How to Fish Good-Part 3 How

 How to Fish Good-Part 3 How

Well, this is the part that everybody loves about fishing.  Buying new stuff and trying it out.  It is the least important part of "fishing good". 

Basically, how to fish can be split into three categories:  bait, lures, and flies.  Many people start by fishing with worms, salmon eggs, or power bait.  There are lots of advantages to fishing bait.  One is that you can set the pole in a holder and eat fried chicken while listening to the ball game on the radio. 

For pure magic nothing beats a bobber with a worm attached at one end and a kid at the other.  Here is my daughter with a stringer full of trout caught high in the mountains of eastern Oregon.   She was the only person catching fish that day and even though she went up and down the bank sharing her expertise with the other anglers nobody took her seriously.  The trials of a expert fisherman at age five.

Many expert fisherpersons soon move on to lure fishing.  I suspect it has something to do with attention deficit disorder.  So fisherman give up the calm of bait fishing for the activity of lure fishing.  Not sure they catch more fish, but their hands are clean and there is a lot more activity.

I was a horrible lure fisherman.  It seems the only places I could catch fish with lures were miles from any trail or road.  For a decade or so I spent a lot of time miles from trails and fancied myself quite the fisherman.  Well, if the fish have never seen a lure and were starving then I caught fish on lures.

In a attempt to be a better fisherman I finally took up fly fishing.  In the 1970's the only people that fly fished were Englishmen and cowboys in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.   I had zero contact with English fly-fishers but those cowboys were catching fish!!  This was all before that silly movie brought a very undesirable crowd into fly fishing.  So now we are faced with fly fishermen that have all the humor of a Episcopalian minister. 

Fly fishing along streams is a lot like working in the woods as a professional Forester.  You trip and stumble a lot.  You get wet.  You get dirty.  At times, your vocabulary devolves into four letter words.  Wait, why am I fishing streams when it is so much like work!!

Then I discovered float tubes and lakes.  If you have ever wanted to fish out of a lounge chair smoking a good cigar (or in my case a bad, cheap cigar) fly fishing out of float tube is for you and me.  We will cover this great invention by a southern bass fisherman in later blogs.  But for now, heaven is a sunny day on a small lake in eastern Washington with a lit cigar and a tugging fish at the other end.

There is one thing that all three fishing methods NEED to have in common and that is SHARP hooks.  If you want to catch fish, you have to hook them.  There are plenty of hook sharpeners out there.  Find one you like and use it whether your fishing bait, lures or flies.  Lansky Multi-groove Fish Hook Sharpener.

Well, this concludes the how to fish good series.  Much different than your previous fishing advice, eh.