Bayou City Anglers had speakers Thursday on fishing the Guadalupe River from Go Outside Expeditions. It was a great presentation, and they touted Dynamic Nymphing by George Daniel. BCA was out of the book, but it was available to download on Kindle–which is probably good anyway. We are drowning in books.
It is the first fly fishing book I’ve bought in years. I guess mostly in these late years I fish some kind of streamer: saltwater, bass, even trout as often as not. Streamers make sense to me. You throw the fly out there and bring it home.
The introduction to Dynamic Nymphing was by Charles Jardine, which was interesting for two reasons. The first was content. He wrote something obvious, but nothing is ever obvious to me. Jardine says that trout don’t know where he’s from, and wherever he fishes they don’t really know where they are. They’re trout. You fish trout essentially the same in Italy as in Argentina as on the Guadalupe River. Productive techniques are good wherever they may be.
The second reason was because Jardine’s son, Alex, was guiding the one time I can remember getting angry, really angry, about fly fishing. We had booked a trip with Aardvark McCleod on the Hampshire chalk streams, and Alex, who was charming and tried to explain cricket to me, made a suggestion about my casting. It was probably a great suggestion that I didn’t understand, and I ended up whacking the rod with the fly for the next hour trying to put it into practice. Alex told me to stop, but I kept going until I finally screamed goddammit, which still embarrasses me, and almost certainly embarrassed him. Then I went back to my old stupid cast. The Hampshires, by the way, aren’t one of the 50 states. They do look exactly like a Constable painting though.
As to Dynamic Nymphing, it is a how-to on both of the European styles of straight-line nymphing, and indicator nymphing. The three things I’ve taken away so far are get rid of the split shot and use weighted nymphs, let the water move the fly most times, and stop hanging up on the rocks. I like particularly getting rid of the split shot. I spend at least a half-hour every trip undoing the leader tangle around the split shot. Good riddance.