"Give a man a fish or a quail and you feed him for a day. Give a man a fly rod, a shotgun and a bird dog and he won’t amount to a damn." – (Unknown)
Fly fishing? In Louisiana?
   Well, certainly.
   My father taught me to fly fish with a burgundy Heddon fiberglass rod. He was a deadly weapon on the little bream and the big bass with a fly rod.
  You could nearly make a commercial out of it: Fly fishing. It's not just for trout anymore.
  For those of you into the esoteric: I fish bamboo, fiberglass and graphite.  I'm neither purist nor snoot. I like them all. I like all fly rods, really. They're one part science, one part art and one part magic.
   If I had my druthers, and the duckies, I'd probably fish nothing but bamboo. Most of the time, anyway. Don't like those ultra-fast rods at all. I rarely need to cast more than fifty feet, though like a true obsessive, I want to cast a hundred feet of line. Just to say I did.
   Listen, I'm not stupid. I know I'm disadvantaging myself to a certain large extent with these concoctions made of tinsel, feather, fur and thread. I could be a lot more productive chunking bait and lures, and I'm not a snoot, remember? I don't give a dang what you throw, so long as you're not an asshole about it, fisherman are some of the best people I know. But yeah, buddy of mine, Catch Cormier, says "clear water favors the fly fisherman" and he's spot on. 
   So why do it?
   Tell me. I'd love to know.
   The gear is expensive. Listen, you're interested? Don't go to get a rod at Wally-World. The names you recognize on spinning and bait tackle that are fine manufacturers -- but they don't know much about making fly rods. Forget it. You go spend fifteen, twenty bucks on a fly rod you're going to quit the first day. The thing won't cast worth pecan. 
   What to pay? There are some sub-$100 fly rods out there. Yes, I said below a hundred smackers. A premium rod, should you be so inclined, will run you six, seven hundred. We're talking rods here that will cast a chicken into the next zip code...or land a fly so tiny you need a magnifying glass to thread your two-pound test leader tippet through the eye of the hook.
   The good news is, this can be as expensive or inexpensive as you want it to be, within reason. Junk rods and reels aside, you can get a good setup, rod, reel and line, for under a hundred at places like Cabelas, though I highly recommend visiting a local fly shop first to support your local retailers.
   If you've got a qualified casting instructor around, for goodness sake, go get some lessons. It'll save somebody an ear: You, or your fishing buddy.
   Here in Louisiana, you can fish from a boat, from the banks of creeks, ponds, whatever. Rods range from willowy 1-weights to big 8- and 9-weights for redfish and trout. Yes, I said redfish. A bull red on a fly rod is one helluva ride!
   The difference being, in general fishing, you cast a weighted lure tied to a thin monofilament line. You are casting the weight of the lure, then. In fly fishing, you are casting a diminutive fly on a heavy PVC line. You are, you see, casting the weight of the line, and the fly just goes along for the ride.
   Therein lies the rub. Two or three different length and action traditional fishing rods might do you fine for your whole life. Fly fishing ain’t like that. If you are a fanatical fisherman, you need rods ranging from six to nine feet, in varying degrees of action, the stiffness and where it bends in the length of the rod.
   So you wiggle out about 25 feet of this fly line, that comes in all kinds of nice colors. Once it’s in the water and lying semi-straight in front of you, you lower your rod tip to the surface of the water, lift slowly but accelerating, and pull the line up with you over your shoulder, until the tip of your rod reaches about the 1 o’clock position. Maybe 1:30, but 2 o’clock is too far! Your line will whiz over your head, stretch out behind you, and when it just starts to stretch out again behind you, you snap the rod forward again to about 11 o’clock.
   If you’ve said your prayers every night before bed, washed and bathed regularly, gone to church at least annually, followed the Ten Commandments and never sacrificed Pacific Island virgins to pagan gods, the line will then shoot forward, taking some excess you had lying at your feet with it, and land straight as an arrow in front of you as you lower the rod tip to about 9 o’clock, and your leader and fly will gently land within at least a three-foot circle of where you wanted it.
   This is the essence of fly fishing: Prayer. Fly fishermen are the most religious of fishermen, because it takes divine intervention to make all this work.
   Norman Maclean said, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing … our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."

