From the Editor: Take Someone Fishing

There are two types of people who read our special publication Fly Fishing Made Easy. You are either a potential fly-fishing mentor, or you’re someone who needs a mentor.

If you’re a mentor, fly fishing has brought you great happiness, and there’s someone you want to share that passion with. That person may be your child, your niece or nephew, a friend, your romantic interest, or maybe your husband or wife. They could also be a member of your scout pack or church group, or a coworker.

Whatever the case, fly fishing has changed your life for the better, and you want someone else to experience it. This magazine is an excellent reference for many of the skills you’ll want to demonstrate.

You can use Fly Fishing Made Easy to show a beginning fly fisher how to wind backing on a reel and connect the fly line, leader, tippet, and finally the fly.

You’ll explain how to identify mayflies and how to recognize and imitate stoneflies. You’ll help them choose the fly patterns they need to imitate caddisflies, baitfish, eggs, worms, and other food sources.

Once you’ve got your student squared away with the flies and tackle, there is still much to learn. Flies aren’t much good without a proper delivery, so you need to show your budding fly fisher some basic presentations.

In his story “4 Simple Strategies,” longtime guide Paul Weamer shows the most basic ways to get started presenting dry flies to rising trout, make a streamer come alive in the water, swing a soft-hackle, and dead-drift nymphs subsurface. He takes all the fluff and technical jargon out of nymphing, and shows how easy it can be to catch fish with a beadhead nymph and a bobber. Yes, that’s right . . . he calls it a bobber.

Of course, you’ll need to explain where exactly to drift that bobber, so we show how to identify fishy areas, including the heads and tails of pools, undercut banks, side channels, and inflows. We do the same with lakes, and show how trout congregate around inflows and outflows, weed beds, sunken shoreline structure, and well-defined drop-offs.

Finally, when all the physical and mental skills are mastered, and a new fly fisher gets a trout in the net, it’s time to teach responsibility. Fly fishing is growing in popularity, so we all need to practice “leave no trace” principles, learn how to properly share the water, and how to release trout successfully.

In addition to the physical skills involved in wading, casting, and knot tying, there are also ethical and moral responsibilities that come along with recreating on our public waterways. We aren’t just teaching new anglers—the most important objective is that we are creating new stewards for our finite resources.

There is much to teach and learn, and this magazine can be your guide, or at least a starting point to begin your journey.

So take someone fishing, and then give them a copy of Fly Fishing Made Easy as a reference. You’ll find that next time you are on the water, they’ll be better prepared to take it to the next level.

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