Camping and Fly Fishing – Fish On! Shishidome, Yamanashi
I took Toshi, my long time buddy who also got unemployed by the recent economic breakdown, out for camping and his first experience of fly fishing. Something to play with while dealing with downward economy and loss of motivation. Toshi has a thing about snakeheads and insisted on buying Abu Garcia bait casting reel, so I had to convince that there are people catching snakeheads with fly. Then he agreed to go.
We arrived at Fish On! Shishidome on Friday afternoon, built the camp site. Wind was blowing too hard, so we stayed in the camp site and went over the fundamental of fly fishing. When wind became little milder, little casting lesson. Then drank, drank, and drank…
I woke up early next morning and stepped out of my campervan hire to get a head start to fish for yamame and iwana, so that I could do all my fishing before I take Toshi around in the afternoon. At 6 am, stream was already filled with fishermen, so I had to start near the wooden bridge where many ignored for it wasn’t a big spot. On the first cast, I pulled this beautiful yamame with CDC dun.
Confirming the fishing area had nice looking fish, then I continued on for pockets nearby and caught total of 8 yamames. One of them happened to have red-spot. Perhaps pure amago, perhaps hybrid?
I had to paused once around 9:30 am by Toshi’s phone call that he woke up and needed breakfast. I continued to fish after that for I saw iwana becoming active as sun rose higher. I caught 4 iwana then headed back to camp site.
I took Thoshi trought the foundation of fly casting starting with formation of back cast into forward cast with tight loop. He still had wrist unstablly open from time to time which was causing very wide loop and non-loop, but he seemd to have enough confidence, so I placed him on the stream immediately.
After several casts into the stream, Toshi managed to put his fly line straight forward within 10m. I confirmed that he was all ready to fish. I tied him my special high floating CDC caddis for good luck.
Then after series of attempt……. Thoshi got big smile on his first fish on dry fly!
I wonder how many smiles I can attain, if I could instruct more properly. At least, I gotta make myself ready to teach my 2 sons someday.
If you’d like to know more, please click the banner below.