It’s a strange experience, being around long enough to see things change. No matter what you’re into, you eventually find yourself looking around and thinking about what happened in the last five years, ten years, two decades. How did I get here? How much has changed around me. And how did it all happen so quickly?

Parenting is a series of those kinds of moments, really. Just the other day, my wife and I stared at each other mesmerized as we realized and said it out loud: We’re halfway done. In another eight years, our youngest son will have his driver’s license while our oldest will likely be out of the house and moving on to wherever his fate takes him. Neither of us want to be done.

Anyway, like the rest of life, the fly fishing industry moves fast too. And as so much evolves or circles back around to lap itself, it’s interesting to see which things grow with the industry and which things fall off the speedy ride.

The Orvis Fly Fishing Guide Podcast is one of those things that’s in for the long haul. I’ve been listening to Tom Rosenbauer from the beginning. And I’d argue that Tom set the model for a fly fishing podcast, which many other quality podcasts have built upon.

So I was honored to join Tom on his show. We talked about streamers, mostly. About how fast the industry has moved into what I think of as the modern streamer code. And about how, in my mind, I juxtapose that with an old-school streamer style that (maybe) a lot of anglers have forgotten about.

Streamside

I’ve written my thoughts about this in a number of articles, and like everything else that happens around a river, they continue to evolve. But essentially, a modern streamer presentation asks the trout to come to the fly, while an old school style brings the fly to the trout.

READ: Troutbitten | Streamers as an Easy Meal — The Old-School Streamer Thing

Now, that’s a drastic simplification of the two methods, but I talked about it a little deeper with Tom on the podcast. We got into some Mono Rig tactics, brought up the streamer head flip and considered the size of the forage that trout are really eating — yes even the big ones.

I think I made it clear that, for me, this is not an either/or proposition. It’s both. I throw and strip streamers in just about every way imaginable. And it all works — sometimes. But I do have a preference for more of the old school tactics. Especially when I’m wading, when I can’t cover miles of water in a day, I must make the most of my limited opportunities, to convince a higher percentage of trout that might see the fly. We got into a lot more of that on the podcast.

Thanks to Tom and Orvis for the chance to talk for a while about how so many things change so fast, but at the root, a whole lot stays the same.

You can find the Orvis Fly Fishing Guide Podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever else you download your pods.

Here it is on the Orvis site.

And here is a direct link.

Fish hard friends.

Enjoy the day.
Domenick Swentosky
T R O U T B I T T E N
domenick@troutbitten.com