   So if you’ve lived a life of decadence and debauchery, you’ll put too much power into the back-stroke, especially if you are a reformed bait-caster, and your line will jerk like a coiled serpent striking. You’ll stop the rod too far back, like at 3 o’clock, then slam it forward like you’re Mickey Mantle going for a homer.
   In this case, your line will, if you’re lucky, end up in a messy little pile right at your toes, all three dozen feet of it. If you’re not lucky, you’ll look like a kitten who got into the yarn.
   There’s the attraction of it all, you see. It’s not so much about the fish. I could catch way more fish with a glob of squirming earthworms impaled on a gold Eagle Claw hook.
   But, defaulting to Maclean again, "My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy."

   And there’s the crux of it. It’s the learning curve. It’s the challenge. It’s – especially, to me at least – the abandonment of coarseness and the refinement of skill. Three years ago I was doing good if I could get 30 feet of line out. Today I’m doing 60 feet pretty easy and with decent accuracy, but by no means does that make me more than average with a fly rod. Many of my friends can cast the entire fly line, roughly 100 feet.
   One more thing: A couple of folks, upon seeing one of my bamboo fly rods, commented, "Oh! It’s nothing like I thought. I pictured one of those old bamboo poles like Huck Finn used."
   The origin of the fly rod traces back to Scotland. Those first rods were made of wood and used to cast – more like pitch, really – lines made of horsehair.
   Later, as fly fishing moved to the rest of Europe and America especially, new woods were found that made the rods more like casting instruments, and Chinese silk became the preferred choice of fly line composition.
 
My adventure: Fly fishing in Montana
  Eventually, someone discovered what used to be called Calcutta cane, from India. First they used sections of this to make tips for the rods. Eventually again, someone discovered Tonkin cane, which only grows in a remote cove of a bay in China. Like Cuban seed cigars, this particular variety of bamboo will grow no where else in the world, and in a century of searching, no other bamboo has been found that is even remotely as suitable for rod building as Tonkin cane.
   If you’ve ever cut a piece of bamboo, you’ll know it’s hard as heck. Bamboo from Tonkin Bay is shipped to America. A bamboo fly rod is made by drying the two-to-three-inch diameter cane stalks, splitting them lengthwise into thin strips, placing those strips on a mold that is set to taper from the thick butt section of the rod to the fine tip, sometimes fine as a pencil lead. Six of these are planed into equilateral 60 degree triangles and glued together, to form a hexagon shaped fly rod. There are no bumps or nodes from the joints of the cane like Huck Finn used. Bamboo fly rods are flattened, straightened, tapered and glued into precision instruments of incredible delicacy, surprising power and amazing grace.
  
Cutthroat trout, Goose Lake Montana
  Bamboo rods were largely replaced by fiberglass in the late 1950s after a good 40- or 50-year run. By the end of the 1970s or so, graphite became the material of choice. There are a couple hundred modern bamboo rod builders, so the art is still thriving.
   I prefer bamboo. I prefer wooden boats and old wood houses, too.
   I love casting a rod made of grass. Bamboo is, of course a hard-stalked grass. I love that feeling of it, it still has life to it, unlike fiberglass or graphite. I have rods made of all three materials. But bamboo…bamboo resonates, deep down somewhere.
   I could go on and on (like I already have) about this lifestyle of mine. Because its become more than a hobby, it truly is a lifestyle. There’s always a little space in my brain reserved for it. The rest can be occupied by work and house renovations and family and friends and pets and driving and whatever, but there’s always a little part of my mind in which I’m fly fishing.
   I like to think I’m a passable writer, and I hope to be a better one each day that passes. But truth of the matter is, my "art" if I’ll ever really have one, is fly fishing, and it’s the one I seek to excel at the most.
   Perhaps my favorite author, Harry Middleton, said it best, how the twitch of a fish on a fine fly rod would be undeniable: "It led me off the banks, out of the yellowing late-autumn meadows into the river’s cold, blue-green current sinking me not in sense but in sensation, pulling me down to a lower consciousness, that place of mind that was whole rather than fragmented, wet and organic, ancient and elemental, before it was anything else."
   Yup. That’s it, exactly.

Larry Offner's Warmfly Now the premiere warmwater fly fishing place-to-be!
  Ron Begnaud's RedChaser
  New Orleans fly shop Uptown Angler.
Fly Anglers Online See my column Native Waters under Features
Louisiana Fly Fishing All about fly fishing in our state
Boyd Rod Co. The rod below was crafted by rodmaker Harry Boyd, Winnsboro, Louisiana

Far & Away Outdoors literate and art...awesome stuff.

Read about my experience as a guest on "Fly Fishing America" here: 
Montana: Part 1 2 3 4 5 6
Louisiana Part 1 2 3