by Mike Buss, Virginia Coastal Fly Anglers
This month let’s talk about fly fishing bloopers, you know, the stuff that happens while we are fly fishing that at the time seems to be real important, but after time becomes a comical story that gets repeated over and over to lots of laughs. All of these things have happened to me or to someone I know while we have been fly fishing.
I hope this has not happened to you, but it has happened to a friend of mine. We had just launched the boat and were looking forward to a day of catching, but as we started to motor out, we seemed to be taking on water. A quick check at the stern confirmed the plug was not in place and water was pouring into the boat. Luckily, we had not left the dock area and were able to get the boat back on the trailer and out of the water before we had passed the point of no return for water in the boat. It has been the subject of a lot of funny stories over the years.
How about lines in the motor? I’m sure just about all of us who fly fish out of boats have experienced this problem. We just came back from out annual trip to Harkers Island to fish for false albacore and we ended up having 3 lines get tangled in the motor and I can’t remember a single year when we haven’t had at least one get tangled and we have been going down there for over 20 years.
Broken rods seem to just happen and this year on that same trip to Harkers Island, we broke 5 rods. One happened when the line got wrapped around a prop and before we could get the engine stopped, the tip of the rod tried to wrap itself around the prop and of course was broken. We stepped on one of them and the rest were broken when we tried to high stick an albacore close to the boat. Over the years I have broken rods in just about every way you can imagine. I even broke one walking to the dock when I wasn’t paying attention and caught the tip in the grillwork of a parked truck. It pays to buy good rods with a good warranty because they will get broken.
How about losing a tip section of your rod while playing a fish? I guarantee when this happens, there is a real priority put on landing that fish so you can put your rod back together.
Knots also happen to your fly line and they are particularly troublesome when you are playing a fish. Sometimes you can turn your rod and the knot will flow through the guides and sometimes it won’t make it before breaking off the fish or breaking the guide. I have had both happen to me.
Of course, there are the usual tippet breaks and bent and straightened hooks that happen on most trips. It is particularly disappointing when you forget that your backing has breaking strength of 20 lbs. and you use a 25 lbs. tippet and you hook a big fish that pulls hard until the 20 lbs. backing breaks before the 25 lbs. tippet and you end up watching your fly line disappear behind that fish.
As you can see, there are a lot of things that can go wrong on a fishing trip and many of them seem very important at the time, but over the years they make some real good stories and lot of resulting laughs.