After three decades of fly fishing, my favorite aspect of the sport is teaching. My wife, Lori, and I do a lot of teaching. Our most popular venue is the fly fishing classes that we teach at Arkansas State University Mountain Home. In fact our spring class is coming up in April and we have already starting preparing for it. However, my favorite teaching format is one on one on stream. That way I can give my students a lot of individual attention and alter the lesson to suit their needs.
I had a teaching guide trip yesterday, where I tailored the day to satisfy my student’s needs. My clients were Mike and Gail. They are avid bass anglers who had recently retired and moved to the area. They have owned a weekend place on Table Rock Lake for years and have now moved there full time. They are now interested in taking up fly fishing. They had done some fly fishing on their own but realized that to improve, they needed a little assistance.
They had booked a trip with me to get started but requested that I provide some casting assistance, before the trip, so they could practice. We scheduled a class here at Blue Ribbon Fly Shop, so that we could take advantage, of our casting pond, which is the perfect place to teach fly casting. I took a few minutes to string up and check out their fly rods, before we began the lesson. In about an hour, I had them both casting well enough to go fishing.
Then yesterday we went fishing at Rim Shoals. I had guided on the Norfork the previous day and it had been a bit slow. After a solid week of rain, it was nice to fish on a sunny day. I was able to wear a tropical fishing shirt and my straw cowboy hat for the first time this year. They were running around 10,000 cubic feet of water per second or the rough equivalent of three full generators. The winds were light and variable and the temperature hit seventy five degrees. It was a near perfect day!
As I was rigging up their fly rods, I took a lot of time explaining how I was doing it and why. We spent a lot of time on fly selection. We started with a San Juan worm, with a dropper. I used a different nymph for each of them. Mike had a hare and copper and Gail had a Y2K. Mike picked up a nice trout on the first drift and another on the second drift. Both were on the Hare and copper so I changed Gail over to the same fly. If I am fishing two people I always start them off on different flies.
Mike is interested in getting a boat, so we spent a lot of time talking about boat handling, setting up drifts and controlling drifts. We also talked about selecting a boat for their use.
As we were fishing, I showed them how to fish under an indicator, taught them to mend and fine tuned their casting. When they hung the bottom, I had them let out line until I got the motor started and ran upstream to back the fly out. Mike had a tendency to try and jerk the fly loose. I explained that that may work when bass fishing with 30 pound test line but doesn’t work that well with 5X tippet. We lost a few flies but he was soon taking his time and retrieving stuck flies.
Gail was off to a slow start on her hook set and was getting a bit frustrated but with a little coaching and encouragement she was soon into some nice trout. She ended the day with as many trout as Mike and was well satisfied with her progress. We also tried a couple of other techniques, fishing streamers and some hopper fishing.
We ended the day with between twenty five and thirty trout (we lost count) and they both felt like they had learned a lot. It was a very satisfying day for me. The best place to learn fly fishing is on the water.
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