Sooner or later every fly-fisher you know finds themselves consumed by a mysterious urge to hang, pin, dangle, snap, clamp, and stuff as many weird little angling devices and accessories as humanly possible into and onto their fishing vest: Clippers, retractors, knot-tiers, bottles of fly dope, spools of tippet material, and — well, you name it, the list is positively endless. It seems the more stuff you have dangling from your vest, the more likely you and other fly-fishers are to think you actually know what you’re doing. It’s a harmless delusion. You can usually tell when one of these fly-fishing gadget-freaks is on the river long before you see them: clang, bang, tinkle, clank … they sound like a junkyard coming downstream.
Eventually, though, most of us come to our senses. One day you suddenly realize your “lightweight” fly vest now weighs 37 pounds. Your local chiropractor is adjusting you weekly for chronic back and neck pain, and — perhaps more telling — you can’t find what you need without physically spilling the entire contents of the vest on the ground and searching through the clutter for 20 minutes or so. You also notice you can’t remember what half this stuff is for.
At this point, you resolve to lighten the load. You replace the vest with an angler’s belt pack about the size of a paperback novel. In it, you carry a single fly box, a pair of forceps, a line nipper, a spool or two of tippet material, and a small tin of split shot — the essentials and nothing more. Free at last of the 40-pound vest and the annoying metallic clanging, you glide through the forest with the stealth of a panther. Your neck and shoulder pains are gone, and you haven’t seen the chiropractor for months.
This works out well, and you feel marvelously efficient … for a while. But then, you begin to suffer from bouts of creeping anxiety. Triggered by the fly-fisher’s unholy fear of being caught on the river without the right fly, you stuff another fly box in there. And then another. And while you’re at it, you add another spool of tippet material, just in case. And some more split shot for the same reason. Before you know it, the little pack is bursting at the seams and you consider going back to the vest — but with the sworn understanding you’ll carry only what you need for a day on the stream and absolutely, positively, nothing else. Well, except for the net, of course — can’t live without the net. Or the water bottle. And a couple of candy bars. And …
Author: Dennis E. Smith
