Tradition calls for right-handed fly anglers to cast with their right hand and reel with their left hand. I think God ordained this as the 11th Commandment but Moses dropped the stones coming down the mountain and that one got broken off.
This tradition makes sense. In mountain streams, your reel‘s primary purpose is to hold line. If you’re lucky, you get a fish big enough to put you on the reel. But for the most part your retrieve by stripping in the line.
Then along came saltwater fly fishing and Lefty Kreh. A left-hander by birth, Lefty had to learn to cast with his right hand after a severe injury to his left arm many years ago. Fishing in saltwater for bigger and more powerful fish, he realized that many big fish will have a blistering first run. But fish aren’t dumb. At a certain point, they realize running away from the angler isn’t working- they are still hooked up. Some would head for the bottom and dare you to crank them in- very hard to do with a fly rod. Sometimes, it seems as though they realize running away from the angler wasn’t working so they would turn around and head back toward the boat. They have so much speed in their reversal, there was no way the average angler can strip all the line back in to keep tension on the fish. Trying to reel the line in hampered them because they were using their non-dominant hand to reel the line back onto the reel. He observed that you can reel faster with your dominant hand that with your off-hand.
But we use our left hand to reel in spinning reels when we are fishing with spinning tackle. Yes, we do. But spinning reels are geared so each turn of the handle retrieves much more line than the single action fly reels where one turn around with the reel handle retrieves only one spool turn of line.
Further, the reel handle on a spinning rod has a longer handle than the handle on a fly rod. It swings though a larger arc. But with the single action and the handle on the rim of the reel, we can retrieve fare more line quickly using our dominant hand.
Still further, they point out we should hold the rod in our right hand while playing the fish. But we play fish with the rod in our left hand when we use bait casting rods or trolling rigs.
Lefty advised those who fish in saltwater should switch to right-hand retrieve. Makes sense to me.
But this isn’t a matter of life and death. Lots of folks (even right-handed folks) have caught tons of fish with a left-hand retrieve fly rod. So, the choice is yours. You can follow tradition or you can be an oddball and take the easy way out. By the way, almost all fly fishing reels convert from left-to-right or right-to-left so you can try both and switch to your favorite.
Decisions, decisions.
Don’t forget to check out the resources of Fly Fishers International at www.flyfishersinternational.org.
Also, Google this and other topics of interest and go to YouTube for seemingly endless videos.
