Years ago, when I had just graduated from college, my friend Matt Dickerson did me a great service. Well, several services, really. He and his wife provided my new wife and me with terrific role models for a happy marriage and for raising kids, and we still learn from watching their family. For instance, Matt taught me how (by example, of course) to keep one's marriage happy through the judicious use of one's fishing gear (go fishing often enough to stay sane; not so often that your wife calls the police to report a missing person).
Matt also taught me how to lose stuff. As often as we could, we'd meet in the wee hours to get out on one of Vermont's copious tiny streams, to look for those places where other fishermen surely had never fished and where the trout were large in size and number. (I'd tell you where, but then I'd have to rip your tongue out so you couldn't tell anyone else. You understand. Of course, if you want to find out, you can always hire Matt as a guide) We'd meet at some pre-arranged location and then drive up into the mountains.
Matt's one of those people who has way too much energy, no matter what time of day, whereas I tend to have just about enough at most times, and slightly less than enough the rest of the time. So I'd let Matt do most of the talking. And talk he did. "Did I ever tell you about the time I lost a rod in one of the gorges in Ithaca? I had set it down to clean a fish, and when I looked up, it had been washed away by the current" Sometimes the stories were particularly poignant, like the time he dropped a box of spinners in the water and it floated out into the middle of a deep pool. He waded down to the other end, hoping to catch it when it floated into the shallow tail of the pool, but instead, it sunk, right out of his reach.
Matt is a novelist (among other things), and he tells a good story. His tales were infectious--so infectious that I started to lose things while fishing, too. (Of course, this was Matt's fault, not mine, you understand.) Our first year fishing together I lost three pair of sunglasses, about eleven pounds of assorted fishing tackle, and I ran over my best rod. It was somehow a bonding experience, and it showed me that I was on the way to becoming a great fisherman, just like my mentor. Of course, as time has gone on, I have become aware of the fact that my wife reads our credit card bills, and that those darned credit companies don't have the sense to change "Bob's fly shop" to something more innocuous, like "Bob's florist". Though I suppose if they did, My wife would wonder who was getting all those flowers, and then I'd be in even deeper trouble. Maybe it's better this way. I recognize that it would be a terrible thing to have to choose between a happy marriage and my fishing habit (let's be frank - it's not a sport; baseball is a sport. Fishing is an addiction. Which is fine with me.) Fishing would have to go (yes, I love my wife even more than I love scaly, mucus-covered, bug-eating, cold-blooded vertebrates, believe it or not.) That being the case I've been trying to cut back a little on losing stuff. Not cold turkey, mind you. A man has to have a little joy in his life, after all, and there's nothing like the joy of knowing that I lost another pair of forceps, and that I am now forced beyond my will to return to the fly shop, that source of much earthly bliss, and to wander therein, perhaps for hours, admiring all the new things I can buy, fish with - and lose.
Since some of you may be in the same boat as I am (if so, please stay seated while casting, and) let me offer you some of my sage and time-tested advice about how not to lose too many flies. It's an ugly thing when you're changing flies in the middle of the stream and something causes you to spill a whole box into the stream (it's even uglier if fish downstream start rising on the untethered dries you just dropped!) Several companies have come up with solutions for this problem.
One company (Wheatley) offers fly boxes with little spring-loaded glass doors on each fly compartment, so you only open one compartment at a time. That's a great idea, and I keep telling myself that as soon as I have too much money I'm going to go and blow a hundred dollars on one of those nifty gadgets, if only because they look so sophisticated, and are therefore bound to make me catch more fish.
Threader Boxes: I haven't tried them personally, but I hear from friends that the new threader boxes (Orvis sells one for $28-$39) do a good job of keeping flies in their place, and are especially handy when fishing small flies (i.e. size 18 and smaller). I'm told the little threaders save considerable time and vexation when tying on tiny flies.
The FlyTrap: An even better idea is the relatively new use of ripple foam in fly boxes, so flies can't fall out even if the box is shaken upside down. The Flytrap, which pins to your vest, is by far the most ingenious of these, but it's not cheap at about $20. Still, that's less money that it'd cost to replace a box full of flies, and on that account, it's worth it. The working of the Flytrap is a little rough in all the ones I've tested, a bit like fingernails on a chalkboard as one opens the aluminum case, but certainly not intolerable. The one beef I have with the Flytrap is that I already have enough stuff pinned to my vest, and sometimes I've lost stuff by inadvertently knocking things loose on tree branches or rocks. That being the case, here's my suggestion for minimizing fly-loss while also keeping costs down. Some of the new ripple-foam boxes have a small hole or loop built in (Orvis' inexpensive "Clearwater" boxes have this feature, and they also have real moving hinges, rather than being molded of one piece of plastic which might eventually wear out) where you can attach a zinger (which you can get pretty cheaply - L.L.Bean sells a good one for less than five dollars). Pin the zinger inside your pocket and attach the loop end to your fly box. That way, if you drop the fly box it automatically retracts to your pocket. Also, it prevents the fly box from falling out if you forget to zip your pocket back up after tying on a fly.