Cheap thrills and hacks for fly-fishing

Fly-fishing, like other addictions, gets expensive. 

It is absurdly easy to read about a new doodad, or the best fly ever, or the miracle tippet material, and charge out and buy it.

These are the things that litter the third shelf of my fishing cabinet. 

It’s a lot easier on the wallet and the psyche to think a bit about the goal behind a new purchase, and perhaps find a less expensive way to accomplish said goal.

Item: Studs for wading boots

Slipping and falling down in rivers is no fun. It is manly to get banged up when fishing, but the manliness quotient (MQ) is just as good for my personal favorite, the scratch on the face by a bramble (resulting in a lovely streak of dried blood), as for the broken wrist (which kept me in a cast for 10 months — before the operation).

To calculate the MQ, use this formula:

Manliness Quotient = Stupidity times Difficulty divided by Number of Fish Landed (MQ = S times D, divided by NFL). This is also my formula for picking pro football games against the spread.

Last year I had an excellent pair of Simms felt-soled wading boots. They were sturdy and they fit well, and all I needed was some studs to make them the fishing equivalent of snow tires.

So I bought Goat Head Sole Spikes for $20-something bucks, 20 of them plus a little ratchet thingy to screw them in.

They worked very well. As Flounder says toward the end of “Animal House,” “Oh boy, is this great?!”

They worked so well, I went into a fugue state and forgot to put the boots back in the car. When I went back the next day, they were gone, and I hope the thief is forced to walk on his own face with them come Judgment Day.

For Round Two, I went to the hardware store and bought two dozen sheet metal screws and a tube of non-water soluble glue for a grand total of about $10.

With a similar pair of felt-soled boots, I first used a slender framing nail to tap a starter hole, added a drop of glue, and then used the ratchet thingy to install the screws

Then, exhibiting rare patience and common sense, I waited a day before using them.

And they worked just as well as the more expensive spikes.

Item: The crummy fly patch on the Umpqua pack

I bought a great Umpqua chest pack with a backpack attached. The only flaw in the thing is the crummy foam fly patch on the front of the pack. It fell apart fairly quickly and was situated in such a way that I kept knocking flies off it with my hands.

So I bought a small hard plastic fly box from C and F. It folds down, holds about 25 flies, and just barely fits in the allotted space. Cost: about $35.

It comes with a standard pin arrangement to secure it to the pack or whatever. Since the Umpqua pack already had a Velcro strip for the crummy thing, I added Velcro to the back of the C and F box. (Cost: under $2).

Now I can keep my go-to flies close to hand without losing them.

Item: Those flimsy wading staff holsters

If you don’t want to fall down, get a wading staff. These collapsible gizmos, when not in use, are stored in a holster that attaches to the wading belt.

It doesn’t matter if you buy an expensive staff or the cheapo model. The holster is, at best, made from thin neoprene or plain old nylon fabric, lovingly stitched together by a machine somewhere, with Grade Z thread. They will fall apart, especially if, like me, you fish 180 days per year.

So I looked online and found the greatest thing ever: a holster that can accommodate any size staff and belt, made in the US of A out of nylon, polypropylene and PVC. Twenty bucks, made by KoolBak.

I could have bought expensive spikes, a new chest pack, or duct taped the old holster together.

But instead I paused, thought it through, and wound up with a workable solution at a modest expenditure.

Next time: How to knock out poison ivy before it sets in; how to avoid tick bites; startling new uses for old jockstraps.