Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 7, 1994 TAG: 9403090060
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But there were.
An avalanche of calls began pouring in to member Steve Hiner, a Virginia Tech entomologist, whose work and home phones had been listed for registration purposes.
The first class was filled.
A second was scheduled for April. It has been filled.
A third is set for May 7. There remain a few openings, but you'd better hurry. (You can call 703-544-7792 or 703-382-5543 to register, but don't expect to get Hiner's office. He's had enough.)
Interest in trout fishing is booming, which is a revolution to an angler like Hiner, who adopted the sport as his own while a kid growing up in Bath County.
Gary Martel, the new fish division chief of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, remembers when "I'd go out on the South Fork of the Holston River with my fly rod and people would stop their cars because they'd never seen anyone with a fly rod. Now it is extremely common."
Why are so many newcomers showing up in schools and streams?
Members of the New River TU chapter wanted to know that too, so they asked their students.
"Relaxation was the No. 1 reason," said Hiner.
"Getting outdoors was No. 2. Over half of them mentioned the challenge of fly fishing."
Fly fishing has shaken its snob status, its rich-man's image, its holier-than-thou syndrome.
No one is happier about that than Hiner, who is apt to punctuate a particularly good cast on the Jackson River with tobacco juice. Tobacco chewing, he told one female recruit, keeps the biting insects away. She asked him to recommend a brand.
"We must guard against an elite attitude," said Harry Murray, who started selling fly tackle out of the back of his People's Drug on Main Street Edinburg in 1970. Murray now has the largest fly-fishing speciality mail order business on the East Coast (catalog available by writing P.O. Box 156, Edinburg 22824).
"Some of he people I teach are right off the back of the hatchery truck," said Murray. "I tell them, `We will go over into a good, little brook trout stream and take maybe 30 or 40 fish a day,' and they are blinking because they are thrilled if they can follow the hatchery truck and take six."
There may have been a time when fly fishing was billed as a top-of-the-pecking-order pastime where catching a trout wasn't all that important when calculating a day's success.
But in fly fishing, like any fishing, the idea is to have something tugging on your line, said Robert Bryant, the manager of the Orvis store in Roanoke. If it is a wild trout, all the better, but Bryant isn't about to scoff at a hatchery-reared fish.
"Very few fly fishermen honestly can say that they don't like to go out and catch stocked fish," he said. "By cracky, I do. If it is a stocked fish that has been in there awhile, I enjoy it."
A fly rod also is the ticket to Virginia's catch-and-release streams, where the emphasis is on sport, rather than meat, said Bryant. He is an authority on one such stream, the Smith River in Henry County.
The demand for special-regulations water is on the increase, according to an early look at a trout survey conducted last year by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. It doesn't hurt that the new fish chief is an advocate of a diversed program.
"I think we really need to talk about what quality can be, but do it gracefully and not cram it down people's throats," said Murray.
Once you get people hooked on fly fishing, they most likely are going to become interested in fly tying and hatches and stream quality, said Bryant. Their slim fly rod and delicate leader links them to the natural world, and that's good for both fish and fishermen.
by CNB