In Poker, there’s often talk of a “tell” – some involuntary gesture that results from the stress of keeping a winning hand a secret. It can be a twitch of an eyelid, the involuntary dilation of your pupils or even the stretching of your hand.
Tells exist in fishing too, ones that signal an impending hookup. For me, as often as not, when my forefinger, the one the line is looped over, starts to throb I often hook up a few seconds later. It’s not a pleasant throb, its more like the throb that signals the beginning of a toothache but it usually only goes on for a few minutes.
It happens consistently enough that a couple of times I’ve yelled “Bite my fly!” at the top of my lungs. Miraculously, I’ve hooked a fish the very next instant. Its also scared the bejaizus out of a new fishing partner on more than one occasion.
But why does it happen? I’m still trying to figure that one out. I fantasize that it’s got something to do with hydrodynamics and the harmonics of my fly swinging through a run at precisely the right depth and speed.
Don’t worry, I’ve seen the look on your face plenty of times before. I can’t rationally explain it, or much else for that matter. I can only relate what I feel.
I do know that the throbbing is more pronounced when I am fishing bamboo, which by all accounts is more sensitive than the more modern carbon rod.
You scoff. I get that, I have for years scoffed as well, content with an affordable army of carbon fibre sticks, but, but… But. I have always wondered what the hoopla was about – or was it all just crap? Over the last ten years or so, I had tried various bamboo rods briefly, never having that “oh yeah” experience that comes with finding, touching or experiencing a rod that truly speaks to you.
Then, quietly, it happened. Couple of years ago, while grass casting a brothers’ 9 foot Orvis Shooting Star, my brain finally said, “oh, I get it”. It was if the rod was one, flexible piece. I did little to flex it, yet flex it did and then the line flew. How could it be? A fifty year old rod that responded like it was just an extension of my arm?
You won’t be surprised to learn that shortly after that, I was in possession of my very own Shooting Star, at what represented not a great deal of cost. The extra cachet was that I am older than the rod, by about three months. Overall, I would say that the rod has fared better with age.
I fished the Shooting Star over the course of the next winter, at first fearful that the magic I had first felt would not return. When it did however, I marveled at how well I fished with it, how sensitive it was and how many fish I landed over that winter.