First Steps in Fly-Fishing
by OldBaldGuy - January 14, 2008
"There's more b.s. in fly fishing than in the average Kansas feedlot." --Lefty Kreh
Maybe you've been thinking about giving fly fishing a try, but don't know what you need? Maybe you have an old fly rod you inherited or picked up somewhere sitting unused in the closet? Maybe you even received a "complete fly-fishing outfit" as a gift, and now you're wondering how to put it all together?
My goal in this article is to help you get started on the right foot. Fly fishing doesn't have to be complicated, although you can make it that way. And fly fishing doesn't have to be outrageously expensive, although plenty of people are more than willing to help you spend your money.
What do you need to have fun fly fishing? You'll need:
- A Fly Rod.
- Fly Line (actually a 4-part "system" of backing, line, leader, and tippet).
- A Fly Reel, and
- Some bugs to tie on the business end.
Let's talk first about cost, since everyone "knows" fly fishing as a hobby ranks somewhere between yachting and Formula One racing.
In August of 2006 I was camped at French Creek campground on the west side of the Medicine Bows in Wyoming. Each morning I'd get up and drive to the North Platte or the Encampment or one of the several little creeks that drain into them. Every evening I'd return to camp, fix myself some supper, pour a little Tennessee nectar in a plastic cup, and walk around the campground to compare notes with the other fishermen.
The two most successful fishermen in the campground that week were a Kansas highway patrolman and his 13-year-old son. They'd walk down the bank of French Creek a couple of hundred yards to the fence marking the end of Forest Service ground, enter the water wearing canvas sneakers, jean shorts and t-shirts, then wade and fish their way upstream past the campground. Some days, just for variety, they'd walk a half mile up the road that ran parallel to the stream, start there, and fish their way upstream another half mile.
As near as I could tell, they never once fished more than a couple of miles away from the campground, and always on French Creek. But they were extremely thorough, conscientiously giving every pool, run, and undercut an opportunity to yield a trout. Each day, in addition to a bunch of little brookies, they caught at least a couple of nice 16-18" browns or rainbows. Some days more than a couple.
One fished a $29.95 Wal-Mart "complete outfit" of rod, reel, line, leader, and flies, and the other spent $39.95 on a similar packaged outfit from Shakespeare that may not have included any flies. It's also important to note that they were dry-fly-fishing "purists." (Dry flies float on the surface.) The father's favorite saying was, "It isn't fly fishing if you can't see the fly!" I thought that was a little bit snobby.
Now, when the new Orvis catalog arrives in my mailbox in January, with its beautiful depictions of $600 and $800 fly rods - perfectly matched with $500 and $600 fly reels - I think about that patrolman and his boy. Their entire week-long trip from southeast Kansas, including gas, food, campground fees, and ALL of their fly fishing equipment, cost less than one of those Orvis reels. You can't put a price on the boy's life-long memories from that trip.
"If we carry purism to its logical conclusion, to do it right you'd have to live naked in a cave, hit your trout on the head with rocks, and eat them raw. But, so as not to violate another essential element of the fly-fishing tradition, the rocks would have to be quarried in England and cost $300 each." --John Gierach
My original outfit, which I still use, wasn't quite so humble. It's a 9-foot, 5-wt. Cabela's Wind River graphite rod that came complete with a graphite Cabela's-brand reel, inexpensive line, and leader. I can't recall the exact purchase price - it was on sale - but Cabela's and Bass Pro usually sell similar outfits for about $100. In the five and a half years I've been fly fishing, that outfit has accounted for some nice fish:
23 inch Big Horn brown, caught on
$100 Cabela's complete 5-wt. outfit
Let's look at the components one by one, beginning with...
The Fly Rod.
(I apologize in advance to you knowledgeable fly fishermen reading this for all of my over-simplifications that follow, but my goal is to get people started. If we can accomplish that, there will be plenty of time for you to confuse them later.)
