Fishing a spot together and narrating my own mistakes
This is the final lesson of the entire class, and it is my favorite, because we are not drilling anything. We are simply going fishing.
The plan is straightforward. We select one spot on the bank, one we already scouted when we walked the river together, and we fish it as a group for a good while. I will rig up, I will cast, and I will state aloud every mistake as I make it. Not afterward. During. That is the whole teaching method today.
Why I use this method
Most fishing instruction implies the instructor never errs, which is both false and unhelpful. I miss mends. I misjudge distance. I hook the branch behind me about as often as any of you will. At this point the only real difference between us is that twelve years of practice have taught me to stay calm about it.
So rather than pretend, I narrate. "That cast landed short; I was aiming for the seam and hit the slow water in front of it, so watch, I'll add a little more line." Or, "That's a bad drift, see how the fly is dragging a wake behind it, that's the line pulling on it, I mended too late." You hear the mistake and the correction in real time. That is more instructive than watching me cast cleanly in silence.
What we will actually do together
- Select the spot. We will walk to the water and choose based on everything from a few lessons back: a seam, a riffle dumping into slower water, a current break behind a rock. I will ask a few of you to point to where you would fish it before I say anything. That is the real test of whether the reading-water material stuck.
- Rig up, start to finish, no help from me unless you ask. You did this on your own last lesson. Today you repeat it at the river, with real current pulling at your leader while you try to thread it. It is harder here than at the kitchen table. That is expected.
- I fish first and narrate throughout. Cast, drift, mend, retrieve, repeat. I will identify the good drifts as well as the bad ones, because you need to see both to recognize the difference.
- Then you fish, and I stand beside you and offer one correction at a time. Rod tip. Then timing. Then drift. One fix per cast, as always. I will not give you four corrections simultaneously; that helps no one.
- We rotate through the group so everyone gets genuine time in the good water, not only whoever arrived first.
One point about today: no one needs to catch a fish for this to count as a good day. I mean that precisely. If we spend two hours and nothing takes a fly, but you rigged up yourself, read the water yourself, and produced one good drift you were proud of, that is a complete success. Some of my best afternoons out here ended with an empty net.
A brief note on knots, since we are at the river
The knot still matters more than the cast. I will state it one final time, because it is the last lesson and I want it to hold. You can have the finest presentation on the river, but a sloppy clinch knot means the fish you actually hook will swim off with your fly in its lip and you will never learn why. Check your knot before every new fly, wet it before you cinch it down, and give it a firm tug. Every single time.
On the subject of things that are not pretty yet still function, I want to describe a fly I tied once at the kitchen table. I was distracted, not attending to the proportions, and what came off my vise resembled a bug that had lost a fight. Tricia saw it and said exactly that, "that's a bug that lost a fight," and laughed for a solid minute. I nearly discarded it. Instead I kept it in my box out of stubbornness, and a few weeks later I tied it on out of desperation when nothing else was working, and a decent brown trout ate it on the second drift. I still have it. I keep it as evidence that trout are not art critics. They do not care whether your fly is ugly; they care whether it drifts correctly and roughly matches the size and color of something they already eat. Confidence matters more than craftsmanship, for flies and, honestly, for casting as well.
Safety, once more, plainly
Slick rocks, cold water, and watching your backcast so you do not hook the person beside you. We have covered all of this, but on a day when we are clustered around one good spot it matters more, not less. Give each other room. If your feet begin to go numb, get out and warm up. No one needs to prove anything out here.
Before next time
There is no next time; this is the last lesson. So instead of homework I will say only this: return to this same stretch on your own within the next few weeks, rig up by yourself, and fish it slowly. My thanks to all of you for showing up and being willing to look a little foolish in front of one another. That willingness is most of what learning this required.