Like Grandfather, Like Grandson With This Family

You can’t make a fisherman out of someone who doesn’t want to fish.

I learned that truism many years ago when I thought I could convince my son John that fishing is good for the soul. For a few years, I took him fishing at various lakes in the region. Even when he caught big fish, he wasn’t impressed. To him, fishing was a big bore.

I gave up on him one day several years ago while we were fishing a small lake in Stevens County. We had been hooking and releasing 14- to 18-inch brook trout one after another. Then, suddenly, the brookies ignored our flies.

A true fisherman would have assumed that the brookies had stopped eating for a short time and soon would resume feeding. John, instead, said, “Let’s go home.” I knew then that he’d never be a fisherman.

I was right. He loves to hunt birds and big-game animals, but he’s as enthusiastic about fishing as he is about shopping with his wife. He became a mountain climber and now is a county commissioner.

When his son Jess started showing an interest in fishing a few years ago, I started taking him out to some of the lakes. He said he wanted to fish, but he showed little interest in learning how to cast either with a spinning rod or a fly rod or in learning the fundamentals of fishing. For anyone willing to teach the things that all fishermen must learn, that was discouraging.

He seemed to be more interested in running the boat at high speed or catching frogs and turtles.

For some reason, Jess, now 13 and nearly as tall as his dad, started changing a few months ago. He kept asking me to take him fishing. He sounded sincere, so I decided to take a chance that he finally really wanted to learn how to cast and all the other things that fishermen learn.

John delivered Jess to my home a few days ago and asked me to have him back by 3 p.m. Jess and I soon launched my boat at West Medical Lake, one of the better trout producers in the Spokane region this year.

I threaded floating lines on a couple of fly rods, added 10-foot-long tippets to the leaders and tied chironomid pupa patterns to the tippets. Jess said he thought he could cast, but his first effort indicated he needed a lot of instruction. Like hundreds of youngsters learning to fly fish, he couldn’t control the line. He waved the rod like a wand and his line slapped the water on every backcast.

Some fly fishers, when starting to teach fly casting to neophytes, throw too much information at them all at once. As a result, the learners are overwhelmed and can’t coordinate the casting techniques.

I decided to emphasize one casting motion at a time until Jess became fairly proficient with it and then introduce another casting technique. First, I convinced him that he had to give his line time to unfold behind him before he started a forward cast. When he started developing a rhythm, I got him to pick up the line briskly and stop the rod just after it passed the vertical plane.

I didn’t go into other nuances of casting, figuring he could learn them later.

Then I showed him how to strip with one hand while holding the rod and pinching the line with the thumb and middle finger of the other hand. Until a fly fisher learns to control the line while stripping it, he or she can’t control a fish. Jess caught on quickly.

Before he learned to control the line, however, he lost two or three rainbows that took his chironomid pupa pattern. To keep his interest up, I switched to sinking lines and leech patterns and trolled for a half hour. He hooked a couple of trout.

Then I anchored in a spot where rainbows showed on my sonar. Jess had to make several casts before he got the line out about 30 feet. Then he began stripping slowly. A rainbow hit the fly and Jess stripped fast enough to hold and net it. He was on his way.

He made a few more mistakes. At first, he stripped his line until a trout was flopping at his rod tip. Once, while I was casting, he started casting and his rod hit my rod hard. I cringed. We were using expensive graphite rods that can be damaged when they are cracked together. He didn’t repeat that mistake.

We kept a few fish, but released those we hooked after he became proficient enough to cast, strip, hook and net the fish. The more he caught and released the more he wanted to fish.

Finally, the time came when we had to return to my home.

“Can’t we fish a little longer?” he asked.

Those words were music to my ears. They meant that he finally was a fisherman. He hadn’t even suggested we look for turtles.

I decided, however, to take him home. Better to end the fishing trip while he still wanted to fish.

Jess will go to Alaska a few weeks to fish for big rainbows and perhaps king salmon. He’s going to enjoy that trip. He’s on his way to becoming a good fisherman.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact Fenton Roskelley by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 3814.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fenton Roskelley The Spokesman-Review