It all starts with the rod. If you already have one, great. Look on the rod above the grip and you should see where the manufacturer has imprinted the length of the rod and its line weight rating.
If you're buying your first rod (and assuming you plan to fish around here), you're going to want either a 5-weight or 6-weight graphite rod that's 8-1/2 or 9-feet long. Fly rod "weights" range from teensy tiny "0" (I've read about "00" but have never seen one) up to 12- and even 14-weights for heavy-duty salt water critters. You can catch pretty good sized fish on a 5-wt. - my biggest so far with one are an 11-lb. channel cat and a 15-lb. carp - but it's a little light for tossing some of the larger bass bugs and probably lacks the backbone you'd want for wipers or pike. While a 6-wt. gives you more versatility on the upper end, it's a little too heavy for most panfishing (compared to 5s and lighter rods), and if you really get into trout fishing, it doesn't allow quite as delicate a "presentation." (The heavier the outfit, the bigger the splash.)
If 50% or more of your fishing is for panfish and/or trout, make a 5-wt. your first rod. If you're more interested in bass, go with a 6.
Whichever you choose, get it in either an 8'6" or 9' length. These are the easiest lengths to learn to cast and are considered "general purpose" lengths. Manufacturers offer hundreds of choices in those lengths.
A 4-piece fly rod might cost $10 more than that same rod in a 2-piece model, but I think it's probably worth spending the extra money. Rod tubes and cases longer than four feet can be awkward to transport in passenger cars. With modern ferrule designs, most experts now agree there is no appreciable difference in the rod's action regardless of the number of sections.
DO NOT buy any of the "dual-purpose" rods sold for use with either a spinning or fly reel. They do neither job well, but they're especially poor at casting a fly. Sellers should be prosecuted under federal truth-in-advertising laws.
And now, a few words about fly rod "action." Manufacturers use the terms "fast," "medium-fast," "medium," and (rarely) "slow" to describe how close to the tip the rod begins to bend when flexed. "Fast" doesn't necessarily equal "better." Incredibly expensive custom bamboo rods usually have a "slow" action. At this stage in your development, don't worry your pretty little head about action. Most of the rods you'll find in the price range I've suggested are going to be "medium" or "medium-fast." Either will cast a fly line nicely. Any problems you'll have learning to cast will have absolutely nothing to do with the action of the rod; those problems will be 100% "operator error!"
The second-most important component in fly fishing is...
The Fly Line.
Some will tell you it's the most important. They may be right.
Unlike spinning or bait casting rigs, where the weight at the end of the line (e.g., lure, bobber and nightcrawler, whatever..) is what pulls the line off the reel when you cast, in fly casting that momentum is created by the weight of the line itself. A fly smaller than the size of a mosquito on a size 20 hook doesn't create much momentum, no matter how hard or fast you swing it.
Like fly rods, fly lines come in "weights." (Line weights are based on the actual weight of the last 30 feet of line.) Match the line weight to the rod weight - 5 wt. line on a 5-wt. rod, 6-wt. line on a 6-wt. rod, etc. Self-proclaimed experts will tell you about the advantages of "over-lining" (i.e., 6-wt. or 7-wt. line on a 5-wt. rod). Be polite, but ignore them. Their advice may be true for certain limited situations, but for day-in, day-out use you can trust the manufacturers' ratings.
All fly lines once were "level," which means all 60- or 82- or 90-feet of fly line are the same diameter throughout the length of the line. Level fly lines now are pretty rare and usually show up only on the least expensive "complete package" outfits from discount stores.
Almost all lines now are some variation of two simple categories; they're either "weight forward" (WF) or "double taper" (DT). If you buy a complete outfit or a pre-spooled reel, the odds are about 100-1 that it will come with a weight-forward line because (1) WF lines are the easiest for a beginner to learn to cast, and, more importantly, (2) manufacturers like selling WF lines more than double taper lines because when they wear out, WF lines have to be replaced with a new line. DT lines, because they are symetrical at both ends, can be reversed. When one end of a DT line begins to wear out, turn it around and tie the tip of the worn end to the backing.
