I'm not a particularly religious man, but I do consider myself a person of faith who would never assume to know God's mind. I mean really, who - in the grand scheme - am I? Truth be told, I can barely get through a full work day without screwing the pooch at least once. The big guy upstairs creates the universe in seven days, and I might be able to mow my lawn, and pay someone to change the oil in my wife's car inside of that same week. Pathetic, I know.
In contemplating the divine, my own inadequacy, and bug chucking, I find myself wondering why if God decided to build a natural redundancy into human beings - two eyes, two legs, ten fingers, three testicles -why then is two handed casting not the norm? Why do fly flingers fling their flies with only one arm doing the lion's share of the work. It occurs to me that one-handed casting goes against nature, against divine design.
Here's the thing. On a recent steelhead trip - a four day bender on the Salmon River - I fished a two-handed rod exclusively. I didn't intend as much; I'm hardly a dedicated spey guy. It just sort of happened. I was there. The rod was there. I was a little drunk. Why not?
And I have to say ... I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it so much - in fact - that I'm considering a bamboo firesale to help finance an arsenal of two-handed sticks, and hundreds of yards of T-14. I'm sure I'll regret this later, but like the lives of so many other bug chuckers my life is a series of regrets strung loosely together, so why not?
Anyone interested in a 7' 4# quadrate that was built on a Payne 98 taper?
2 comments:
You know, I heard of a guy who did just that - go the way of the super-long, two-fisted fly rod - and he had to revert back to the old-fashioned single-handed fly-flinging mode of yesteryear. Seems he mostly fished small freestone streams averaging about 35 feet wide, and all his two-handed casts landed way up in the bushed on yonder side of the stream. The real kicker was when he got arrested for trespassing because he regularly cast far above the mean high water mark on his favorite stream and had to violate closely guarded private property to retrieve his flies. "Officer, it wasn't my fault, it is this dandy two-fisted, fly-flinging phenomenon that made me do it!"
Gerry
PS I'll give ya $20 to take that ole fashioned bamboo off yer hands!
Welcome to The Nation young Jedi...
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