Trout @ Salmon
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Date: April 19, 2007 at 12:28:06
From: ken, [pool-64-223-54-128.prov.east.verizon.net]
Subject: Re: Fly fishing
One of the things about getting older is remembering how things, "Used to be,"even if they weren't actually that way except in our/my imaginary romantic memory.
To me a jig is about function and tied in lead heads or heads made of other material are functionally jigs.
That is not a judgement just a function definition perhaps.
Guides are guides and not necessarily fishermen first but entertainers and showmen and other things too numerous to mention.
Some of them are decent and some are not.
Being a guide is not all that it is thought to be - for sure. It is a great way to sabotage your love of fishing and turn it into a chore that you have to do often with people that you may not want to hang out with when fishing at all.
It can bring out very imaginative passive aggressive behavior in both guides and clients.
I am interested in the state of the art in fly fishing as it is now. I have not been privy to how it has evolved over the last twenty or more years as I have not fished for them in earnest since the early Eighties.
It seems to me that it has gotten quite technical but I do not know that for sure.
I do know that there are lots of experts now and lots of changes in the language.
I do know that all the technical changes in Salt Water fly fishing are suspect in terms of function even though they are accepted and promoted in the media as by-product of state of the art progressive marketing for sales of equipment and education and travel destinations.
I do not know if trout fishing has been altered and manipulated toward the technical as much as the salt has been by short sighted financial industry goals.
I loved the old names of flies like Whirling duns and Light Cahills and my all time favorite name, The White Gloved Howdy.
I enjoyed the sweetness of it all and the touching of the early Catskill days written about by Bergman and others with grace and style and the feel of those times of running boards and model T Fords and solitude and naps while the silk lines dried strung between trees and - silk gut.
Bamboo and the grace and magic of trout fishing in natures holy places is what I loved about fly fishing.
I just wonder if the romance and spirit of it has been lost to the stark, modern rational view of life or if the memory and traditions of grace and beauty are still alive and well and evolving still connected in fullness to the past.
Somehow in my limited way, rightly or wrongly, I equate and connect the accepted use of jigs, molded or tied as true fly's to a, "Dark Age of Angling," that signifies and celebrates the loss of awareness of the experiential esoteric and practical masterful lineage of trout fishing and that is the root of my question.
I would like to know if the old is honored and respected or if it is dismissed as useless and not relevant anymore?
The rest is all just the transitory politics of the marketplace to me.
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