A common mistake is to equate “experience” with time.  That if a person does something for 10, 20, or 30 years he magically becomes experienced.  Gaining experience is an active pursuit; one must seek it out as one seeks out new patterns, gear, or spots.  Fly fishing success, ironically, is the true enemy of experience.  People have a tendency to find what works and stick with it. I’m not knocking that, just pointing out that with that mindset learning becomes far more difficult. Truly experienced fly fishermen are easy to spot; they tend to be the ones asking a lot of questions.

The 2008 striper season on Cape Cod really epitomized this.  A shifting of the sand caused a well-known fly fishing Mecca to become a stagnant puddle.  For fifty years or more, this area may well have been the single greatest fly fishing area for stripers in the world (titles like that are always debatable of course.)  There were anglers and guides with decades of experience who knew every nook and cranny of that area, every: baitfish, rip, dip, eddy – you get the idea. Yet one winter storm completely erased much of the relevancy of that knowledge.

So what did many of these anglers do?  They kept fishing the same area rather than venture out and learn something new.  They fell into the experience trap.  The belief that what you know best from personal history is what is best.  Theories about the imminent extinction of the striped bass, petitions to limit the seal population, and gripes about commercial fishermen became common topics of conversation.  The grip of “experience” was so strong it was easier to believe that there were no fish in the sea, than that a small set of fishing tactics in a small area of the ocean no longer worked.

Now I’m not going to pretend I had a lot of sympathy – heck I wont even name the place because I hope more and more people will fish there (where I don’t) I even go so far as to post pictures of fish I caught in other spots and say I caught them there to direct traffic.  I’m a ripe bastard I admit that, it is part of my charm.  However, I am also guilty of falling into the exact same trap…I think most of us are.

The striper event is a macro example – easy to understand and criticize.  Now how many times have we ventured to our favorite lake, pond, or stream, to cast our favorite flies – Old Faithful and such – done the things that have worked countless times in the past only to get skunked and chalk it up to air pressure, cold fronts, bad luck, or my personal favorite excuse, “The Universe has conspired against me.”  We may have felt bad that we didn’t catch any fish, but what was truly missed was an opportunity to learn something, to increase our experience. Your best opportunity to learn something new is when what you already know fails to work.

I believe that the most successful fly fishermen share this one trait.  It is not superior casting skills, PhD’s in entomology, or an uncanny ability to read water.  It is the simple skill of being able to recognize when something isn’t working, and the ability to adapt and try something new.

Several computer games on the market today reward players with experience points for completing certain tasks.  The more points you earn the more powerful your character becomes.  This in turn allows you to complete more difficult tasks and get more points.  It is really no different in fly fishing.  Well so far no purple-skinned chain mail bikini clad bimbos in fly fishing, but I remain hopeful.

In fly fishing the key to gaining experience is simple.  Think about what you are doing.  There is no better way to promote this habit in yourself than to play ten casts.

When I was a lad I would pretty much choose my flies based on what I felt like using, and I would cast them where I felt like casting them.  Sometimes I’d catch fish, sometimes I wouldn’t, since the variables were more or less random any conclusions I came to where suspect at best.  My father, on the other hand, would very rarely cast and not catch a fish.  If he caught three fish in a day, he probably made less than ten casts.  One day when I was casting like mad but catching nothing my father challenged me to a game.  The rules were simple you could make ten casts, if you caught a fish you won the prize of ten more casts, if you didn’t then you had to stop fishing.  The only other rule was you had to call your shot like in a game of pool.

So if you made a cast with a nymph you would have to say, “I’m using a size 10 Gold Ribbed Hare’s ear on a 9’ 4x leader, no indicator, three split shot 18 inches from the fly.  I’m going to cast upstream into the white water of that waterfall and tumble the fly to the tail of the plunge pool.”

Sounds involved and it is, but should that cast fail to catch a fish, you are unlikely to make it a second time without some adjustment.  More importantly if it should succeed, you will know exactly why it did.  This stupid and often annoying little game is probably the quickest way to gain true fly fishing experience.  You will learn more from playing one game of ten casts then you will in ten years of random attempts or merely repeating what worked the other day.

The more engaged you are in any activity the more you will learn from it.

The second key to this is to hone your skills.  A fly fishing neophyte is often most concerned about his casting, knots, leader considerations, and line management.  The better skilled you are, the more of your active brain is free to learn and problem solve.  Like the video game, the more experience you have the easier it becomes to gain more.

Give it a try.