Welcome, and why I got hooked (the pun is on purpose)
Hello. I'm Gilbert, and I'll be your instructor. For the next several weeks I'll be the person standing beside you in cold water, asking whether you can feel the difference between raising your rod tip and raising it considerably further. I'm retired, I live here in the valley, and I've spent a little over a decade learning these rivers well enough to be genuinely useful to a beginner — which is the whole of my qualification, and I'll be honest about its limits as we go.
Before we address gear or casting, I want to explain how I arrived at this, because it bears directly on how the course is structured.
I came to fly fishing late. I was not an outdoor child; I was more the piano-lessons-and-paper-route sort. Roughly twelve years ago a neighbor persuaded me to go up the Provo with him. I fished for three hours and caught nothing. Zero fish. Not one.
And I drove home grinning like an idiot.
Tricia, my wife, asked how it had gone, and I told her, "I didn't catch anything and I want to go back tomorrow." She simply looked at me. She had married a man who'd found his new thing, and it happened to be standing in a river not catching fish.
The point is precise: that afternoon was not really about fish. It was the quiet, the moving water, and having a legitimate reason to stand in a river rather than standing around feeling out of place. I've considered it often since, and it explains why I named the course as I did. We are not here strictly to catch trout. We are here to have a calm, defensible reason to be outside with our hands occupied. If you catch fish along the way, so much the better.
What we're actually doing in this class
In practical terms: over the coming weeks you will learn to read water, to tie one knot reliably, to cast well enough to place a fly where you intend, and to handle a fish gently should you catch one. That is the complete list. I will not hand you forty techniques on the first day.
Many beginner classes attempt to produce an expert by week two, and it tends to backfire. Students leave overwhelmed and never return to the river on their own. My objective is the reverse: I want you leaving each session having actually done something with your hands, confident you could attempt it again unsupervised.
A little advance honesty
I should state plainly, before you form any impression of me, that I am not a professional. I got hooked on this (yes, I deploy that pun deliberately, every time; I find it funny and I will not stop) and then read everything I could locate and practiced in my own backyard until Tricia asked me, politely but firmly, to stop whipping the fence with my line.
I still cannot cast a fly across an entire river with meaningful distance. If that is your goal, I am the wrong instructor, and I'll tell you so cheerfully now, so no one is disappointed by week four. What I can do is help you place a fly where a fish is actually holding, at a normal, reasonable range. And here is my considered opinion: reading the water matters more than your gear ever will. I have watched a man with a nine-hundred-dollar rod cast beautifully into water that hasn't held a fish in years, while a beginner with a forty-dollar setup who knows where trout hold out-fished him all afternoon. I will repeat this until you accept it. We will spend real time on it.
One thing I need to tell you about hooks
Early on, around my fifth or sixth outing, I hooked my own ear. Not a fish. My ear. It was a barbless hook, fortunately, so it came out easily, but I still had to explain the small mark to people at church the next morning, which was humbling in its own right.
So here is a rule with no flexibility in this class: every hook has its barb pinched down, every time, without exception. It is easier on any fish you catch, and dramatically easier on your ear, your neighbor's jacket, and my ear, since I evidently need the reminder more than most. We will do it together on the first day so you see precisely how it's done. It takes about four seconds with a pair of pliers.
Why I keep doing this
I like people, I like the river, and somewhere along the way I became reasonably good at helping nervous beginners relax enough to enjoy standing in moving water. That is essentially the entire résumé. I'm retired now, I have the time, and driving up the canyon on a weekday morning still feels like getting away with something.
You need not be the quiet, meditative, at-one-with-nature type to do this well. That is a myth people carry in with them, and it only makes them tense. Talk, laugh, botch your cast, ask a supposedly dumb question—there is no such thing. The fish are entirely indifferent to whether you're enjoying yourself, so you may as well enjoy yourself.
Before next time: simply consider whether you own any old shoes you don't mind getting wet. We'll discuss waders later; for now, bank fishing in old sneakers is plenty to begin with.