fishing trout with a spinner or a dry fly?
I'm getting interested in trout fishing and I have spoken to some Trout Unlimited guys and they all swear by dry flies. I myself am just starting and I've done a little rooster tail fishing with some nice catches. Is one more humane than the other as far as catch and release goes? Also whats a nice fly fishing reel and rod to get as a noob?
The Trout Unlimited guys you've talked to probably prefer fly fishing to spin fishing because TU is primarily a fly-fishing organization. It was created by fly anglers and the vast majority of members are fly anglers. This doesn't mean that fly fishing is superior to other forms of fishing.
I'm a TU member and I prefer fly angling for trout because it gives you the ability to imitate virtually any form of trout forage (without resorting to bait), from the tiniest gnat to the biggest baitfish. It allows you to attack any level of the water and I have found it to be more productive for trout than spin fishing under most circumstances, especially on streams and rivers.
Is fly fishing more humane than spin fishing? I guess it is slightly more humane because flies do not have treble hooks and you are much less likely to deep hook a fish on a fly than you are with spinners and other spin fishing lures. Fly hooks are generally smaller than spin fishing hooks and lots of fly anglers use barbless hooks, though there is nothing to stop a spin fisherman from using barbless hooks. If you are a catch-and-release angler, your goal is to be humane throughout the fishing process, not just in your choice of lure. In other words, a spin angler can be every bit as humane to fish as a fly angler. Most of the spin anglers I know catch fewer trout than fly anglers, so perhaps that's their way of being humane (heh heh).
I hate to be uppity about gear, but I would shy away from those beginner combo's in the $80 - $100 price range that you see between the soccer balls and treadmills at your big-box sporting goods store. They're usually so cheaply made that they're no fun to fish with or they soon break/malfunction in some way and have very poor warantees. However, I have a young friend who recently got a combo from Cabela's that seemed okay -- he said it was around $150 and the "brand" was Three Forks. It was a 4-piece 5 weight around 8-foot long and it came with a storage bag and some other stuff. I tried casting with it and both the rod and reel worked passably well. I looked at Cabela's and I found this:
http://www.cabelas.com/cabelas/en/templates/links/link.jsp?id=0051114320386a&type=product&cmCat=SEARCH_all&returnPage=search-results1.jsp&Ntt=fly+combo&Ntk=Products&sort=all&Go.y=0&_D%3AhasJS=+&N=0&_D%3Asort=+&Nty=1&hasJS=true&_DARGS=%2Fcabelas%2Fen%2Fcommon%2Fsearch%2Fsearch-box.jsp.form1&Go.x=0&_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1
The combos there are in the $100 price range, and I can't tell if it's the same outfit -- maybe the price point has dropped or something.
I'm also partial to Temple Fork Outfitters (TFO). They make good equipment and it's generally less expensive than some of the well-known brand names.
http://templeforkflyrods.com/index.html
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Learn To Use A Fly Rod and Fly Fish
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