Those who can’t fish, shop for gear

I should have gone fishing on Saturday, Jan. 24.

If you recall, it was snowing a bit, but it wasn’t very cold out, and the air had that sort of flat feeling that usually works out well for this angler.

So a quick jaunt to the West Branch of the Farmington would have been completely feasible.

But no. Instead I opted to watch endless episodes of “The Blacklist” while in CWS mode. (That’s “Cold Weather Slug,” not “Chicago White Sox.”)

The Farmington remains about the only game in town during the winter, and the stretch from Riverton up to the dam is usually fishable not matter how cold it gets.

The banks are icy, and the water is cold, and nothing much happens. Frankly, it’s a miserable experience.

But it’s manly. Binge-watching television shows in the dark is not manly. It’s cocoon-ly.

Here are some exciting fly-fishing related things to pass on, in the hope that my fellow housebound anglers can ward off impending insanity.

Somebody has finally come up with something new in a fly box. It’s called the Tacky Box, costs about $25, and you can cram a lot of nymphs, wets and streamers in it.

Best of all, it is wafer thin. It fits in my shoulder bag, or even my small chest pack. The dimensions are 3⁄4 inch thick and 3 1⁄2 inches by 7 inches in area. Rectangular, in short. 

There are slots for 168 flies, but unless these flies are tiny and you want to use tweezers to get them in and out, I don’t think you’ll get every slot filled.

Taylor Streit’s “Instinctive Fly Fishing” is back in print, in a revised second edition. Streit is a guide who operates out of Taos, N.M.

This is the single best book on the subject I have ever read. It is crammed with useful, practical advice. He eschews complicated instructions in favor of advice written in a nice, easy, conversational style.

(Streit, whom I met 20-odd years ago, also eschews tobacco, but that’s another story.)

I recently read a rather indignant post on a fly-fishing online forum bemoaning the tendency of fly-fishermen to fail to dress their lines.

Bemoaning is in the same category as eschewing, as far as I’m concerned. (File under “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”)

But the bemoaner had a point. Dressing (aka “cleaning”) fly lines, especially the floating variety, does seem to have gone out of favor. And a dirty line will not float very well.

The easy part is finding the right materials. A giant box of those hand wipes works to get the accumulated gunk off, and then a commercial dressing like Mucilin can be applied.

The hard part is finding someone with a large, well-heated basement so you can unspool the line, treat it and allow it to dry. This takes a while and inevitably something gets tangled up.

I hope these handy suggestions help my comrades through the next bleak weeks, because “The Blacklist” only has so many episodes and I really don’t want to read Proust, which was my other bright idea.