The Lost Art of Catching Dinks

At two and a half years of age, my oldest grandson is still too young (and too small) to drop into a pair of waders and tote along to the trout stream. Still, I look forward to the day when I can watch him catch his first trout. That thought has occupied my mind often enough this year, so that I’ve actually re-dedicated a portion of my on-stream efforts to relearning how to catch small trout.

Reed's First Brown Trout on a FlyThe typical progression for many fly fishermen, is to start out with the goal of catching a trout . . . any trout. Once that’s been achieved, they strive to catch a lot of trout. Again, size doesn’t matter. They just want to affirm that the first trout they caught wasn’t a fluke. They want to validate their new found skill by catching a bunch of those “dinks”.

Then, the natural progression seems to point them toward catching larger and larger trout. What’s it take to catch a 15-inch brown? How about a eighteen-incher? Can I pull off a repeat? How about a three-peat? Can I break twenty-inches? OK, now, how about a genuine two-footer? And so it goes.

Along with these new goals, come new techniques, presentation, larger flies, night time fishing, fly tying and more. So, the natural inclination to move along this fly fishing progression is not a bad thing. It helps the angler set new goals, and expand whatever horizons that need to be expanded to achieve those goals.

The problem is, we can actually forget, or at least lose the “edge” on, the early skills we relied on to catch all those dinks. Let me prove the point. Try this sometime: Head out to the river with the goal of catching 10 trout less than 10 inches in size. If you have moved very far along that natural fly fishing progression, I bet that you will find that challenge to be a real challenge, indeed.

So, why is all this important? Because one day, your grandson or granddaughter is going to ask, “Pa, can I go fishing with you?”

When that time comes, I hope you haven’t forgotten how to catch dinks.

(Special thanks to my good friend Ken, for sharing his grandson, Reed, with me. This was Reed’s first time fly fishing, so we wanted to make sure Reed caught some fish. We fished unweighted soft hackles, with a floating fly line, through a thigh-deep gravel run, and had a ball.)