Fly fishing holds lessons about art and design (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Fly fishing holds lessons about art and design (2014)

realart.com

18 pointsrntn15 comments

Yay, fly fishing.

Fly fishing isn't about catching fish, it's about catching fish beautifully.

Most fly fishermen are catch and release, they don't even keep the fish.

You can make all kinds of reductive arguments about recreational fishing, but unless you are fishing for food or for $$$, it's all about the enjoyment you take out of the activity.

Fly fishing is harder than using live bait, most spinning reels, etc, but that's not the point. If it was about catching fish, gill nets beat both, and in turn are trumped by fish damns, explosives, electricity, and paralytics (all of which have been/are still commonly used in scientific and commercial harvest).

It's a skill that encompasses body mechanics, tracking/reading water, presentation, the hunt....

It's outdoors, near water, done alone.

It can be as expensive or cheap as you want to make it, the basics/floor to get in are surprising cheap.

It's wonderful.

I have tried fly fishing, and although it is difficult to learn, I have been very successful.

To enumerate the species I have hooked into:

Fremontodendron californicum, Buxus Sempervirens, Acer Circinatum, Quercus Alba... and more

I'm all in favor of design for the sake of design. I've tried fly fishing a few times, and not surprisingly, found it quite difficult. There's a pond near me with no fish that's solely for fly fishers to practice. I can appreciate the need.

I grew up in the Midwest fishing on a lake with a spin-casting outfit. The arm movements you use for that are completely counterproductive for fly fishing.

So, yeah, I could learn to throw a fly. But life's too short. As superkuh says: fish are fish.

I agree that fly fishing is beautiful, but disagree that it is an elective way to make things more difficult in the name of beauty. Most fly fishing happens in relatively shallow rivers where flies comprise a large part of the fish diet. There isn't really any other way to catch the fish. What I love about fly fishing, though, is that it often takes place is beautiful mountain streams. The beauty of the environment is hard to beat.

Not really true, about no other way. In such waters an ultralight spinning rig with a small hook and single split shot, with just a worm on the hook, is far more effective.

So effective, fly fisherman consider it "cheating".

In Canadian provinces, bait fishing in streams is often illegal.

And in Britain they don't allow casting downstream.

I don’t think they consider it cheating. It’s often illegal because it is more likely to harm the fish.

It really is more likely to harm the fish.

Regarding the "cheating" comment, it is a thing I have heard a few times.

Yeah, match the hatch matters, but not as much as you think if you give them something else juicy.

I live on a class 1 trout stream. I've talked to plenty of fancily dressed fly fisherman in for tourism struggling to catch large trout. I do better with a worm or grasshopper on a hook. And the funniest of all is that the biggest browns I've caught were using bread by the local hydroelectric dam because people feed the ducks there and the trout adapted.

Fish are fish. Trout are nothing special. The environmental beauty is still there when using a spinning rod.

In your anecdote, your comparing tourists to a local. Of course a local is going to be more productive regardless of tackle. There are a lot of anecdotes here, with very little data.

Live bait with the proper rig will pretty much always beat an imitation fly. Same goes for organics (fish eggs) that will have scent/oil/particle trail.

If you don't live in Montana or other "promised land", you can try fly fishing anywhere. I'm fly fishing almost exclusively in lowland carp waters for 22 years already and caught plenty of big fish, carps, grass carps, chubs, asps, breams, nase, perch, roaches, rudds. https://i.redd.it/q7t30dmy0hw81.jpg

Fly fishing is fun but in practice it never looks like the videos.

It’s rarely possible to find a good fishing spot where the river is so slow to can stand in it with the required space for a full back cast.

It’s almost always some form of rolling cast to reposition the fly without hitting logs brush or whatever.

Fly fishing is to fishing as audiophiles are to music. It's more about aesthetics and art than it is about achieving the best end result.

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