Thats great! If you want to get into fly fishing, you should know that having the best rod is the heart of the hobby. You should definitely invest in a good fly fishing rod. If anyone is looking to upgrade their rod, you should check this helpful site.

I think that rods are pretty unimportant really. I started fly fishing about a year before graphite became available in Canada, back in the 70s. My first fly rod was a Hardy glass rod. As soon as I could, I got a graphite blank, and some parts and never looked back. That was change you could believe in. Nothing comparable has happened in rods, and a Canadian tire graphite salmon rod I bought for the kids to use, maybe 35 bucks, is a bigger gun than that Hardy, though it is short a guide.

It is no longer an industry secret that a lot of the Magic New Graphite rods that come out every year, IM666, or whatever. Are basically uncastable by mere humans, and certainly never that useful on the water. There is a way to play almost any rod action, tactically. I am a real rod snob as I make all my own, and was in the industry for a while. But I have yet to see anything happen that is like what happened when carbon came in. Maybe nano tubes, or something will arrive on the scene, and we will all be able to fish on the far side of the lake without a boat.

Reels used to be the thing people told you not to waste your time on. But back when a McDonalds burger was 25 cents, a crap fly reel was 35 dollars. Today that would be 5-10 times more, adjusted for inflation. And there are nice looking reels for as little as 60 dollars, so why worry.

I buy lines off ebay, old Cortland 444s that I can score for 5 bucks, they still work great. I bought one of those Chinese lines, but I have not really tried it yet.

The cheapest way to improve your gear is to look into leaders, they are magic. I use Bolger's formulas for general leaders, they often require only one more knot than a bought leader, would and they work better, by far. His version of a Harvey leader is dry fly magic. And there are all kinds of easy to tie of no tie leaders for things from salt water to Polish nymphing, Biggest gain for the least effort and dollars is in leaders.

http://www.rackelhanen.se/eng/10058.htm

This article shows the Harvey leader. The original is 7 pieces and 6 knots. Borger's is 3 pieces and 2 knots. Since a lot of people will slide a leader out of the pack and immediately tie on a tippet, you are only tying two knots where you would usually tie one, and you get a much better leader.

The Harvey leader is great for dries, and some kinds of nymphing, but it is basically designed not to turn over your fly. To land it will s bends in the leader.

By Bolger has designs for all basic purposes. The basic idea is that you can make a functional leader with a single piece chosen to bend without a hinge from the fly line attachment. You would use the lightest piece that does not hinge. Then you drop down to the next piece by making it 35% less in diameter, than the first piece, all the way to the end. This is a huge drop compared to all the spools and knots we used to fiddle with, and it works just as well. I think the original material was in his book Presentations. But you might have to dig to find it on the net. He has a description of his uni leader on his site. But that concept seemed like a step backwards from his simple formula. It allows you to adapt any leader to anything, but you need a bunch of different spools, and hacking away at both ends to make the changes. And I normally find having a selection of leaders is easier for me. I keep the material in the car and can make almost anything should a tarpon swim into a local Ontario river.

You can have a nice rod and line but if you don't match the fly and leader to those components you will have a less than ideal experience.

Just came across this thread so I'll have to go back and read it but I'm sure my 2 cents has already been uttered.

Good points petey....and the strength of the latest mono is pretty remarkable. Just wish everything didn't cost so darn much, especially food and fuel(gas & #2 heating oil) I may be looking at a wood stove soon.

I just joined the site yesterday - enjoying all kinds of stuff I like to read about here.

I got back into fly fishing about 15 years ago after a decade or so hiatus. I had the benefit of some information from the owner of our local shop in town here plus the trove of stuff you can find on the internet. I fly fish pretty much exclusively and fish for trout on a decent sized river in Pennsylvania that my family has a place on, sometimes for bass in the summer in the rivers and ponds of New York state and have also fished for salmon and steelhead with some success on the Salmon River in NY. Apologies if any of this is repetitive of things already mentioned - I read through several but not all of the posts. Here are some useful tactics I've come to understand and recognize.

