RA BEATTIE's new DVD "Nervous Water" is a compilation of all the best work from the filmmaker's five years of shooting fly fishing adventures. With over two-and-a-half hours of video — several longer pieces along with a dozen or so short segments — the DVD is filled with examples of Beattie's ability to frame a fishing scene so that it can't possibly be forgotten. Beattie calls this segment from the DVD "the Redfish Cut." It's a narrative on sightcasting for waking and tailing redfish along the south Texas coastline.

YET ANOTHER front in the battle for customers between fly shops and online retailers is the market for fishing flies. A standard dry fly in a fly shop costs anywhere from $1.50 to $2.00, but there are literally dozens of online retailers who can offer patterns for half that price.

IN THE SPRING of 1931, the fly fishing duo of Lee Wulff and Dan Bailey could be found fishing the prolific trout streams of up-state New York using Lee’s new and revolutionary hair wing dry flies. Adorned with buoyant and sturdy buck tail fibers on their wings and tails, Lee’s new creations were a far departure from the sparse dressings of the day. As these flies first hit the water, we began a whole new era in dry fly trout fishing ... sturdy attractor flies with meaty silhouettes that rode high in the water and fished well in fast currents. Exactly forty years later, another fly fishing duo, Doug Swisher and Carl Richards, were busy setting the stage for the next era in the history of dry fly design with their launch of the parachute dry fly. Although the originator of the parachute dry fly is unknown, it was the Swisher/Richards book Selective Trout (Crown Books, New York, 1971) that brought this effective way of tying a dry fly to the forefront of trout fishing.

GENERALLY, we are united in the belief that all rod design has been progressive and that the ideas about fly rods in the past were so bad as to make it amazing that people were able to fish at all. — Thomas McGuane

St. Croix's new Rio Santo series fly rods are priced at only $100-130.

WE'LL BE THE FIRST to admit to a kind of hesitant obsession with fly fishing gear. In the back of our minds, we know that beyond being able to deliver a fly to a fish, fooling that fish into eating and then playing it quickly, the rest is frosting. As a wise old angler once said when the bite was hot and a novice was struggling with his leader, "Just put on four feet of anything."

Nevertheless, a portion of our love of the sport comes from just plain enjoying the gear. Many of us do drive to the local fly shop to shake a few rods, spin a reel, finger wader fabric, or scrutinize the fly bin for some superbug that will set off maniacal attacks by the most difficult fish. We gaze at taper diagrams on the backs of fly line packages without a clue as to how all those little variations in diameter will help us catch fish, though we're sure they will.