And A Happy New Year

There is a school of thought that says that an instructors certificate is a professional qualification. I can’t argue with that, it is. I can argue that it is a very poor choice of profession if you intend making a living from instructing. If I had dropped my real job to become a full-time instructor I would have died of starvation about two weeks after passing my first test. What sort of profession is it that you must have a second job to subsidise it. What sort of profession is it that costs you about 100 times more to participate in it than you earn from it? That’s not a profession, that’s a hobby.

But, like most hobbies, someone, somewhere, is making money from it. It just isn’t you (or me).

There is a few bob to be made by a select few that help create new instructors, again, not me. I very rarely charge anyone who wants help to become an instructor.

So where does professionalism come into fly casting instruction? In my opinion the professional should be those that mentor and assess candidates for money. It would be extremely unprofessional, in my opinion, to mentor anyone, for money, if you were not fully current with the test they were preparing for. It would be extremely unprofessional, in my opinion, to assess someone for a test (they have paid to take) that you couldn’t or hadn’t passed. These are the only two circumstances (paid mentors and assessors) where anyone should be re-tested on a regular basis to ensure they are current and everyone has confidence in their abilities. Along with this would be attendance at workshops to learn how to do the job properly.

The test should not be altered in any way for a set period (say three years). The test should be under constant review with feed back from both assessors, observers and candidates but changes would only be made once every (say) three years. This would give continuity for the candidates and mentors. The first people to take the revised test should be the assessors and mentors, if they want to keep on mentoring and assessing.

It strikes me that as soon as you have passed whatever test you have taken you immediately forget what it was like to be a candidate and want to make things harder. Put yourself back in the candidates head  and remember how you struggled learning some of the tasks, how you sweated over the wording of your description of a particular cast, how you many rod and line combinations you tried out to find the one that suited you, the angst and uncertainty about what was required and, for the unlucky few, the nerves on the day of the test.

The tests are hard enough, we just need confidence in the way they are administered.

One thing puzzles me though, why has spey casting been elevated to such importance in single-handed fly casting assessments? Yes, they are fun to do but in forty years of fly fishing I have never used a spey (well, maybe a snake roll) to present a fly to a fish. I have messed about with them for fun but never fired one-off in anger.

I was talking to an ‘elder statesman’ the other day about spey casting and he has probably fished every river in the country but claims never to have used a spey cast because of the noise they create, he would rather catch fish than frighten them.