CONTINUING EDUCATION
Fishing Opportunities and Skills Development
One of our club’s principle missions is to encourage people to go out and fly fish. A big part of that is to have the programs and opportunities to build skills across our membership, especially to those just getting started.
Joe Libeu, Life Member of our club, a Federation of Fly Fishers Master Casting Instructor and all around tireless ambassador for fly fishing, made a suggestion at our recent Board of Director’s Meeting. His proposal was to create more of a structure around mentor outings, skills workshops, casting, fishing different types of waters, and such. It’s still in the formative stages but the idea won over the Board pretty quickly.
Places like the Owens River, San Joaquin, stillwaters and spring creeks were ideas for possible mentor outings. What would make these outings different than our normal club outings is that we would limit the number of participants seeking mentoring (first come, first serve on-line registration) and have mentors join for the first half day to help kick start the outing with the participants who would then be more able go out and fish on their own. Mentors will also be able to go out and fish.
For skills building, we are thinking of creating more opportunities for casting workshops including sessions on intermediate, double-haul, fishing casts and sinking lines casting.
Mentors and instructors will be a critical component of the program’s success. We have a list of club instructors for our Casting In The Park sessions and would welcome others to join, but we will also need outing mentors.
Let me know if you would like to be a part of the mentor corps (president@ffcoc.org).
Best regards,
Brian Mayer