Learning to Fly Fish in Tasmania's Central Highlands
Fly fishing is often referred to as a “dark art”. It’s a fishing technique shrouded in mystery and tradition. For some lucky fishers, it is a fishing technique that is discovered at an early age or through convenient personal connections. The father who fly fishes will often introduce his children to it. The good mate who fly fishes might offer to get you started.
For others, though, it’s a case of “where do I start”? For too many, the answer to that question is something like - “I’ll get myself some gear and I’ll just give it a go on my own”. For many of them, this is a formula for failure. I liken that to my own efforts to become a player of various musical instruments. I’ve tried many and, with every one that I have tried to teach myself, I have become an abject failure. And I have the unplayed instruments to prove it.
So the path to learning to fly fish should be a deliberate one, and I recommend that it is done in steps.
The first step is to discover if fly fishing is really something that you want to commit to, as, trust me, it requires commitment. This step requires that you are careful about how you make that discovery. Sure, you can start be watching artistically filmed videos of wonderfully kitted-out fly fishers casting tiny flies, creating beautiful loops, netting massive fish in picturesque surroundings as your motivation, but reality will very quickly catch up with you.
Those images don’t help you appreciate the complexity of the gear, the confusion of flies and fly fishing techniques that exist, the challenge of casting near trees and the difficulty in remaining upright while you’re trying to do all the things you might have seen in the video.
So I suggest that you park the attraction of those alluring videos in the “one day I’ll do that” file and head back into reality and attack the first step by adopting the “try before you buy” principle. As a guide, if I’m approached by someone who thinks they want to give it a go, my first advice is that they should NOT buy any gear until they try fly fishing.
This advice has three important dimensions, all of which relate to potential mistakes:
don’t buy anything before you have tried fly fishing in case you don’t enjoy it;
don’t buy anything because it seems like a good deal before you actually know what a “good deal” is; and
don’t buy anything before you understand what is going to suit the fishing you are likely going to take on.
I could devote pages to each of those decisions, but they are wrapped up in what I believe is the ideal second step in your learn to fly fish strategy, which is to pay someone to get you started. Remember, this is the strategy I am recommending those without the family or personal connections to help them get started (and, even for them, I believe that sometimes paying a stranger to help you can be less painful - think “teaching your child to drive” as the type of experience you might be avoiding).
The next piece of advice that I offer is that starting your learning on still water (i.e. a lake) is preferable to learning on a river. For many, river fishing is the quintessential fly fishing experience, but starting on a lake eliminates just some of the challenging distractions of learning on a river.
For example, on a lake:
moving water isn’t trying to knock you over;
generally trees aren’t the only thing your flies are catching; and
you are not worrying that the next slippery rock will see you toppling into the water.
Like many guides, I offer fly fishing tuition for beginners, novices and, unsurprisingly, for those who have tried to do it on their own and have failed. Some of these are able to join one of my scheduled “workshops” where you join a small group of fellow learners for a day. I’m also, however, happy to devote a day’s fly fishing booking to the basics of fly fishing for beginners.
The basics are the things that you really need to see, hear and understand to get you started. Of course a single day won’t make you into a fly fisherman. Nor will a single golf lesson turn you into a pro, or a French lesson render you fluent in a new language. But we all have to start somewhere.
A day of basics involves plenty of information, a proportion of which is hopefully absorbed and which also, hopefully, stirs an appetite for more information. In practical terms, a day will include conversations and activities focussed on:
gear - rods, reels and lines, including the ‘special’ language that fly fishers use to designate sizes and weights;
flies - the differences between wet flies and dry flies, the imitation of aquatic insects and terrestrial insects, the life cycles of insects and the fly fisher’s fascination with those life cycles;
casting - the importance of presentation and accuracy over distance, the concept of keeping things straight and how your wrist will do everything possible to ensure you DON”T keep things straight; and
fishing - where to fish, how to fish, how to cast and retrieve, how to get a dry fly to only move “naturally”, how to “strike”, how to play a fish, how to land a fish and how to release a fish.
For most, a day devoted to those four topics does a few things. Hopefully it resolves the “is this for me” question. After a day I believe you will know. And, for the majority of those who say yes, it stimulates the “what do I do next” question. That becomes highly contextual but, once again, it will be helped by the fact that you now have a connection in the fly fishing game who should not disappear from your thinking at the end of that day.
I happily spend time talking to people about fly fishing opportunities that may exist closer to home. I will always remind them that at least some of their fly fishing development will occur on land - with a big enough back yard or at a nearby sporting field you have a great place to practice your casting techniques. I will often direct people to online teaching resources - there are some fantastic resources that I frequently recommend - like the Orvis “How to Fly Fish” website or a YouTube channel like Tom Jarman Fishing (Tom is the current captain of the Australian Fly Fishing team).
I also try to help them with their shopping plans. My strongest encouragement there is to find a retailer who has people who know about fly fishing and who will talk you through your decision making (as opposed a couple of major chains that don’t offer either the service or the gear that will really help you). And, to help them with that conversation I try to stress at least four issues:
plan to buy a “combo” where your retailer has matched a rod, a fly line, a reel and a leader into an affordable package;
regard the quality of your rod and your line as a higher priority than the quality of your reel;
plan to start with a floating weight forward fly line; and
make sure you understand the warranty on your rod - rod tips do break and the warranty determines how quickly and how cheaply you can replace that broken tip.
Like anything in life, you can approach fly fishing 1,000 different ways. This discussion has been focussed on encouraging you to spend a day with a guide on a lake, learning the basics. That does not inhibit the ultimate fly fishing path you adopt, but it gives you a great opportunity to get some understanding of what it’s all about.
If you want to find out more about what I can do you you, check out my Learn to Fly Fish Services here.