Fly-fishing Foundations

May 19, 2025

Fly-fishing is a new experience for me, radically different from what I did growing up. This weekend I took the plunge and started to learn to fly fish.

Recently my sister and I finally got around to going to through my Dad’s fishing gear. My Dad was an avid fisherman who loved every aspect of fishing. Fly-fishing with his brother Jim being one of the activities he really enjoyed but never had an opportunity to do as much as we imagine he would have like to.

To this day, his hesitancy to fish the local resource, be it the Fox river, the local park districts or even the Chain O’Lakes up in Antioch, still leave me with questions.

He had so many fishing resources available to him, and he didn’t take advantage of them. Why? Maybe it was less about the fishing and more about getting to fish with his brother, to be honest I don’t think we will ever know.

But we had been putting off going through his fishing gear, partly because of our own busy scheduled, but partly because it was something so connected to the core of who he was. The thought of going through it was somehow deeper than other things.

Going through everything ended up taking way longer than either of us thought it would take. Seeing a lot of the older gear brought back a lot of great memories from our childhood going on our annual two-week vacations to Minnesota to fish, play and visit our Aunt and Uncle.

Back in the 70’s and 80’s family vacations really meant only one thing. We were going to Minnesota. We would be staying in a Mom & Pop fishing resort in a cabin. There would be fishing which we would try to avoid whenever possible.

There would be a resort store where we could get candy and pop on credit. And we would swim and have adventures every day until exhaustion.

And at some point we would go visit our Aunt & Uncle and our cousins. If we were lucky Grandma and Grandpa would also be up there at a different resort, never at the same resort mind you, they liked a certain lake which my Dad wasn’t all that fond of fishing.

Now when we go on vacation now, if our hotel has a kitchen we will generally make food 20% of the time and even then usually just breakfast and sometimes lunch.

On the vacations growing up my Mom would cook 90% of the meals in the cabin, with the remaining 10% split between going out and having dinner with my Aunt and Uncle (usually at their house). This was the norm, and of that 90% most of it was fresh fish that my Dad had caught and cleaned (almost exclusively deep-fried).

I mention all of this because these trips had a bigger impact on me than I would even know until much, much later in my life. They represent a core memory that is a big part of my childhood. And I would have to say that they represent Happy memories.

So when it came time to go through my Dad’s fishing gear it was a biter-sweet experience at times bringing up happy memories against feelings of loss and sadness at his passing.

In the end I found myself coming home with way more fishing gear than I knew what to do with. On top of that I now had access to Fly Fishing rods, reels and associated support gear.

Up until this last weekend all of my fishing to date had been with either spin-casting or bait-casting reels where you cast the lure out and reel the lure back in to the pole.

How is fly fishing different from spin casting?

According to our AI Overlords: “Fly fishing uses a long, flexible rod and a weighted fly line to propel a lightweight fly, while spin casting uses a shorter, stiffer rod and a lighter line to cast a weighted lure or bait.”

While I agree with this, it leaves out a big point. With fly fishing you aren’t generally reeling the line in between casts. You whip the line back behind you and reverse it back one or more times to reposition the lure.

If you have ever seen the movie “A River Runs Through It” they Fly fish the entire movie. Fly-fishing is mostly done in rivers but there are no limitations on where you do it.

The nice thing about doing it on a river is that the current becomes the movement mechanism rather than reeling it back in. I say this as someone who doesn’t know the fine points of fly-fishing at all. Just some basics and even those may very likely be wrong.

So I did like anyone would do and started to watch Youtube videos on how to fly fish. I quickly realized I needed to get some practice before ever going out on the river.

But before I could do that, I need to change the reels over to what is called “Right-Hand retrieve”. What does this mean? Put simple, which hand are you going o use when you do use the reel to reel in a fish.

For me since I will be holding the rod with my left hand, I will be using my right hand to reel the line in. As expected my Dad still had the instructions in the box, but they were woefully unhelpful. So off to Reddit I went to see if anyone could help.

To give you an idea, the instructions for taking the reel apart said: a) remove screw, b) remove drag wheel. Ok, seems simple enough but the drag wheel didn’t want to come off.

Much like my canoe dolly experience some provided the answer in the simplest of questions: “Did you unscrew the drag wheel?” Doh! Feeling a little stupid I did so and the fly-fishing real was now taken apart.

After a few trials and errors I now had the reels converted over to right-hand retrieve mode but now I had a new problem. The line was wrapped on the reel in the least optimal way.

I would come to learn (through more videos) that the best way for the line to be would was for it to exit the reel on the bottom, in the current config it was coming off the top of the reel. So I went about unwinding the line to rewind it in the direction that I wanted.

Let me just say that unwinding the line onto a spool that was being wound back up is how this operation should always be done. My idea to carefully unwind it onto the floor was the worst possible choice I could make, and before I knew it I had a giant rats nest of line to untangle.

Talk about frustration at my own decision. But that’s how we learn right? Right? Anyway, once I got that situation taken care of I repeated the process on my second reel using a spool and it was blissfully easy to do.

Heading out to Practice

I then went out to practice in the large field by our house. Of course, it was way, way too windy so my results were less than stellar, but I started to get more of a feel for what it might be like.

This was followed up by more videos and by Friday (05/16) I made up my mind to actually go out to Hudson Crossing and venture out onto the Fox River to try Fly Fishing.

Friday was also the night of an incredibly rare dust storm that swept across Illinois and other surrounding states and come Saturday while the dust was gone what it left was higher than normal winds and cold temperatures.

But I was determined, so after dropping my daughter off at 6:45AM for a band function I headed over to the park to get ready.

Now I’ve never worn waders before and the pair I inherited from my Dad have socks at the end instead of formed boots like some waders have. This is great for me because I have much bigger feet than my Dad.

Real wader boots that go on over these footings are very expensive, so I improvised and used a pair of old running shoes. They would end up getting small rocks and gravel in them but I couldn’t honestly tell.

I am planning on getting a cheap pair of running gators to go over the shoes to keep the rocks out. That should be a much cheaper solution in the long run.

Stepping out into the river the water was mostly knee-deep with a few areas coming up to my waist. Casting proved somewhat easier once the line was wet and I had moved to the other side of the river.

I was also able to see how the river current can be used to move the dry fly-fishing lures along naturally. There were as you can imagine some spectacular fails and a lot of poor casts.

Some lessons I learned. Be more patient on the back cast, going forward too soon can really much up your results. Keep your wrist and arm more locked together, trying to using your write to add power isn’t as effective.

One guide I read suggested tucking the end of your pole into your shirt or to put a thick rubber band around your wrist and pole. When I went out the next day I tried to keep this in mind and it did seem to improve my casts.

In the end I went out Saturday and Sunday morning with my brother-in-law Greg joining me on the short for some bait/spin casting while I was in the river.

I think fly-fishing is going to be a fun activity I can do here in Oswego. I am looking forward to doing more of it in the future. And to answer the question you might be wondering, I did not catch any fish. I had one hit on Sunday but it didn’t take the bait. Next time for sure!