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Get hooked on fly-fishing
By Joanna Poncavage
Of The Morning Call
September 25, 2007
It's a sport. It's a pastime. It's a reason to travel to beautiful,
natural places. It may even provide dinner.
Fly-fishing, an ancient method of catching fish with insect-like lures,
drew renewed interest in 1992 when Robert Redford's film, ''A River Runs
Through It,'' inspired novices to pick up a rod. Many headed to downtown
Allentown, where the Little Lehigh Creek wends through the city's Lehigh
Parkway. Lately, not all fishers are men.
''We see a lot more women than we did in years past,'' says Rod Rohrbach,
proprietor of the Little Lehigh Fly Shop. ''Here we are promoting it, and
when women come here, they find it an attractive, safe place to be,'' he
says from the shop, a historic stone building tucked between a walking
trail and the creek where he offers lessons and sells equipment.
While wading upstream against the current can be a great workout, says
Donna Trexler, vice president of the Delaware Valley Women's Fly Fishing
Association, fly-fishing needn't be a strenuous sport. Equipment is light,
and some fishing spots have easy access from a parking lot.
But its techniques, such as casting a line to have it land just so,
require a certain degree of coordination. This can be a gentle exercise
for joint and soft tissue mobility, according to Casting for Recovery
(www.castingforrecovery.org), a group that organizes fly-fishing retreats
for women who have had breast cancer.
And as well as a social activity, fly-fishing offers a healing connection
to nature, which in turn helps relieve stress and promotes calmness.
''We all share similar hectic lives, family problems, job changes and
occasional health problems, but when we get together to fish … it all goes
away,'' adds Betsy Miraglia of Bryn Mawr, a DVWFFA member.
The challenge of the sport is its woman-against-fish aspect: the strategy
to knowing what the fish sees, and how it will react to what is familiar
and what is strange. The reward is learning how to mimic what is natural,
and how to trick the fish into biting what it thinks is its favorite
insect landing on the water. Fly-fishing can be a science, requiring
knowledge of some finer points of entomology, yet tying flies that look
like real insects is a craft.
Rohrbach recently led a free fly-fishing class for a dozen women at his
shop. The parkway was busy with walkers, runners and riders on bicycles or
horses. Yet perhaps few were aware of the treasure flowing beside them.
''The Little Lehigh Creek has the highest population of stream-bred fish
in Pennsylvania,'' says Rohrbach. ''When you get your feet wet, you're in
the wilderness, and you're in a new world.''
More fly-fishing info: Delaware Valley Women's Fly Fishing Association,
http://www.dvwffa.org ; Little Lehigh Fly Shop,
http://www.littlelehighflyshop.com, 610-797-5599.
joanna.poncavage@mcall.com |
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