The joy of being an indiscriminate fly fisherman.

The joy of being an indiscriminate fly fisherman is that the only thing one needs to do properly is hook a fish.

Not that there's any lasting fun in slapping the water on a backcast, or spooking trout out of a hole surrounded by more accomplished and suddenly angry anglers. There's something to be said for honing casting and fly-tying skills, and building knowledge of the stream ecosystem and habits of trout and other gamefish.

And while others are saying it, I'll be fishing.

Which is what I found myself doing Sunday evening for the first time this year, hip-deep in Oil Creek with the sun slipping over a high ridge and the promise of a grannom caddis hatch beginning to unfold on the water.

The fly rod was new, a warranty replacement for the Redington that snapped during an Idaho fishing trip. The chest waders were old and somehow hadn't self-repaired their leaks over the winter, nor had the felt sole reattached itself to my wader boot.

So I stood midstream, lop-legged and wet at one knee, throwing Mike Laskowski's green-butt caddis pattern at rising trout, alongside four common mergansers, my wife and seven other anglers engaged in the same wonderful waste of time.

Half an hour in a feeding brown trout took the hook as if I had done something to earn its trust. I imagine it thinking, if trout do think, that the fly had to be the real deal, because no fly fisherman would dare let it land that hard, in that coil of tippet, that many times without either finally getting it right or finally giving up.

I released the brown, made to cast again in the gloaming and heard a hiss and snap that's associated only with bullwhips and too-fast backcasts. I still don't know where the fly ended up, but I found at that point it was the only grannom pattern in my flybox. Had it been any earlier in the day I might have gone back to Mike Laskowski's shop, Oil Creek Outfitters, but he was a quarter-mile upstream, actually catching fish.

I moved on to my default fly, a parachute Adams, which is said to resemble so many insects that it makes a good all-around attractor pattern. And darned if I didn't attract another brown, which might have thought that little white parachute was whipped cream on its dessert. It devoured the fly, unraveling the hackle and making it unfishable.

Naturally it was my last parachute Adams, which I'd have known had I inspected the gear (see: leaky waders).

By this time a sliver of moon was out, the common mergansers were off and the hatch was on, not as thick as anglers had hoped, but respectable and bringing slurping trout to the surface in little dimples and great leaps. For the duration of the rise, until moments before the mink forded the creek and put down all the trout around me, I tried to thread a hair-sized tippet through a hair-sized eye on a fly I could not identify in the dark, and which I lost in the flowing water before wading to shore on a slick bed made more slippery by the absence of one felt sole.

I'll be lucky to have another day so bad the rest of the year.

MATT MARTIN, managing editor/sports, can be reached at 870-1704 or by e-mail at matt.martin@timesnews.com. For more outdoors coverage, visit www.nwpaoutdoors.com.

River Girl reels in community

River Girl reels in community
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Kelly McCoy, owner of River Girl Fishing Company, teaches individuals the basics of fly-fishing. McCoy opened her store in Todd, N.C. Photo by Christy Bullins

by MEGAN NORTHCOTE
Intern Lifestyles Reporter

The first fish Kelly McCoy ever caught was a grass fish.
No, this is not a new species of fish. In fact, it’s not even a fish at all.
But for McCoy this is how her days on the river all began.

When McCoy was in college at Mississippi State University earning her degree in fishery science, a friend in one of her classes decided to teach her to fish.

He took her to the center of campus, set a hula-hoop on the lawn, handed her a fishing rod and told her “don’t even attempt to go into the water until you can land [the hook] in the hoop twenty times successfully,” McCoy said.
And that is how McCoy caught her first grass fish and learned to cast a fishing rod, a skill that would later shape her future career.

After mastering this skill, McCoy spent so much time on the river in graduate school that she became known as “River Rat” or “River Girl” among her friends.
And then one day, while working for a Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in Florida, McCoy decided to sell everything and move to Todd, N.C. with her fishing partner.
“I thought, what can I do with my background that would benefit the little town of Todd and that I would enjoy?” McCoy said.
And then it hit her: nowhere in Todd was there a place where people could purchase fishing supplies, obtain a fishing license or learn the art of fly-fishing.

Life vests line the walls of River Girl Fishing Company. McCoy rents canoes, selling fishing supplies and fishing licenses. Photo by Christy Bullins

Without waiting another minute, McCoy rented out a small room above a bakery in Todd, sold her four-wheeler to pay for expenses and opened the River Girl Fishing Company in July of 2006. “From the moment I was over there, people came in asking for inner tubes,” McCoy said.

In a matter of months, McCoy expanded her business to include not only fly-fishing rental and lessons, but also kayak rental, and eventually canoe, inner-tube and bicycle rental.

For the last couple years, McCoy has gotten a total of forty new boats from a boating company in Greensboro called Great Outdoors.

“[The owner of the company] told me to pick out any boat that I wanted for free and pay it off by July,” McCoy said. Using this system, McCoy picks out the boats she wants and sells the boats at the end of the season, using the profits to repay the company.
With the expansion of her company, McCoy has moved to a bigger location on Railroad Grade Road in Todd, NC.


She offers fly-fishing lessons, which includes a two-hour lesson in her front yard, learning the basics of casting and selecting the proper bait, just as she first did. For another hour, she takes participants to the New River to put their skills into practice. These three-hour lessons cost $50, which McCoy said is fairly reasonable compared to competing prices.
McCoy also rents out boats at reduced rates for college students and local Todd residents.

Discount rates for kayaking are $20 per person and $10 per person for tubing. Regular rates for Kayaking are $35 for a short trip and $45 for a long trip. Regular rates for tubing are $15 for a short trip and $20 for a long trip.
Lessons are also offered for those interested.
“Instead of personalized one-on-one lessons,” McCoy said “we actually walk out to the river to show them paddle strokes they need so they won’t be banging back and forth on the banks.”

River Girl Fishing Company is open to all ages and experience levels. McCoy encourages all college students to come out and experience the fun while also giving back to the environment.

Another opportunity McCoy offers is a monthly river clean-up of the New River where participants are given a free boat ride if they pick up trash along the way.

“I would spend a lot of time going down the river and I would spend most of my time picking up garbage,” McCoy said. “I thought how could I pick up trash and enjoy my trip down the river?” Prizes are awarded for the most trash collected and the most unique piece of trash. A free bar-b-que will be served afterwards.

The first clean-up day will be Sunday, May 3 and will continue on the first Sunday of every month.

“If you love something you’ll try to take care of it, try to protect it, do it the legal way,” McCoy said. “I’m hoping [visitors to River Girl Fishing Company] gain a love for the river and become stewards of the land.”

Contact Kelly McCoy at rivergirl24@skybest.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it for the time of the clean-up and for more information.