1) For trout - if you are dry fly fishing and not connecting, change flies but do so only after making several drifts over a rising fish. As I think has been noted, they will often have some periodicity to the rises but also they are connecting to bugs which, unless the hatch is carpeting the water, are also a variable. Don't present right after you see the rise but a little while so they are likely looking again. If they pass up several times and other risers do, change to another likely fly. On the river I fish there are about 3 main options any time of the year, so I stick to those as opposed to the ton of other flies in my boxes. Note also that there are hatch/emergence charts for lots of rivers and specific flies will be common at specific times and not at all at others. One caveat to this is that climate change has tended to push around some of the dates in my experience in these charts so things like Tricos which used to be a July thing could be happening in June. Get to have a sense of what the main bugs look like flying around and try to have some of them. If you get a hit and lose a fish, it's often a good sign of course you've picked the right fly so stick with it for a while.

A formula for appropriate tippet size to fly that I've seen is divide the hook size by 3 - so a sz.12 dry fly/3 = 4x tippet. Getting this right will help prevent wind knots and present the fly best.

Also, an observation - lots of wind sucks for fly fishing but a bit of wind is actually not a bad thing - makes it harder for them to be selective and for them to notice leader, etc.

2) For trout - besides fishing dry flies, often they will be taking emerging flies or feeding sub-surface. A simple way to try for them is to tie a second fly (where two at the same time are permissible) to the bend of the hook for the dry with about 2-3 feet of 5x or less in between. There is also some stuff you can get that is anti-flotant that helps sink that fly a bit. Of course a fly with a small bead or that has little material on it relative to the hook is helpful too. Fishing two flies is often a hassle with regard to getting more knots in your leader or issues like that but can really be the ticket sometimes, particularly when you think they should be rising but they aren't and there are bugs around.

3) For trout - I have not mastered wet fly fishing at all, mainly because I tend not to have much luck relative to using a dry-dropper combination. What I have had a lot of success with is using a weighted wooly bugger presented on a sinking polyleader. Polyleaders are sinking, weighted leaders that are coated and tapered so they cast decently. If you have a floating dry line you can loop-loop connect the polyleader onto the fly line instead of a regular leader and there you have a sinking tip for swinging flies. You tie a short section of 3X to the end of the polyleader to your fly or flies (again you can fish two if regulations permit). I've found the combination of a weighted bugger on the swing is deadly if fishing the pool right below a drop, swinging the fly down over the drop and through the pool or the tail out to the pool. The best weighted bugger that I've found is roughly made as follows:

Daiichi #8 streamer hook
wire to weight hook some
Red thread
Black marabou tail
Root beer krystal flash
Green and black barred schlappen to palmer
White/grey guinea speckled
Brass bead

Put the bead on, start thread, 8-10 wraps of wire behind the bead in the thorax area.
Tie in one marabou feather as the tail making length appropriate, don't clip the unused stem off (see below).
Tie in schlappen feather by the tip (small) end.
Wrap thread to behind the bead and tie in two pieces of root beer krystal flash doubled so they can be trimmed to make 4 "legs" that extend back the length of the fly into and slightly past the tail.
Wrap the marabout stem up the hook shank to create a black underbody - tie off well behind the bead, tucking the stem end into the bead once trimmed.
Using just a few wraps move the thread back to the rear of the fly and tie the krystal "legs" in at the point the tail is secured, allowing them to be free back from there to the end of the tail. Move thread back to front of the body.
Palmer the schlappen to a little back from the bead and tie off and cut off excess.
Tie in the guinea feather by the tip and make about two wraps.
Build a visible collar of red thread behind the bead and whip finish.
I tend not to cement over the thread as it stays brighter - a good approach is to build 3/4 of the collar and cement and then complete the collar over the dried and cemented thread wraps.

This pattern does really, really well. Also retrieved by stripping for bass and crappie in lakes, etc. again on a polyleader to get it down.

4) For bass see just above. For topwater I find Bett's Poka-pop are outstanding poppers - Bass Pro shops sells them. The best color is Chartreause. They come in two sizes - I debarb the hooks and this is especially helpful with the smaller size version as it will catch panfish which have very small mouths - makes getting the hook out a lot easier. Needle nose pliers is also very useful as well, but really, best to debarb and just keep tension on the fish unless you really plan to eat them all. I have not fished Clouser minnows but they are a great pattern - chartreause and white is a good combo.

5) I find the size 8 bugger I detailed above works for steelhead too - just scale up the rod and polyleader as needed.

6) The floating line with possible addition of sinking polyleaders makes a versitile kit and is lighter than toting along extra spools or reels with sinking lines. A medium fast to faster 5 weight rod will throw both 5 and 6 lines and the odd sink tip. If I'm planning to swing flies more exclusively I use a 6 wt.