You'll see all sorts of marketing b.s. in how manufacturers label their lines: "bass taper" for turning over bigger flies, "shooting heads" for longer casts, etc. These almost always are some variation of a weight-forward line. I refuse to spend the extra money until they come out with a guaranteed two-pound bluegill taper.
In addition to weight and taper, there's a third thing you need to look for in lines: the letter "F" as in "Floating." You will see lines that sink, lines that only sink at the tip, sinking tip lines that sink at different predetermined rates, and floating lines. Do not, as a beginner, buy anything other than a floating line. If the box says it's floating line and it still sinks, ask for your money back.
The reason is that most fly casts begin with picking the line up off the water, which creates the initial "load" on the rod. This is much easier to do when the line isn't lying on the bottom of the lake. Now, some of you are thinking, "I don't want to fish dry flies on the surface all of the time." Never fear. Even with a floating line, you can fish well beneath the surface with sinking leaders. (You'll also discover that the tip of your floating line serves as an incredibly sensitive "strike indicator" when something grabs your bug under the surface.)
So, to review, you want the label on your fly line to read:
WF-5-F or WF-6-F or DT-5-F or DT-6-F
meaning "weight forward taper, five (or six) weight line, floating" or "double taper, five (or six) weight line, floating."
Fly lines have a slick coating that allows slack line to shoot through the guides when you make a proper cast. Dirty lines aren't as slick as clean lines, so they don't shoot as well. Most of our sandpits and reservoirs around here have dirty water, and some of that dirt collects on the line and dries there when you're done fishing. After days when you notice that your bad casts are even shorter than normal, take the reel to the kitchen sink, strip the line into warm water with some mild Ivory dish soap, rub it with a soft wet cloth, then rinse thoroughly. You don't need the $10/oz. little bottles of "line conditioner." Some people say they wash their lines religiously after every outing. These people are anal compulsives and should be ignored.
Unlike spinning tackle, where you tie the line directly to the reel, crank it onto the spool, and you're good to go, almost all but the smallest fly reels provide space for "backing." This most often is a relatively thin 20-lb. test Dacron line that serves two purposes. First, since the actual fly line is no more than 90 feet long, adding a hundred or more yards of backing gives you much more length to play a big fast-running fish. Second, partially filling the reel with backing increases the spool's effective diameter, meaning each crank of the reel retrieves more fly line. (At some point in every great fly fishing story, you'll read the words "he took me into the backing!")
Tie one end of the backing to the spool with an arbor knot. Tie the other end of the backing to your fly line with a nail knot or other equally small knot that will pass easily through the rod guides when you hook that 20-pound wiper.
The last two components of your line "system" are the leader and the tippet. Generally speaking, as a beginner you will be using a tapered monofilament leader - thick at the butt end where you attach it to the fly line and almost thread-like at the skinny end. The most common leader lengths are 9-foot and 7.5-foot.
You could tie your fly directly to the skinny end of the $3 leader, but each time you change flies, you'll be cutting off the length of the knot, tying a new knot, trimming the tag end of the new knot, etc. You don't have to tie on too many flies before that 9-foot leader has become a 6-foot leader, and it's no longer very thin at the skinny end. That's why Moses invented tippet. It's simply limp monfilament line tied on the skinny end of the leader, typically extending the leader two feet or more. When you've used up too much of the tippet after tying on several different flies, you just replace the tippet stub with a new length.
Instead of "pound test," like almost everything else in fishing, leaders and tippet sizes are denoted by a number and the letter "X" (e.g., 3X, 4X, 5X, etc.). The primary reason for this is to discourage neophytes who have not yet become fully indoctrinated by the cult. Leaders are rated by their strength at the skinny end. Let's say you have a 3X leader, which translates to about 8-lb. test. You can add 3X or 4X or even 5X tippet to that leader (the same size or smaller), but nothing larger than 3X. (One major manufacturer, Umpqua, rates its leaders at 2X=10 lb. test, 3X=8 lb., 4X=6 lb., 5X=4 lb., 6X=3 lb., and 7X=2 lb.)
