Fishing – the journey begins

Welcome to my first post!

You can go to the “About” me button to find out how this blog started and a little bit about me and my life 🙂

This year I began to learn how to fly fish. It all started in August 2010 when I realised our lovely teenage son G had reached the age where it was no longer cool or desirable to go on family holidays with the “rents”. For several years, I had spent blissful fishing days at the side of Scottish lochs reading, painting and occasionally filming R and G in the fishing boat out on the loch. Now R was about to lose his fishing companion for the foreseeable future until going fishing with your father became cool again (usually when your child reaches the age of 32 approximately, so I’m told).

In a self sacrificial moment and because I love him 🙂 I offered to learn to fly fish so I could keep him company on the boat. This decision must have involved a bottle of wine or two as I’m not confident on water and can hardly swim if I fell in let alone handle a fish if I caught one! I spent that winter putting off the dreaded moment but my lovely husband began enthusiastically scouring Ebay, buying me fishing related presents and before I knew it I was kitted out with state of the art rod, reel and line.

Spring arrived and we set out for the local park for dry land casting practice. It seemed (like a golf swing) that you have to find the correct technique (the ahh moment when you know it feels right) and then its all down to muscle memory and relaxed technique. Also like golf, this is amazingly difficult and frustratingly just when you get it you lose it again!!!

Well I eventually graduated to a local fishing lake and caught my first fish so that by the time we went to Scotland in the summer, I knew vaguely what I was doing. Since then, R and I have had many fly fishing adventures and I’m loving this new activity.  I can even stand up in the boat to cast without falling in and can kill the fish I catch mostly without help! I love being outdoors, being aware of the changing weather, the sky, the clouds etc.There is so much we don’t notice when we observe the outdoors from our windows rushing from office to home and back again. Fishing has put me back in touch with subjects I enjoyed at school like the physics of water and the biology of animal behaviour. There are different schools of thought about whether it’s more important to use flies that are very realistic visually or to use flies that move in a realistic manner utilising the properties of the water. So I have some books to read and some fishing tales to tell my readers along the way 🙂

Oh and by the way, R tells me that when men catch a fish there is a lot of punching the air, jubilation, weighing and measuring going on but that he has noticed women are rather more refined in their approach to success ……………..