The Method Isn't The Problem

 Another oldie from loops..

Both Nick and Paul's posts this week chimed with something I've been thinking about recently, a lot of people criticise methods, it could be the bung, Euro nymphing, the booby or anything else. Often it's a sort of knee-jerk response because they don't understand it, or maybe it's envy at the success of another angler, sometimes it's because of the way a lot of people use the method in question.

I'm far from a purist, just yesterday I was fitting large willow leaf spinner blades to some topwater gamechangers in a bid to make them a bit noisier! I'll gladly fish the bung, a booby or a Euro rig-I even use a beefed up french leader for small stream carping! I've no time for the moans from old-usually American- men complaining that Euro nymphing isn't flyfishing, or isn't new and they've been doing it for 60 years. The second complaint in particular just screams to me that they don't understand the method(s) The American team's historic performance in international competition illustrates pretty clearly that modern European techniques haven't been in common use across the pond for 60 years. Perhaps it's carmundgeonry, perhaps it's envy, but it's definitely based in ignorance.

The same is true for the Booby, although it is thankfully becoming rehabilitated to an extent. Years ago became was fairly common for fisheries in the UK to ban boobies, of course the fishery manager/owner can set the rules they want but the booby bans seem to me to be mostly rooted in some kind of prejudice. I know of more than one place that banned the booby but allowed a deer hair bomb because it doesn't have foam and is a "proper fly" even though it's functionally more or less the same. Sometimes the bans were only limited to catch & release fishing, which atually makes sense because of the deep hooking risk. But why stop a guy on a 6 fish kill ticket using a booby? Probably it stems from how the booby was most commonly used in the 80s & 90s i.e. cast out and "fished" static or slowly crawled back on a Hi-D(the fastest sink at the time) with a short leader, say 18'-3'. It could be deadly, but often resulted in fish swallowing the fly. And certainly, to many, looked a lot like ledgering. Thankfully people have switched on to the many ways the booby and other buoyant flies can be fished on various retrieves throughout the water column. There are still places that ban boobies but there are workarounds for people wanting to use a floating fly and, should they avoid the old static method, they'll probably fly under the radar.

The Bung suffers much the same, except it looks like a float fishing rather than ledgering. It can be just float fishing(which is actually a lot more skillful than many fly anglers want to accept) I admit, I don't see much skill in turning up at a half acre put & take, automatically tying on a wotsit, attaching a bung and casting it out and waiting, but I also don't see much greater skill in just fishing a cat's whisker and blindly pulling it back all day. There's more to the bung than that. Years ago I remember a boat partner in a competition complaining that there was no skill in the bung as he switched to buzzers under an indicator. I didn't acknowledge it, the only reason he was changing was that I was doing him several fish to nothing in the first hour. Over the course of the day he did catch a few but got soundly thrashed. The reason was that I was actively fishing my bung on a long cast using a rolling retrieve to create a fish attracting wake and lift my buzzers toward the surface before stopping to let them settle. He was just fishing it static. At the end of the day he made another comment about it being just the bung, but had no answer to my question about why he didn't actually copy HOW I was fishing it or why if there was no skill he'd just taken a doing to the tune of 18 fish to 3. It's the kind of thing that happens all the time. The other consideration is the casting skill required, try casting 3 buzzers and a hooked indicator (all on droppers) on a 25ft level leader from a seated position in a boat (the rules of loch style internationals and qualifiers require you to be seated while fishing). A lot of the critics of the method are going to struggle with that!

Here's a video of an actively fishable bung that has a bit more than meets the eye.