I live in extremely rural Wyoming, well off the beaten path of its famous trout fishing near Yellowstone or the North Platte. Around here, most folks farm, ranch, or work in extraction industries to pay the bills. It’s the sort of place where people are, almost as a rule, cash-poor and land-rich. The few high-dollar houses that exist out here are tucked away enough that you often forget them.
As a fly fishing writer, when folks ask what I do for a living, I often hear some version of, “Oh, that’s the fancy fishing. I never could afford that,” as a reply. When fly fishing is such a draw to expensive areas like Jackson, Bozeman, and Missoula, I can’t blame people for feeling that way. But it’s always bothered me that fly fishing still retains a lot of its elitist reputation.
Some of that is warranted. Enough anglers are taught in books, videos, and at fly fishing shows that there’s only one right way to cast a fly rod, or that Euro nymphing isn’t really fly fishing, or that if you fish with barbed hooks, you might as well just bash every trout you catch over the head.
A lot of what’s taught, especially with catch-and-release and conservation, does have a stuffy feel to it, like only people with a 401(k) and a decent debt-to-income ratio can worry about whether the right strain of cutthroat trout is swimming in the tributaries to Yellowstone Lake. I’d argue that stuffy feel is more a result of bad teaching than it is anything about fly fishing inherently being elitist.
Yes, we know catch-and-release is a great tool. We know that barbless hooks are better for both trout and anglers. And we know there’s value in restoring native species to the landscape. But how that’s communicated matters just as much as what we’re saying.
As an example, think back to the last time you saw an eager new fly angler post a picture of their first big trout online. They probably were squeezing the fish, maybe had a finger in its gills, or the fish was covered in dirt, grass, and rocks.
Do I cringe when I see those pictures? Less now than I used to, but I still do. I don’t like seeing fish not cared for, especially if they’re not destined for the frying pan.
But it’s one trout. Unless it was the single egg-laying female for an entire three-mile stretch of creek, it’s going to have an extremely small impact on the fishery. Shoot, in some rivers, removing trout is the best way to increase the average fish size.
Do the new anglers need to be educated about proper catch-and-release tactics? Absolutely. But is calling them out—publicly shaming them after they accomplished something they’re proud of—really the right way to go about it?
On the flip side of that, I do see plenty of posts from conventional anglers who insist that barbed treble hooks don’t cause damage to fish, or that trout aren’t “delicate flowers.” They push back on fly anglers who want barbless, single-hook regulations because, in their eyes, we’re telling them their favorite way to fish isn’t worthwhile.
Conventional anglers would do well to put down the pitchforks and listen to what we have to say, but only if we fly anglers are willing to communicate it in a way that doesn’t sound like we’re a politician trying to curry votes after spending all year in D.C.
Fly anglers would do well to realize that there’s a level of simplicity and peace in sitting in a lawn chair with a bait rod out in the water, doing a whole lot of nothing. As a former worm-dunker who spent dozens of Saturdays doing just that, I sometimes miss how easy and simple fishing was. I enjoy fly fishing more, but I still remember and cherish the value of those long hours spent staring at my line, waiting for a fish to eat that glob of Powerbait.
At the end of the day, any kind of fishing is a way for us to interact with the natural world, to get away from reality for a bit, and to have fun. Last I checked, you don’t have to be some wealthy cattle baron to enjoy a day out on the water.
It’s high time we remember that, and do our best to ditch the elitist attitudes still clinging to the sport.
Yeah, I agree. The elitist attitudes suck. But so does the hostility from the morons. I’ll never forget the day I was fishing the Arkansas River in Bighorn Sheep Canyon, right near the highway, when a car passed by with a bunch of redneck assholes calling me a “faggot fly fisherman”. The simple truth is that fly fishermen as a whole tend to be conscious of things like habitat and sustainability. And a whole lotta conventional fishermen just want to “limit out” and show off what they’ve killed before they fry it, or throw it away.