Every year our fly-fishing club arranges a beginners crash course in fly-fishing. It's not a "class", really more of an introduction to help them through the most basic part of it. We meet a couple of nights in the club house for a little bit of theory. No university level, just introduction to interesting insect categories, knots, basics of equipment, like rods, reels, lines etc. and we let them look at a couple of us tying a few flies.

  For the next part of the course we will book a sports hall where a few of us will guide them through the basic fly-casting. The ones who have their own rods bring them and the ones who don't will borrow one from the club. None of us are certified instructors, but it will still be easy to see a remarkable difference in their casting after those two nights. Even though they won't have left the place having been taught any advanced casting or being able to shoot the entire line out, they WILL be able to do the required thing to catch fish - placing the fly on the most productive side of the water line.

  The final gathering is an outdoors one. Even though the indoors nights might have been interesting, this usually is the one that really gives most boost and means most to it as a future interest. Now they're going to be swinging the rod where it is made to be swinged, by the water and not inside a sports hall. Now they're going to use their tippets the way they're made to be used, with flies and not pieces of yarn... and we will have prepared our club lake for it by putting in some extra rainbow trout for them to catch.

  This year we had 19 people joining this introduction course, which was surprisingly many and only to see so many interested was very nice. But the best part certainly came by the water. It didn't take long until the 13-year old boy, youngest one in the group, was standing with a shaking rod and a really serious look on his face. A few minutes later it had been replaced with a really wide smile, when he was standing there with his first fish caught on a fly rod. He's the guy we will see as a new club member waiting outside the door at the first beginners tying class this winter, that I can gaa-ron-tee. But he won't be the only one coming. Not much time had passed from the boy calming down until the club chairman stood with the net ready to assist a very concentrated woman. By the end of the day almost all of them had been standing in the shoes of these two, with shaking rods and with the same looks on their faces.

It was a good year with many interested faces indoors. Seing so many smiling faces by the water made it even better. A few new people hopelessly caught in a new dimension... the darkest dimension... the fly-fishing dimension.