Growing up, I would watch my dad sit in our living room with tons of string and some fishing hooks tying fly’s.  I never understood the point in doing this until he took me to a river to use them when I was ten.  He took out a huge fishing rod with lots of loose line and started to cast it back and forth with one of his fly’s on it.  He started teaching me the different strategies in casting a fly rod and how to position it up the river or down the river.  I learned many ways of casting like a roll cast, backhand cast, sidearm cast, and the generic fly rod cast.  The roll cast is meant for smaller rivers and it rolls off the water.  The backhand cast is used for casting in the opposite direction of your body without switching from your dominant hand to the other hand.  The sidearm cast is usually meant for windy conditions or casting into areas that are hard to cast into.  These casting techniques were very difficult to learn but have had many good benefits in learning how to fly fish.   

 Getting up at six in the morning was not my thing when I was still in grade school, but if it was to go fish with my dad and brother, I could not pass that up.  The nights before we would go fly fishing, my dad prepared by looking up the temperature and what kind of bug hatches would be going on.  He would bring many boxes of fly’s he tied, just to make sure he had everything ranging from nymph’s, crawfish, and many other types of small creatures.   I started off not liking this way of fishing because it took so much time and energy but now that I’ve grown older, I am very glad I was given the opportunity to learn how to.  Sitting in a river with just your fishing rod, may seem very boring, but on beautiful days, there is nowhere else I would be.