| You ask me if I have done fly fishing before. Yes. I did it when I was 5-10. This is how I did it: I catch flies (ones with big green heads) by hand. You fly your open palm swiftly toward the head of the fly, it tries to take off, only to hit the palm of your hand. You close your hand and have the fly. I occasionally showed this skill to impress my kids if there was a housefly inside my house. That must be 20 years ago now, the last time I did this. Then you carefully grab it with your other hand -- this takes some skill. You create a tiny crack to create hope for the poor thing, only to snatch it while its head is out. They tend to stink a bit. You take their heads off, store inside an empty match box. You can store up to 25 flies there, perhaps. I then use a fishing rod, made by myself using a bamboo. This usually involves heating each segment over a oil lamp, and adjust them to make them as straight as possible. The bamboo has to be still green to do this. If it is dried up and yellow, it is too lake to make any corrections. There is no fishing wheel on the bamboo rod, so I had to use "fly-fishing" method to catch these tiny fishes who comes up to eat vegetable leaves. We call them YouYu (swimming fish). They are terribly hard to catch. The hook has to be tiny, and line also small (perhaps 1 lb line). In the fly-fishing method, you have to wave the line a few times front and back before finally let go to the front, to let the fly drop to the water surface. You then drag it toward you, each time about 2 inches. Because there is no wheel, you basically set hook and drag the fish to the land in one shot. Usually this results with the fish landing behind you. I could not afford too many hooks, so I normally go fishing with a single hook and 25 headless flies. In the event that I lose the hook, I have to come home and buy another one. I do not remember where I could have bought the hooks. No memory of a fishing gear store. If you fish for another type of fish, JiYu, something very similar to bluegills here, then you use a float and a worm and wait. So there is no need to use the fly-fishing method. There is one type of fish in the river, colored like rainbows on both sides of the belly. I have forgoten the name of it. But they can be fished with flies. One day I took my younger brother to fish for them on a bridge. This bridge is strange: it has a one meter opening in the middle but the small "walking" tractors (one horse power, hand started, I remember) can go through with wheels on each solid side. He must have caught a fish, in a moment of excitement, backed one step and fell through to the river. The river only had shallow water (about 2 ft deep) but the water was at least 12 ft away. So I thought he must be hurt. Luckily he came up fine and continued fishing as if nothing had happened. One memory I have is that I would have caught 5-6 tiny fishes, each about 1/3 inch thick and perhaps 5 inches long. My mom would use the method of Jian (not really frying because it has little oil) which makes the fish crisp also. My father could eat one entire meal with 2 of these tiny fishes, one small bite of a piece of fish, and one bite of a green pepper. He says his former life might be a cat. I have had no experience getting large fishes like a carp (LiYu) or grass carp (CaoYu). Oh, the fun times of fly-fishing. That is, using the real thing :)  (there might be typos, I did it in 15 min). |
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