of the joy away from why I like to fish in the first place; but if they really hack me off, I’ll do it to defend the honor of fly-fishers everywhere. To date, I’ve won about as many of these challenges as I’ve lost, but my showing is usually good enough to shut them up for a while and at least earn from them, some respect for fly-fishing. It’s always fun to see their eyes grow big when they see some of the flies, I come to do battle with. I think they are impressed by the sheer size of the patterns I’m planning to use as they must have been expecting to see a variety of little poppers or woolly worms to compete with their big spinnerbaits and crankbaits.