I’m not a bug guy…
Of the many things one can learn when taking up fly fishing, I soaked up most subjects like a sponge. The different types of gear, ways to read water, trout behavior, various methods and techniques, the rich history, fly tying, etc… But the one fly fishing topic I never really did a deep dive into, almost to the point of resistance, is aquatic insects.
You know, the stuff the fish eat and our flies are supposed to imitate. Yes, I’m a moron.
Now, I don’t have a phobia of bugs. I just took sort of a weird path with my fly fishing.
When I picked up a fly rod for the first time I fished streamers. Let’s be honest, a woolly bugger is a cheat code for any novice angler. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start.
I would later mess with dry flies and nymphs, but I was in the stage of the game in my fly fishing where I was more concerned about casting than what fly was on the end of the line. If the fly shop or a friend suggested using a pattern, that’s what I fished. At least until it didn’t work and I tied that trusty woolly bugger back on. I definitely wasn’t consciously trying to imitate anything. And I wasn’t flipping over rocks to see what was underneath.
Shortly thereafter, I picked up tenkara, and became infatuated with its simplicity and effectiveness. Traditional fly patterns went away in favor of more impressionistic “kebari” and learning manipulation techniques was king. It didn’t matter what sort of fly you used, it was how you moved it in the water that was important.
Heck, when tenkara was popularized in U.S. over a decade ago it was advertised that Japanese tenkara anglers don’t even try to “match the hatch”, instead only using a few patterns for their fishing. While that may not be 100% true of all tenkara anglers, there is a little bit of truth in that statement.
Flash forward to today, and I guess I’m an adequate fly fisherman.
While I don’t fish as much as I’d like or used to, over the past 17 years I’ve learned how to fly fish freshwater to the salt and I rarely get skunked. But ask me what those bugs are fluttering around off in the distance… no clue.
I guess if I was ever to encounter a cicada hatch, I’d know what that was. Those fuckers are ugly.
Don’t get me wrong, I can certainly generalize a caddisfly vs. mayfly vs. stonefly when I see one – but not enough to have an intelligent conversation about them, their life stages, or when and where in the country I’m mostly likely to find them.
So really, my bug knowledge is rudimentary at best. Which is a little embarrassing and something I’d like to change. I even talked a little about it on a recent Tenkara Angler podcast (57:46) about pre-season preparation.
Therefore, in an effort to start the journey toward etymological literacy, I recently picked up this book. Amazon’s dropping it off on my doorstep this afternoon. Where we go from there, who knows? My mushy, middle-aged adult mind might not even take to ol’ fashioned book learnin’ these days, but I figure if I was able to take up birding during the pandemic, I can take up “bugging” now.
They both have wings, right?
That is an area I can learn more about, too. I’ll order The Bug Book as well. Whitlock’s _Trout and their Food_ might also be a good addition.
The Bug Book looks like it will be a quick, but informative read. We’ll see how that goes, may try Whitlock’s book as well… If Dave’s drawings are in it, you can’t lose!