This has become my year of collecting fly-fishing gadgets. A hook threader is the newest doohickey hanging from my vest.
I first heard of threaders years ago, while working in fly shops. Customers, usually older but not exclusively so, would ask for them. I don’t remember ever carrying these tools, and I’m not pleased with my younger self when I recall I sometimes made snide jokes after the age-challenged anglers left, in search of a more sympathetic establishment.
The baby boom generation ushered in the modern boom in fly fishing. I’m technically a boomer, though folks born in the final years before Generation X — the first half of the ’60s — are now sometimes categorized as Generation Jones. I suppose we’re embarrassed by the self-indulgence that characterized older baby boomers as they’ve passed through American demographics like a large capybara swallowed whole by an anaconda.
Anyone who qualifies for boomer status is at a minimum in their 60s, and we know what happens to 20/20 vision for people in their 60s — it fades into a fuzzy, indecipherable visage that all but rules out fishing small flies without mechanical assistance. You need magnifiers, or Zebra Midges, or any fly size 20 or smaller, are out.
For a long time, I compensated by wearing off-the-rack polarized sunglasses with built-in readers. I wouldn’t have gotten through my 50s as a fly fisher without those helper shades. Inexpensive readers took care of me at work as well. However, two years ago, off-the-shelf reading aids no longer did the trick and I was forced to form a business relationship with an optometrist. It turned out I had developed a considerable astigmatism in my right eye — see, there was a very good reason so many birds flew away unharmed after I pulled the trigger in the last couple decades. See, it’s not my fault.
Still, I now know I need prescription readers. I also realize I’m lucky I made it this long without glasses, and that my condition is easily correctable with prescription lenses or enlarging the text on my computer screen enough so that my students laugh at me when they catch a look.
Karma is a … well, you know.
Fly fishing isn’t so easily fixed. I have to hold a fly at some length for my good left orb to focus, and at that distance it’s nearly impossible to see whether a thin strand of monofilament is passing through the eye of a size 18 Blue-Winged Olive, or alongside it.
I’ve dropped quite a few flies misjudging that maneuver the last few years. On the water, a dropped fly is usually a lost fly.
Fate eventually overcame my will. Seeing as there remain quite a few boomers, Generation Joneses and even Gen Xers in their 60s chasing trout with tiny flies, there must be legions of anglers who share my condition. Hence, just as there was a proliferation of birth control and marijuana in the ’60s and ’70s when young boomers demanded freedom, followed by boomers with offspring in the ’80s banning music with suggestive lyrics to shield the children they conceived while listening to music with suggestive lyrics as their birth control failed, so too do we find in the 2020s a proliferation of gadgets to help oldsters connect fly to tippet.
The most promising of these gadgets use a magnet to hold the fly just so. Once perfectly positioned, passing a gossamer tippet through the hook eye is simple, theoretically speaking.
I’m inpatient with gadgets that don’t work as well as their YouTube videos suggest, so I haven’t yet found a threader that beats a mismatched pair of off-the-shelf readers. Yes, it is a hassle keeping track of all that eyewear while fly fishing, but when I get frustrated, I remind myself I’m on a trout stream.
Only a self-absorbed fool lets a pair of glasses, misplaced for half a day on your ball cap, spoil that.