Maggie's Farm

Or Pat McManus for that matter - Outdoor Life and Field and Stream editor/writer/contributor for many years - over 40 in fact. Wrote the Last Laugh column for Outdoor Life.

McManus was the author who coined the term fibrication defined as the expansion and embellishment of routine and mundane hunting and fishing stories into tales of great accomplishment, adventure and just plain old tall tales.

I had the pleasure of meeting Pat about ten or so years ago - he is as funny and interesting in real life as he is on paper.

for anglers too young to remember

Oh my yes - I am old enough to remember those early years of fishing industry change - I would suggest that not only the fly fishing industry was affected, but the entire spectrum of outdoor sports - in particular the boat industry.

With that in mind, I think that we've undergone another revolution in fishing technique with the introduction of graphite and carbon fiber rods and reel seats. Take, for example a medium weight rod in glass and a medium weight rod in carbon fiber - the carbon fiber rod is thinner, incredibly responsive, stronger and much lighter than even graphite rods. Lure technology has changed also even with fly tying. There are a lot of new artificial materials to be used in building incredibly lifelike flys and lures.

Actual techniques have changed also. Fishermen now understand the concepts of structure, feeding patterns, weather phases, humidity and temperature indexing, etc. They are logging this data on computers along with catches and correlating all this information so that on any given day, they can at least determine what and where to start out. I have data going back almost 25 years on the Narragansett Bay, Race, Montauck and LIS areas - day, time, moon phase, weather pattern, lure use, trolling speeds, structure patterns - a ton of data that I used to be able to pull up on a moments notice. And it was very successful.

Nostalgia is all well and good, but I'm of the firm belief that sometimes we look back too fondly at the simpler days - we, as fishermen, live in a golden age all our own.

Having said all that, my favorite rods are Ugly Sticks and my favorite reels are all Pfleuger or Penn. The venerable 405 series in particular from Penn. :>)

Oh, one last thing. Just this past weekend, I was invited to do some fishing with one of the local guides, Mike Halstead who has a nicely set up 23' Ranger bay boat. Mike has a complete electronics suite on the boat, but the thing that amazed me was the Lowrance HDS-10 sonar/GPS unit. That thing was unbelievable - I spent at least an hour tinkering with it instead of fishing. It's got everything from side scanning to high resolution sub-surface imagery to mapping to....I can't explain it all. Simply amazing.

Guess what's on my Christmas list this year? :>)