“Sir!” The voice was sharp, almost strident, louder than it needed to be. I turned to see a middle-aged woman in a full habit. Memories of my fourth-grade year spent in the wrong school surfaced immediately, and my old fear of Catholic nuns made me feel like I was in trouble again. What had I done this time?
“Yes?” I asked her. “What are you doing?”
It’s a question I get a lot. Standing in the middle of a large expanse of grass in a public park, or on a football field, or in this instance a churchyard, casting a bright orange fly line along a tape measure with soccer cones spaced out every 10 feet arouses curiosity and comments of all stripes. Most common by far are, “How are they biting today?” and “Catching anything?” uttered by older gentlemen walking with their wives, or dogs, or both, and trying to impress the wife or maybe the dog. And sometimes from people who know a little about fly fishing: “I saw one rising over by the picnic tables.” Do they really think no one has said that before? The wives never seem to be impressed by the banter, but maybe the dogs are. I explained to the nun that I was practicing casting a fly rod to prepare for a test that I wanted to take. “That’s what I thought,” she said, and turned sharply and walked off. I guess no further explanation was needed.
Preparing for the Fly Fishers International Casting Instructor certification test takes time, and a lot of it has to be spent over grass. The reason is simple: the test itself will very likely be conducted on grass, because there are far too few casting pools in the United States, and you cannot lay out a tape measure and targets on a pond or stream. The entire state of California has only a handful of these specially made, knee-deep casting pools — four, that I am aware of — and they are fairly widely scattered. Not everyone has easy access to one. So grass is the preferred medium, both for the tests and for the practicing.
I should have started saving comments early on, back when I began casting on grass, because there have been some jewels. One of my favorites involved grass carp, and I had to give the guy credit for that one. Several times I’ve been asked if I was lost, and I was once asked if I was being punished, although for what I was not sure. One lady asked whether if I did well enough casting on grass, I would be allowed to fish on water. Two people have asked if I was practicing to get good enough to be allowed to buy a fishing license, and I thought to myself that’s not such a bad idea.
Probably half of the comments are from people who are genuinely curious and interested, and I’m always glad to take the opportunity to explain what I’m doing, hoping that I might be able to introduce them to f ly fishing. “I’m practicing casting a fly rod so that I can get better at it, and especially so that I can do a better job of teaching other people how to do it,” I usually say. “It’s because I don’t want to pass on my bad casting habits to the next generation of students, and if I get good enough, I can pass a test and get a teaching certificate.”
I don’t think I’m very good at these explanations. Most of the curious tend to walk away much more rapidly than they approached me in the first place. Some of them want to tell me stories about when they went fly fishing that one time when they were on vacation in Montana, or about their dad or cousin or uncle who fly fishes, or about the time they caught a fish somewhere else, or about the time they were punished, too.
On a drizzly gray day last fall, I stopped at Malibu Bluffs Park on my way home from work to try to squeeze in twenty minutes or so of casting practice before it got too dark. It’s a beautiful little park right off the Pacific Coast Highway, and on most weekday afternoons the playing fields are deserted. I had been there for only about ten minutes when the first visitor arrived. I thought at first I was being approached by an adult, since the guy walking up to me looked to be about six feet tall, but when he started speaking, I realized he was just a kid who was large for his age, maybe in high school but maybe even a large middle-schooler.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get better at casting a fly rod, so that I can be a better teacher.”
“Have you ever fished in water, like, for real?”
“Yeah, I do that as much as I can.” “Those cones are your targets, right?
Have you ever hit one of them? My dad went fly fishing one time. He went with his friend. They took sandwiches.”
“Did he enjoy it?”
“No. He said he didn’t catch anything. He said one day I can go, but not until my grades improve. My sister likes to eat fish, but I think it’s gross. One time I saw a video about a fish that squirts water at bugs and knocks them down and then eats them. Did you ever catch one of those?”
“Those are called archerfish, and I’ve seen videos like that, too. I’ve never seen one in the wild or fished for one. I’m pretty sure you can find them only in Southeast Asia and Australia.”
“I bet they would be fun to catch. You could make a fly that looks like a bug and cast it into a tree, then when they squirt it down and eat it you could catch them.”
“Yeah, I’ve actually cast a fly into a tree lots of times, but not really for that reason.”
“I’d like to fish in the ocean. Can you catch big fish with that?”
“Some people do. I usually don’t fish for really big fish.”
“How big?”
“Well, you can catch pretty much any fish on a fly rod that you can catch with a regular rod and reel. But I haven’t tried it.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I’m pretty happy fishing for smaller fish, and you sort of need a boat to go after the really big ones.”
“I bet you could catch a shark. That would be cool. I like sharks. They’re awesome.”
“Yeah, some people actually go fly fishing for sharks. I’d love to try that someday.”
“Maybe you could catch a great white. Sometimes they eat seals.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard they do.”
“I think seals are cool. Who would win between a shark and a whale?”
“Well, I’m not really sure that they would ever be competing for something. There are lots of different kinds of sharks and whales, and I don’t know that much about them.”
“Is your hook sharp?”
“I don’t have a hook on today, just a piece of yarn that kind of looks like a fly.
“Why not?”
“Well, I don’t want to hook anything today, I’m just practicing.
“Do you have kids?”
“I do, I have a daughter and a son. They both live in different states now, but I see them as much as I can.”
“OK bye.”
And so it goes. Now that I have finally passed my CI test, I suppose I could lessen the number of days that I practice. But casting on grass can be kind of addictive, and I find myself wondering what the next curious onlooker will ask and looking forward to my next close encounter. It’s like our parents always told us: grass is indeed a gateway drug. It can lead to stronger habits.