(A general rule of thumb for dry flies - not weighted wet flies -- is that the "X" size of your tippet should be 1/3 the size of your fly's hook, so a #12 dry fly will cast best with a 4X leader and tippet. Also, generally speaking, shorter leaders make it easier to cast large wind-resistant and/or heavier flies.)
There are all kinds of ways to attach fly line to leader to tippet, including some clever commercial connectors. Save your money. When I started fly fishing, my mentor taught me to tie the leader to the fly line with a nail knot, and the tippet to the leader with a double surgeon's knot. That worked fine, but eventually the time comes when you want to replace the leader. That meant cutting off the fly line just above nail knot, re-tying a new leader with a new nail knot, and trimming off the tag end of the fly line. Do that enough times and you'll eventually trim the fly line all the way back to the taper.
A better solution, I've been taught, is to leave a short length of the original leader butt nail-knotted to the tip of the fly line. Tie a perfection loop in that butt end as close to the fly line tip as you can (i.e., 1-2"). Then add the new leader using a loop-to-loop connection. (Many commercial leader brands come with the loop pre-tied.) All of us who have converted to homemade furled leaders instead of extruded tapered leaders use loop-to-loop connections; that's how I connect my tippet to my furled leaders, too.
So, now we have the backing bone connected to the fly line bone, the fly line bone connected to the leader bone, the leader bone connected to the tippet bone, and it all goes on...
The Fly Reel.
One school of thought is that the fly reel's only purpose is to keep the unused portion of your fly line from wrapping around your feet. Its function is only storage, some say.
I disagree, but at the same time, I'd rather see a beginner with ten extra bucks spend them on a better quality fly line than a better quality fly reel.
In spin fishing or bait casting, big fish put drag systems to the test. The smoother the drag system, the better. Fly fishing is different. For years fly fishermen used (and many still use) simple "click-pawl" reels that essentially have no mechanical "drag." Click-pawl reels provide a little bit of resistance when you're stripping off slack line to cast so that the reel doesn't "free-spool" and dump coils of line at your feet.
With the exception of the classic Pfluegger 1490 series, most fly reels sold today have either an internal disc drag or a palming ring on the outside edge of the reel, or both. (Pfluegger, by the way, still sells a few "automatic" fly reels, with no crank. You wind a dial on the side to compress a coiled spring which takes up slack line when you depress its lever. These are interesting primarily from a curiosity standpoint.)
Good fly fishermen say that as soon as you hook a fish you should "get the fish on the reel" (meaning crank in all slack line) and play them from the reel, not hand-over-hand pulling in line with your fingers or letting out line between your fingers when the fish makes a run.
I suppose an expensive ($100+) fly reel with a quality drag system would allow you to do that with some confidence. Personally, I have much more faith in the palming rings on my reels, and adjust my inexpensive drags just tight enough to keep the reels from free-spooling. If the fish makes a fast run toward me, I strip in line hand-over-hand to try to keep up, then crank in the slack when I get a chance.
One current fad among manufacturers is large arbor reels. These reels retrieve more line than conventional reels with each turn of the crank but provide less space for backing. They also look incredibly sexy. I might buy one if I still lived in Kodiak and did a lot of salmon fishing, but it would have to have plenty of room for backing.
Now that we've got all our hardware figured out, you only need one more thing to catch a fish...
The Bug.
The "fly" in fly fishing may represent a flying bug. Or it may not. It could represent one of several intermediate aquatic stages of an insect, or a little bitty fish, or a leech, or a worm, or a crawdad, or a frog, or a grasshopper, or an ant, or even another fish's eggs. (And PETA thinks we're nasty!)
