Scott: Fly fishing for beginners

My fishing buddies and I were barely teenagers when we decided that we had to become fly fishermen.

How could we not? We read every issue of “Field and Stream” and “Outdoor Life” from cover to cover, and more than 90 percent of the fishing articles were about fly fishing either for trout and salmon or for saltwater species we’d never heard of.

Even though there were no trout streams in Kansas and the state was beyond bicycle range of the nearest ocean, the four of us went to a surprisingly well-stocked sporting goods department of a local hardware store. There we beheld what, to us, was a dazzling array of fly rods, fly reels and fly lines.

Each of us had earned the contents of his billfold driving tractors, stacking hay bales and pushing lawnmowers. We knew to the last drop of sweat how much every item on the racks and shelves of that house of dreams cost.

We didn’t all choose the same makes or models, but each of us left the store in possession of an 8-foot rod, a simple reel and a floating level line, which we hoped  was the proper match for the rod we had chosen.

A group purchase of 100 yards of braided Dacron line, which we later divided among ourselves, served as backing.

Knotless leaders weren’t available, so we bought one spool of 20-pound monofilament, one spool of 17-pound, one spool of 12-pound and one spool of 8-pound, from which we constructed our own tapered leaders.

With the exception of fly-fishing specialty shops located in big cities, it’s difficult to buy fly rods, reels, lines or leaders off-the-shelf these days.

Both Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops list a mind-numbing variety of fly-fishing tackle in their catalogs.

These include kits, which include a rod, a reel, a weight-forward line, backing and a knotless leader, all of which constitute a well-balanced unit.

Both companies offer house brand kits that sell for less than $100, an amount which, in relative value, is less than we paid 50 years ago.

I recommend that any newcomer to this sport take advantage of the kit option. Proper balance between a fly rod and its line is essential if you hope to have an enjoyable fly-fishing experience, because fly fishing requires the angler to cast the line that carries the lure with it.

The best way to learn how to use fly-fishing tackle is to take lessons, formal or otherwise, from an expert.

Instructional videos are another good option. Learning to cast by studying illustrated written instructions is difficult.

The bluegill and bass that inhabit farm ponds and small impoundments are excellent subjects for testing your new-found skills.

Both species are tolerant of sloppy casting and will eagerly strike a wide variety of poppers, dry flies and weighted wet flies — wooly worms and wooly buggers are unbeatable.

Missouri has more than enough miles of high quality trout and smallmouth bass streams to keep the most avid fly fishermen intrigued for a lifetime.

Some of this water requires an expert’s touch, but a lot of it will surrender its piscatorial riches to novices.

While I have a dozen or so favorite fly patterns I never leave behind, I buy a lot of my flies from shops located near the stream I intend to fish that day because advice from local experts is often worth buying tackle at retail prices.

If you’ve got a burning desire to test your fly-fishing skills against a bigger, tougher foe, carp will attack wet flies with reckless abandon in either still or flowing water.

All of these “freshwater bonefish,” which — for reasons that will become apparent the first time you stick a fly in one’s lips — is what we called them, ask is that the water be clear enough to make the fly visible for at least a couple of feet.

I’d like to offer a word of encouragement regarding casting distance. It takes a lot of practice to learn how to keep much more than 10 yards of fly line in the air.

The 50-yard casts the anglers in fly-fishing videos make so effortlessly are partially a product of fly rods that cost at least four times as much as you paid for your entire outfit.

Anyone who can lay 30 feet of fly line and a 7- to 9-foot leader gently on the water’s surface can catch a lot of bluegill, bass, trout and  carp.

Those of us who have a hard time resisting the urge to shoot for the middle of the pond or the far side of the stream are casting beyond the most catchable fish far more often than we’d like to admit.