Archive for the ‘Women's Fly Fishing’ Category

Ok.. now we can probably do this again, seeing as a couple of things have been taken care of – and the purpose is to make Colleen Mackenzie (Campbell) famous on Google again ;P

For what it’s worth, I plan on doing lots of fly fishing with Ms Colleen Campbell Mackenzie!  It’s amazing to me that even though she’s from a wonderful part of Canada with lots of fish, she’s never caught one.  Hopefully her first one will be on the fly rod.

Using my fly rod!

Right, Colleen?

Anyone that can be in the Guelph area on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 might want to consider heading over to The First Cast fly shop. Sylvia D’Amelio will be a guest fly tyer at the shop that day.

I’ve not seen Sylvia tie flies before – but I have seen her fly fish. I’ve also had the pleasure of speaking with her a few different occasions and she’s a wonderful fly angler to speak with.  She’s got credentials as well, working as a fish biologist with Trout Unlimited.

And yes – she is also a very attractive woman fly angler too. But don’t get your hopes up – last I heard she is engaged.

Sylvia is front row, on the right.

Yesterday during an informal part of the “Are Fish Sentient? Symposium” at the University of Guelph in the pub, I had occassion to be sitting with Dr. Braithwaite, a woman who’s name I sadly did not get but who I believe works at the Toronto Zoo, and a beautiful U of G student who is studying the use of morphine in fish.  Hmmm.. anyone noticing a theme here about some of my interests?  Yeah… fly fishing, wine and women.. not always in that order either… but I digress except to also point out that while sitting with these three women, Dr. Braithwaite asked me a question that I found curious.

She asked me what I thought of women becoming more involved in fly fishing.

Anyone that knows me well, likely can predict with certainty my response to that.  Personally, I think it is wonderful that there are more women becoming interested in the sport of fly angling.  I would be the first person to encourage any woman that is interested in fly fishing to get out there and give it a try.  I also pointed out to the three women I was with that many instructors will tell you that women are far easier to teach the art of fly casting to than men.  Indeed, many women “pick up” on it more swiftly and end up being superior fly casters. Dr. Braithwaite asked if I had opinion on “why” this might be so.

Now, once again others that know me well will likely chuckle on someone wondering if I have an opinion on something. I told the group that it seemed that women at times could be better listeners than men (yes, I mean this in a very general way) but even more importantly, women seemed to grasp the idea of using the fly rod as a lever instead of feeling some need to “muscle” a cast.  Therefore, again generally speaking, women seem to have a better chance of realizing sooner the techniques in fly fishing.

The woman associated with the zoo chuckled and thought that perhaps of the company I was in, I was being “politically correct” in my response.  But no, seriously – what I’ve written here, as I discussed yesterday, are my thoughts on the matter.

This brings me to the point of this blog post. (Again, some that know me will know my tendency to ramble on and on).  I’ve just added a link to Mato’s Fishin’ Hole, a blog maintained by Deb.  I’ve never had the opportunity to fly fish with Deb but I met her a year ago at a fly tying class instructed by Ian James.  Since then, we’ve had the odd email, and this evening, during one of those emails I discovered that Deb had a blog.

Hopefully Deb will continue to add content to her blog – I think it would be wonderful if she did. The more women that discuss and talk about this passion of theirs can only be a positive thing to encourage other women who are interested to actually get out there and give it a try.

By the way, I did offer to take Dr. Braithwaite out on the river before she had to return to Scotland on Monday.  I think if there had been more time, I could have convinced her to at least experience standing in a river waving a stick – maybe with the “Buddhist Fly Fishing” practice of using a fly with the hook point broken off of the fly.