Fishing:

Getting Started in BTBFF - Part IV: What to Wear

On Your Head

 

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Watching Out for Your Noggin

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Just about everyone that fly-fishes understands the importance of a good hat. Not necessarily for sun protection, but as a safety device. Salt water flies are heavy, have big sharp hooks, and hurt like hell when they hit you, even if you don't get stuck.

Baseball/golf caps with a long bill are OK, especially if you can find one with a dark underbrim (reduces glare), but something that protects the back of the neck and the ears, like a flats-style hat (with the neck flaps), or a Tilley or bucket hat with a broad brim, are better. You may not feel comfortable with the fashion statement, but wear something!

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The Eyes Have It

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Polarized sunglasses are pretty much a given for most fishermen. Reducing glare helps you to spot fish, and reduces eyestrain. And certainly the reduction in UV light that comes from wearing a good pair of sunglasses has long-term benefits for the health of your eyes.

A good pair of sunglasses has an additional benefit for fly-fishermen - physical eye protection. That 2/0 Clouser flying around can cause some serious damage if it hits you in the eye! You owe it to yourself to wear some sort of eye protection while you're fishing. We've actually popped a contact lens out of our eye with a fly without getting hooked (how's THAT for luck), so we've learned our lesson.

Recommending a lens color is usually a good way to start an argument, so we won't. We have both gray and brown lenses on board. We like a brown or rose color when kelp paddy fishing, because it tends to make the brown of a paddy stand out a bit more. This pair of sunglasses has light-density lenses, which works out better for us when the Marine Layer is thick and the light level is low. On the other hand, a gray lens is color-neutral, so it renders color more accurately, and our gray lens is higher-density, so we use it under bright sky conditions.

What about fit? This is one of our big beefs - we typically need a fairly flat frame to fit our face, and nosepads because we do not have much of a nose bridge. But trying to find a frame like this in contemporary plastic frames is tough.

The majority of the wraparound plastic frames are designed for people with a nose bridge and a fairly curved face. When we wear these types of frames, the frames sit on our cheeks, and there is a large gap between the frame and our nose bridge. The end result is that the frames are constantly slipping down our face, getting fogged from contact with our cheeks, or they sit so close to our face that our eyelashes touch the lens.

If you are in this situation, DON'T BE A SLAVE TO FASHION, no matter how much you like the frames. Find a frame that sits comfortably on your nose, without contacting your cheeks, that sit far enough away from your eyes so that you can blink without your eyelashes touching the lens.

In the Habervision line of suglasses, all of their wireframe models fit us; we just had to find a lens size and color that we liked (we chose the St. Tropez in brown). Their Corsica model has a plastic frame that also worked well for us. It's interesting to note that at least one major sunglass manufacturer is producing a line of sunglasses specifically for people with this shape of face (Oakley's "Asian Fit"), so hopefully other manufacturers will follow suit.