By Dennis Smith –
I know I say this every January, but I can’t believe the year is over already and we’re celebrating the next one. But now that it’s here, I also can’t help but wonder what radical, new earth-shaking developments the tackle manufacturers will try to lay on us in the coming year.
I’ve been fly-fishing long enough now to recognize that, rod, reel and line makers like to promote their latest and greatest inventions as “ingenious, revolutionary state-of-the-art products capable of delivering unheard of performance and outstanding value.” Most, in fact, are merely extraordinarily overpriced evolutionary enhancements to the same old equipment we used for a hundred years. I mean, regardless of whether they’re made from spiral wound fiberglass, vertically aligned carbon filaments boron with titanium-dampened strips of magnesium oxide, fly rods are still fishing poles, right? Long, skinny sticks with line guides and cork handles we use to catch fish.
And all that scientific sounding mumbo jumbo about state-of-the-art performance usually has more to do with the manufacturer’s shop-floor technique and marketing strategy than it does with actual product performance. Even if it’s true some new-age fly rods are capable of slinging a line 100 feet or more, not one in 100 fly fishermen can cast that much line, no matter what kind of “thunder stick” they use. And fewer still are capable of controlling even half that much line on a moving river (where, by the way, more than 90 percent of us conduct our fly-fishing efforts). And, if we’re perfectly honest with ourselves, most of us probably catch the majority of our fish within 10 to 20 feet of the river bank.
Ironically it seems, the longer one fly fishes, the more likely one is to grow weary of acquiring the latest in razzle-dazzle, high-performance rods and peripheral equipment and to revert to familiar old gear. This may explain, in part, why we’re seeing a lot more bamboo rods on the streams again. And you may have noticed that fiberglass fly rods are making a comeback too. Manufacturers like Russ Peak and the Scott Rod Company are telling us their new fiberglass rods cast just like the best bamboo rods ever made and may be the ultimate in fly-casting instruments. So we’re back to bamboo again.
Hmmm.
The majority of guys that I fly fish with now all fish with bamboo, and it didn’t take much arm twisting to get me to join their ranks. Of course, most of us are old guys who started out with bamboo back in the day. So it might just be we were lured by the subtle tug of nostalgia and a suppressed desire to relive old memories. But it also seems weirdly prophetic that, after having tried all the “latest and greatest” stuff for decades, we mysteriously came back to our roots. Happy New Year.