Twerk Your Fly (repost from 2016)

Although some of our runs here in haida Gwaii are big wide open gravel bars akin to the Bulkley or Morice with enough room to carelessly fling flies in any direction, others are quite opposite. With grabby trees above your head, and looming over soft bouldery buckets, each cast we make has to be well constructed from its conception.

Every week our guests have a learning curve to get in tune with this. No matter how experienced you are, your first time through runs like Lumberjack, or Taco stand, you are inevitably going to donate a fly to the tree gods. For the rest of the season your fly will dangle above the run like a flagged memento reminding us of your stay. Every fly in a tree tells a story for us.

If you want to avoid becoming immortalized in the trees you need to have a plan after your errant cast. You need to learn the art of twerking. Once it lands you want to take the utmost care as to not set the hook into the branch. With as little pressure as possible take the slack out of your line and try to get your hands on the head rather than running line if possible. With just a little bit of slack you need to wiggle the rod tip up and down quickly.  “Twerk” the fly like Miley Cyrus at a dance club on Ecstasy.  If you avoided a line wrap, you can actually successfully accomplish this nearly every time.

Fight the urge to pull the fly directly out of a tree after it lands. The next time you’re stuck in a tree, just think of young Miley, and start twerking the fly rigorously and you can avoid some of the largest fly graveyards on the coast.