One of those fly shops

Back in the 80’s and 90’s I was working as an IT journalist and editor-in-chief for a couple of Danish magazine publishers, and in that connection I had the chance to travel quite a bit.

As people who do frequent business travels know, these trips aren’t nearly as interesting or exciting as people who don’t travel imagine.

I often heard friends and family say “You get to go so many interesting places!”.

But the truth is that most of the trips were short and uninteresting. I didn't get to see much, but spent a major part of the time in airports, taxis, shuttles, hotel rooms and not least meeting or conference rooms.

Sometimes there was free time, and I could go for a short walk in area near the hotel or conference center. Some trips even had scheduled longer breaks for non-business activities, and the best itineraries included leisure experiences – whether cultural, adventurous, or culinary.

But in most cases I’d honestly rather have had a local meeting – or these days some kind of online chat – than being hauled halfway around the globe to sit at a conference table and listen to someone reading the text off a PowerPoint presentation.

 

But once in a while during my business trips, I managed to stuff in a few extra days, and found some time to visit people, play the tourist – and even fish.

 

One such trip was to California in the late 90’s where the company SCO invited a bunch of journalists and clients to attend an event called SCO Forum, which was held annually in the late 80’s and through the 90’s. This was a pretty relaxed conference with plenty of technical content, but also music and other events. It took place in Santa Cruz at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

I managed to squeeze in quite a bit of free time on this particular trip, and made a stop over in the Netherlands and visited Bas Verschoor and fished the Oostvorne Meer, met with Rob Lobrowich and fished the Sierras and managed to visit my sister, who was at the time studying at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

While I was staying with my sister, I grabbed a phone book ... yes, one of those huge ones printed on paper ... and ran my fingers through its yellow pages. I found the section on fishing tackle shops, and among the few listed in the San Diego area my eyes were drawn to a name: Stroud Tackle Fly Fishing.

I don’t remember if this was the only of the shops that had the word “fly” in its name or it was just close by where my sister lived, but no matter what I hijacked her and - more importantly - her car, and we went on a small excursion.

She was pretty impressed that I had been able to find the shop at all, and took it as an exotic experience going there.

I remember arriving at the shop, which really didn’t do much to advertise its presence. Its storefront was a windowless tiled wall, a very small sign with the name one it and a door. We could park right in front, and inside I remember it as a small piece of flyshop-heaven with a lot of stuff crammed into every nook and cranny of a fairly small space.

I felt right at home.

The shopkeepers - a man and his wife as far as I remember, most likely the original owners Bill and Eileen Stroud - were nice and talkative, and being from out of town - and then some - I obviously attracted some interest and was taken very good care of.

My sister was waiting patiently in the background, probably wondering how I could spend that much time looking at this mess of highly uninteresting clutter.

I bought several things, among them my first ever stockingfoot waders (neoprene from Orvis) and some inexpensive canvas wading boots from China to use with them.

I also bought some fly tying materials, and I still have a couple of Hoffman saddles that I brought home from the trip. They were really inexpensive, even by the standards of that era, and I still have the package with a grizzly grade 2 dry fly saddle, which was 12 US dollars. Yes, twelve dollars for a full saddle!

The Hoffman brand is now owned by Whiting, and a similar saddle is probably more like 10 times that today.

 

Stroud is still there, these days run by Rick Vorst. The shop seems to be much the same as it was when I was there, judging from images available online.