Fishing The River Usk Pt7

The last tangle of the trip

Some observations on the noble pastime that is Fly Fishing:

Fly Fishing is - Fighting your way though the undergrowth and thorns in expensive plastic trousers, carrying a really expensive stick that's so fragile it might as well be made of glass.

Fly Fishing is - buying or making a steam-side Special Effects department in miniature, and then using spider webs to tie the creations onto the line, while sitting in cold water, often in the dark.
From where I'm standing Fly-tying looks like a hobby within a hobby, apparently their are guys who have 'had to' build whole extensions on to their houses just to store the inevitable collections of fly tying materials. Some of which are collectable.

The moment just before the F±§k@R is cut off, and the whole process started again

Fly Fishing is - Relaxing by unknotting spiders webs in the half light of and overgrown stream. Practiced mainly by gentlemen of advancing years 'middle youth', who have finally acquired the patience required for all the untangling, the money for all the kit and caboodle and the time off.
The sport then serves mainly to remind the practitioner he needs reading glasses.

Fly Fishing is - Where the romance of craft and the precision of science intersect; it speaks of a past where men we'd like to be, men from a bygone era, make things, things of staggering precision, and make them in sheds. So that, armed with their creations, when time and financial tide are right we can re-hatch into ourselves as boys, all penknives and baseball caps, poking sticks into the water, and conjuring up visions of what might one day be.

Get anything? Some bushes, a soaking, spent a lot though!

Fly Fishing is - watching good intention turn to pragmatism as one fishless day turns into another
The Lighthouse Keeper [day one]: Oh no SBW, Dry Fly is what it's all about, that's the real thing
The Lighthouse Keeper [day three]: Lets do some nymphing!

Fly Fishing is - A school of fishing so up-itself that it can become, [once a collection of bit 'n' bobs have been bought - at at £4.98 each] any other kind of fishing (float, lure) without even noticing, yet still remain disdainful of them.

See - just like Abercrombie and Fitch

Fly Fishing is - The search for the simple life, the search for a time when we were grubby but happy, enthralled by the simplest things; following the movement of a ball of fluff as the currents tumble it down a streams meander, the flicker and flash of a tiny fish made from Peacock Feather, seeing that same feather-fish become the new kid on the block as fry, tentative and observent, surrounded it until the biggest and blodest of the fry muscles its way past the onlookers to break its teeth on the feather-fishes brass head.

Annoyingly the true pure simplicity of it all can only be revealed at vast expense. Often without the involvement of fish.

More soon
SBW