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Number of women fly fishing has gone up since 2003
By DAVE BUCHANAN The Daily Sentinel Fly fishing. It’s not just for men anymore. As if it ever were. It was in the 1400s that Dame Juliana Berners, preceding Izaak Walton by 200 years, published the essay, "A Treatyse of Fysshynge Wyth an Angle," (the Old English title) in which the good nun suggests that fishing with a rod and a line brings good spirits and enhances life. More and more, many of those anglers enjoying those good spirits and enhanced life are women. According to an Outdoor Industry Foundation study last year, there are nearly 3.5 million women who fly fish in the United States, up 200,000 since 2003. That’s welcome news to Robert Ramsay, president of the American Fly Fishers Trade Association.
Chubs making a comeback at Strawberry
During the C.A.S.T. (Catch a Special Thrill) event held on Strawberry this past Saturday, I had the opportunity to take a look at the chub population in the Soldier Creek portion -- and the picture wasn't a pretty one. "We've been catching fish right and left," said George Sommer, current president of the TBF Bass Federation, "but all we've caught are adult chubs." It was a fact that the area Sommer and his C.A.S.T. participants were fishing showed a water column littered with adult chubs, that swarmed each bait as it fell towards the bottom. "We thought the cuts (cutthroats) would be biting," continued Sommer, "but we can't seem to get through all the chubs." The same story was repeated several times Saturday. Each time I approached a boat, my fish finder came alive with schools of chubs, which were confirmed as I moved slowly through the shallows so that the chubs became visible to the naked eye.
Injured vets strong-arm the river
Bond - The trout rose and sipped a mayfly off the surface of the Colorado River. Joshua Williams caught the small disturbance on the water from the corner of his eye. Standing in a drift boat, he raised his fly rod and the trout rose again and gulped in the artificial fly on the end of the line. And suddenly, Williams was in trouble. He'd done this a hundred times before on the rivers and creeks around his home in Virginia, passionately throwing a fly at rising trout, holding the long rod in his right hand and gently stripping in the slack line with his left, a delicate two-handed operation. But on Friday, the baby-faced 22-year-old Army staff sergeant who spent a hellish year engaged in street combat in Iraq had a problem. He didn't have a right hand. The trout surged into the current.
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