Doing Awful Things With Fly Rods

Before the arrival of spinning reels, fly rod owners were mighty inventive when it came to figuring out how to use a fly rod in non-classic ways. Gordon Wickstrom writes about spinners, swivels and artificials of all shapes and sizes that were once hung on the end of a fly line. “There was one thing, for sure, that we could do with this rig, which was to fling fly rod spinners around all up and down our streams. The interbellum period was the great age of the ‘fly rod spinner,’ and no trout fisherman worthy of his rod would be caught on the water without a few of these distinctly American lures.” In the Boulder Daily Camera.