At some point you accept this fly fishing thing is going to stick.
That’s when you start to look around for the lower, middle quality rod. The bang-for-your-buck rod. The great-value stick that will provide you with more of the artistry that the starter rod you bought in plastic packaging that came with three flies, all of which disintegrate in water, can’t.
You stay here for a little bit and start to develop your specific style. You become more aware of what you might want from a rod in order to fish your water more effectively and introduce yourself to the lower end models of the premium brands.
When you think you qualify, or get a little loose with the credit card, you ponder the excalibur of fly rods and check the price. The premium rod from a premium brand costs about the same as the total amount you’ve spent on the sport — rod, reel, gear and gas. But you know what you want. You’ve established your style. You are hopelessly addicted to this method of fishing and eventually justify the purchase.
In the same way that you noticed the difference between a $75 Plueger and a $150 Temple Fork Outfitters 5-weight, you pick up Sage’s new graphite iteration and think, “Oh yeah, I do think this rod could handle a king salmon and my shoulder could handle a weekend of casting for them.”
Anyone who didn’t drop rent on a single rod on their first trip into a fly shop remembers their own journey to the top tier of fly rod technology and understands that eventuality has no bearing on competency and provides no inside track to respect.
Anglers, anyone really, also remember becoming aware of the ecosystem which provides depth and variety to the experience. Results become somewhat routine because it’s impossible to maintain the level of amp you experienced the first time a steelhead pulled line from the reel, a coho jumped or a coastal cutthroat rose to a dry fly. But you get reminders and new firsts. It’s not that fishing gets reduced to a checklist, but the experience broadens and you see more opportunities.
You also see and appreciate the innovators and creatives (not influencers) that are steady and dependable as the industry becomes increasingly impacted by private equity firms and corporations. Those are the types who manage fly fishing gear though they couldn’t tell an 8-weight from a 1-weight and who care mostly about margins and efficiency rather than connection and quality.
That’s not to say that all private equity firms or parent companies are bad. Smaller companies often don’t have the capital to grow or provide the consumer with more of what they want. But the buy-direct, sterile model of consumerism takes the heart out of the starting point: going into a fly shop and looking around, meeting the employee behind the counter who can answer questions but will leave you alone to wander, feel the reinforced knee of a pair of waders, pick up a fly rod meant for king salmon and think, “woah, that’s light.”
That’s what you get when you participate in the ecosystem and look beyond what’s at the end of your line. You start to notice the amount of people who leverage experience and education to turn their hobby into a career and wonder what you can contribute.
Passionate people funnelled energy into education and work which contributes to that price tag. Whether you think it’s worth it or not is a personal choice, but we should show reverence for those behind the products, and appreciate those who stock them on actual shelves.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports & Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.