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On equipment . . .

By Stephen J. Meyers

"The choice of a fly rod is about a thousand times more complicated than the choice of a spouse."

Literary output related to fly fishing seems to go through cycles. For years, nearly every fishing book or essay that was published dealt with the idyllic nature of angling; then, years of writing dominated by technique and exotic locations appeared. Lately, pieces about equipment have become very popular. Not wanting to miss the boat (a boat filled with cash I'm told), I've decided to write a technical column. It's not that I need the money. Heavens no! Although it might be nice to have one of those shiny new Laxus Extrava sedans that parks itself, I've done quite well over the years parking "by ear" and enjoyed the friendly waving of other motorists who sometimes run out of restaurants or shops to send me off with a kindly one-finger salute as I pull away from the curb after using the grill of their SUV as a sounding board. No, my material needs are minimal. Still, an equipment column will make my writing contemporary, and no angling author wants to be left behind when a new craze fills the magazines and sporting bookshelves.

I could write about fly rods, but the choice of a fly rod is about a thousand times more complicated than the choice of a spouse, and besides, since the advent of carbon fiber rods with multi-part space-age fabric layups, and modulus of elasticity numbers approaching several jillion, I haven't got room to do the topic of fly rods justice.

The same goes for fly lines. Once, blue-collar fly rodders chose seven-weight fly rods to cast everything from small flies to bass bugs, and used a level line to do it. Lines now range in size from 000 to 142 (the smallest sizes being used to cast the new nano-flies, and the larger ones for tossing large chunks of bloody beef to great white sharks), and the array of available tapers is dazzling.

When affordable plastic-coated tapered lines appeared in the 1950s, many anglers acquired double-taper floating lines for their fly fishing. The lines floated (most of the time) and shot through the rod guides (sort of) forever. The taper was woven into the Dacron core on a braiding machine that used gears and cams and took a mechanical genius six months to set up. Now, the taper is "extruded" onto a plastic coating over a core of constant diameter. All a line manufacturer has to do to change the taper is reprogram the microprocessor that controls the nozzle of the extruder; so, fly line manufacturers now offer hundreds of tapers - whether we need them or not. There are saltwater tapers and freshwater tapers. There are tapers designed for every species of fish from carp minnow to blue whale, for each stiffness of rod, and to match the personality profile of the angler provided by the clinical psychologist now assigned to the sales staff of each respectable fly shop.

But wait. There's more!

In modern fly lines, there is a magic ingredient mixed into the plastic that makes the line slicker than a campaigning congressman, and makes me wonder if I should try to discover the name of this ingredient so I can tell my wife to recommend it to her patients. (She works in women's health. I'll let you work out the details). That magic lubricant, I discovered earlier this year when I attended a two-week post-graduate seminar on fly lines, is designed to evaporate in three days. After that, the line shoots like a dud and needs to be replaced.

I hope you've discovered in these brief paragraphs that I have far too little room to get into fly lines in depth, either. (Or, for that matter, business ethics.)

So let's talk about insect-repelling shirts.

Lately, a line of clothing that repels insects has appeared, and if you've fished any local waters recently you know that mosquitoes have become a terrible problem. I used to think that people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens were crazy; now, I know that they're just confused about the actual nature of their experience. In all likelihood they were carried off and probed by mosquitoes, then left, dazed, in an alfalfa field to wonder what happened.

The insect-repelling shirts are said to continue working for some 20 washings. Most fishermen I know wash their fishing shirts about every year or two, so they'll last nearly forever - but there are questions. If you fall in the river, does that constitute a washing? If you routinely drop your hemostats into waist-deep water, and retrieve them by plunging an arm into the stream, soaking the sleeve of your insect-repelling shirt along with the shoulder, stomach and parts of the chest and back - how many times can you do that before those areas are no longer protected? How is the meticulous angler-technician supposed to properly enter this in-stream washing data onto the spreadsheet he uses to keep track of his various insect-repelling garments' effectiveness?

I recently asked the sales rep who sells these shirts to our fly shop these very questions. He looked at me with an expression that is kind of hard to describe and said, "Steve, your questions are always the most unbelievable things I've ever heard."

I blushed at the compliment.

He answered me, as well as he was able, by simply re-stating the name of the clothing line: "Buzz-Off!"

Steven J. Meyers is the author of On Seeing Nature, Lime Creek Odyssey, Streamside Reflections, The Nature of Flyfishing, Notes from the San Juans and San Juan River Chronicle.