Fly-fishing in Waupaca

Class to be held at Rec Center

By Greg Seubert

As far as Gene Walz is concerned, anyone can learn to fly-fish.

They just need to master the art of casting a fly rod.

The Iola resident will teach the basics of fly-fishing – including how to properly cast a fly rod – at an upcoming class at the Waupaca Recreation Center.

The class will be held from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays from Jan. 12 to Feb. 9 in the Augie Austin Gym. The $120 cost covers the gym rental.

Walz needs at least seven students to sign up for the class and won’t take more than 10.

“I prefer to teach all my students in a gym before I would even take them out on the water,” he said. “I can’t watch 10 people cast on the water. I will talk about staying safe, all the knots you have to know and how to make tippets. The tippet is the monofilament (leader) and it has to match the fly. You can’t put a No. 12 (fly) on a tippet. I go into all of that.

“The last thing you want to do is go out on a river,” he said. “The guy that’s instructing you is not looking at your technique. Fly-casting is different than fly-fishing. If you can’t cast your fly to the fish, you’re not going to catch any fish. I don’t care what fly you have, You have to be able to cast.”

Walz knows a thing or two about fly-fishing. He taught a class on the sport for several years at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

“The college hired me to teach fly-casting in the gym because fly-casting is different than fly-fishing,” he said. “If you can’t cast, you can’t fish. The rivers are so big out there that you have to be able to throw 70 feet. A lot of guys can fly-fish a small stream, but for the big streams coming into the Great Lakes here with steelhead (trout), you have to be able to cast.”

The 81-year-old Walz learned the proper fly-casting technique as a child.

“I wanted to fly-fish and couldn’t do it,” he said. “My dad took me to a professional to teach my how to cast. This is when I was a kid in Illinois.”

Anglers signing up for Walz’s class should bring their own fly rod and reel.

“You don’t need an expensive rod,” he said. “For general fishing, I recommend a 7-weight rod. I’ll be teaching the class with an $8 rod I got at a garage sale. Believe it or not, the rod has nothing to do with it. If I was going to spend a lot of money (on a reel), I would be fishing for big fish. For steelhead out of the Great Lakes or a 25-pound salmon, you need a pretty good reel, probably in the $100 class. You spend your money on the reel, not the rod.

“I had a guy talking about a $1,000 rod and I said, ‘You don’t need a $1,000 rod, that’s a joke,’” he said. “I used to tell my students, ‘Put it in a corner, talk to it and see if it does anything. It won’t.’”

The class is geared to kids and adults, men and women.

“A lot of people bought a fly rod and couldn’t use it,” Walz said. “I talked to the (Waupaca) Senior Center about it and that I might teach just seniors, but then I thought, ‘Well, I might as well open it up to others because maybe somebody wants to come in with their 16-year-old son.’”

Walz grew up fishing with a fly rod on Campbell Lake northeast of Ogdensburg and said kayaks have made fly-fishing easier.

“You can cast sitting down and I’ll go over that,” he said. “You don’t fight the weeds and overhanging trees. It’s easier now than when I was growing up because that kayak dimension wasn’t there.”

Walz fishes several area waters, including the Little Wolf River and Lake Iola.

“I have two hours and that’s 120 minutes,” he said. “I have to spend time with each one of them and it’s not just teaching them how, it’s showing them what they did wrong. Any video will tell you how to do it, but they’re not going to tell you what you’re doing wrong. It’s like golf. If you think a professional golfer’s just swinging a club, you’re dreaming. Anybody can fly-fish, but you can’t teach yourself.”

Preregistration and payment with the Waupaca Senior Center are required before the class begins. Contact the center at 715-258-4437 to sign up or receive more information.

“Anybody can do it if they’re taught how to do it right,” Walz said. “I have women that do very well and they surpass the men because they’ve never done it and they listen good. The hardest guy to teach is the guy that has been doing it wrong for 20 years.

“It does you no good to practice if you’re practicing your mistakes,” he said. “It has nothing to do with strength. I’m 81 years old and have no problem throwing 70 feet in one or two passes because I know what I’m doing. It’s based on technique. I’m teaching technique.”