Fly fishing bugs are like babies. They come in two general categories, wet and dry. Sooner or later, in both cases, the dry ones eventually become wet. Dry flies are supposed to float on top or just within the surface film. Wet flies sink, some better than others. When your dry fly begins to sink, you can squeeze on and rub in a little dab of floatant (eg, Gink) to make it float again. With a wet baby, you're on your own, fella.
There are approximately 1.7 billion fly patterns, almost all named for their creators (imagine that!) plus whatever it's supposed to represent. Hence, names like "Dave's Hopper." One of the most famous dry flies, the Adams, was invented by Cain and Abel's dad.
As a beginner, you will be confounded by the wide assortment. Ignore 99.9% them. Let's imagine you live in Nebraska and want to fish for a variety of species here, including trout. Here are the first patterns I'd suggest you buy and/or tie:
 Woolly Bugger - No one but a fish could tell you what a Woolly Bugger represents in their mind, but I'll bet variations of that one pattern probably catch more fish and more different species of fish than any other. The only way a Woolly Bugger won't catch fish is to snag it in a tree on your backcast. It's also one of the easiest patterns to tie.
I like my buggers in olive, black, white, brown, and chartreuse, usually with a little bit of added glitter. Twice last year at the Fremont State Lakes I caught five different species in one morning on an olive drab bugger: crappie, gills, LMB, channel cats, and a green sunfish. Both of my master angler channel cats in 2007 came on buggers, but so did trout and smallmouth bass.
 Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear Nymphs - Someone once observed that 80-90% of the critters trout eat are below the water's surface (these percentages would be higher for most of our other species), and almost all of those critters are either grey or brown and less than 3/8ths of an inch long. That's a pretty fair description of a Hare's Ear Nymph.
 <--Copper Johns - I like the tiny (< #14) bead-head versions in either copper or red.
 -->Foam beetles - Fish these on the surface for bluegills and bass. They come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. Some guys swear by yellow. Other guys swear by orange. I'm a traditionalist and prefer my beetles in basic black.
 Hopper imitations - These, too, are fished on the surface, but in addition to drawing strikes on their own, they're the top half of the popular "Hopper/dropper" rig where you attach a dropper line to the hopper hook and suspend a tiny wet fly like a Copper John or bead-head nymph. I'll warn you right now that these rigs are not easy for beginners to cast without them becoming a tangled mess of wind knots. Start with very short casts the first time you try it.
Microjigs - You can buy 1/100 oz. marabou Prolites in various colors from Bass Pro; they're much cheaper than bead-head wet flies and often just as productive. I like to buy bare 1/124th oz. microjigs and insert them in little 1-1/2" skirted plastic tubes because cautious fish seem to hold them in their mouths a second or two longer than hard-body versions. Black plastic tube bodies with either hot pink or chartreuse skirts have worked best for me, except for crappie which seem to prefer glitter white or solid chartreuse. If you get into tying, you can dress the bare microjigs with chennille or dubbing and add tails of marabou or bunny strips. That works, too. One nice thing about microjigs is that the hook rides upside-down so you get fewer snags fishing around brush; the other is that they catch fish - some days so many it doesn't seem fair. And did I mention that they're cheap?
 Adams (dry fly) - The Adams is one of those flies that doesn't represent any one specific insect but must look like a variety of things to different fish. I like it, especially in the "parachute" version, because I usually can see the darn thing, so I know when to set the hook. Other multi-purpose dry flies you might want to consider are the Renegade, Blue Wing Olive, and Elk Hair Caddis.
Some people contend it isn't really fly fishing unless you're casting a tiny dry fly up and across the current, then letting it dead-drift downstream. They award each other extra points for using flies visible only under an electron microscope. Anything other than their purist approach, they argue, is as bad as using worms. Ignore them, too.
Let's go catch something.
"I like dumb fish. Some people say they like to outwit smart fish. I just like to outwit fish. I don't give a damn whether they are smart or not." -Lefty Kreh
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