Fishing a spot together and narrating my own mistakes
Okay. This is it. Last lesson of the whole class, and it's the one I like best, because we're not drilling anything. We're just going fishing.
Here's what we're doing. We're picking one spot on the bank, a spot we already scouted back when we walked the river together, and we're fishing it as a group for a good while. I'm going to rig up, I'm going to cast, and I'm going to say out loud every mistake I make while I'm making it. Not after. During. That's the whole teaching method today.
Why I do it this way
I feel like most fishing instruction makes it sound like the instructor never messes up, and that's not true and it's not helpful. I miss mends. I misjudge distance. I get my fly stuck in the branch behind me about as often as any of you will. The difference between me and you at this point is mostly that I've had twelve years of practice being calm about it.
So instead of pretending, I narrate. "Okay, that cast landed short, I was aiming for the seam and I hit the slow water in front of it, watch, I'm gonna add a little more line." Or, "That's a bad drift, see how the fly's dragging a wake behind it, that's the line pulling on it, I mended too late." You hear the mistake, you hear the fix, in real time. That's more useful to you than me just casting pretty and saying nothing.
What we'll actually do together
- Pick the spot. We'll walk to the water and choose based on everything from a few lessons back, a seam, a riffle dumping into slower water, a little current break behind a rock. I'll ask a couple of you to point at where you'd fish it before I say anything. That's the real test of whether the reading-water stuff stuck.
- Rig up, start to finish, no help from me unless you ask. You did this on your own last lesson. Today you do it again, at the river, with real current pulling at your leader while you try to thread it. It's harder here than it was at the kitchen table. That's normal.
- I fish first and talk the whole time. Cast, drift, mend, retrieve, repeat. I'll point out good drifts too, not just bad ones, because you need to see both to know the difference.
- Then you fish, and I stand next to you and say one thing at a time. Rod tip. Then timing. Then drift. One fix per cast, same as always. I am not going to give you four corrections at once, that helps nobody.
- We rotate through the group so everybody gets real time in the good water, not just the person who got there first.
Here's the thing about today, nobody needs to catch a fish for this to count as a good day. I mean that. If we spend two hours and nothing takes a fly, but you rigged up yourself, read the water yourself, and got one good drift you were proud of, that's a full win. I've had some of my best afternoons out here with an empty net.
A quick word on knots, since we're at the river
The knot still matters more than the cast. I'll say it one more time because it's the last lesson and I want it to stick. You can have the prettiest presentation on the river and if your clinch knot is sloppy, the fish you actually hook is going to swim off with your fly in its lip and you'll never know why. Check your knot before every new fly, wet it before you cinch it down, and give it a real tug. Every single time.
Speaking of things that aren't pretty but still work, I want to tell you about a fly I tied once at the kitchen table. I was humming through it, not really paying attention to the proportions, and what came off my vise looked like a bug that lost a fight. Tricia saw it and said that exact sentence, "that's a bug that lost a fight," and laughed at me for a solid minute. I almost threw it out. Instead I put it in my box out of stubbornness, and a few weeks later I tied it on out of desperation because nothing else was working, and a decent brown trout ate it on the second drift. I still have it. I keep it as a reminder that trout are not art critics. They don't care if your fly is ugly. They care if it's drifting right and it's roughly the size and color of something they already eat. Confidence matters more than craftsmanship, for flies and honestly for casting too.
Safety, one more time, plainly
Slick rocks, cold water, watch your backcast so you don't hook the person next to you, we've said all this before, but on a day when we're all bunched up around one good spot it matters more, not less. Give each other room. If your feet start going numb, get out and warm up. Nobody needs to prove anything out here.
Before next time
There isn't really a next time, this is the last lesson, so instead of homework I'll just say this: go back to this same stretch on your own sometime in the next few weeks, rig up by yourself, and fish it slow. Bless you all for showing up and being willing to look a little silly in front of each other, that's most of what learning this took.