For the past 19 years, I’ve lived about a five-minute walk from being knee-deep in the Stanislaus River as it flows through Ripon. In fact, I moved there because of the river and the great fly-fishing for bass.

Unfortunately, I don’t spend nearly enough time fishing. Work seems to get in the way. Clearly, I have to readjust my priorities.

My dad hooked me on fly-fishing as a child. We fished at least one day out of almost every weekend in the Sierra Nevada. I can’t remember when I began fly-fishing for trout. Until I was about 12, I pretty much thought fly-fishing was the only way people fished for trout.

I also fished for bass, panfish and catfish. When we were children, my dad would take my brother, my sister and me to one of the islands in the San Joaquin Delta, along with a big supply of worms and live minnows. For a kid, there’s nothing quite like seeing that bobber begin to twitch and then race around in small circles, just before your quarry gets serious and jerks that bobber completely under in what seems like a mad dash for the ocean.

Catching a washtub full of bluegill, crappie and catfish was the usual result of our excursions. Occasionally, using our worms and minnows, we’d get a largemouth bass as a bonus. I guess that reinforced the idea that bass were caught using bait or spinning gear. It simply never occurred to me you could fish for bass with a fly rod.

There was no blinding epiphany in which a bolt of lightning or a parting of the heavens revealed fly-fishing for bass to me. About the middle 1970s, I accidentally stumbled across catching bass with a fly rod.

In looking back, my fly rod fishing for bass was a sort of gradual conversion that probably began on the Merced River downstream from Yosemite Park. There are some really nice trout in the lower Merced, with big pools connected by rocky riffles. In the El Portal stretch of the Merced, the water gets pretty warm in summer. Occasionally, my fly would get slammed and my rod almost jerked from my hand, followed by a glistening smallmouth bass leaping into the sunlight, trying to rid himself of my fly. I’d yell with delight until I realized it was just a darned old bass fouling up my trout fishing.

Slowly, it began to dawn on me that maybe these bass weren’t simply a distraction from my beloved trout, but a darned good game fish that deserved more attention. I began to check out bass fishing at the local library and found that some people actually fished for bass with a fly on purpose. The local fly-fishing club also was helpful and had several guys who tied flies specifically designed to catch bass.

Bass flies are quite different from the trout flies I was used to tying. They’re almost always larger than trout flies, which is good for beginning fly tiers because big flies are easier to tie than microscopic trout flies. Many bass flies are tied with deer hair, which is hollow and floats well. It takes practice to learn to spin deer hair around a hook, but once you figure it out, your flies become almost unsinkable.

As you progress on your metamorphosis to become a bass flyrodder, you learn smallmouth bass prefer moving through rocky water at temperatures warmer than those preferred by trout but cooler than those preferred by largemouth bass. By contrast, largemouths prefer warmer, slower-moving water and sandy or clay bottoms. In essence, smallmouths are stream dwellers and largemouths lake dwellers. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but if you fish the rivers on the valley floor, you’ll almost always find the largemouth in the slower waters and the smallmouth in the swifter runs. Fish in rocky or riprapped stretches for smallmouth and quieter back eddies with overhead cover for largemouth.

Why fish for bass with a flyrod at all? The answer is excitement. A fly rod, by definition, is a longer rod that bends easily and uses lighter lines. I heard a presentation the other day by a former bass pro who said he regularly uses 80-pound test line with his bait-casting bass rig. I think the heaviest fly leader I’ve ever used was 15-pound test. In fly-fishing, the rod does the work of subduing the fish, instead of the line.

When you have a large bass slam into your hand-tied bass fly for the first time, it will be you that gets hooked, not the bass. The strike of a big bass is so savage it will make your heart race and you’ll think you’ve hooked into a 100-pound ocean dweller that got into your river by mistake.

Believe me, if you hook a 5-pound bass on a flyrod, you’ll be a flyrod bass fisher forevermore. Don’t take my word for it — get out there and try flyrodding for bass.

Until next week, Tight Lines.

• To comment on this week’s Tight Lines, forward messages to Sports Editor Ike Dodson at 239-6351, ext. 306, or e-mail ike@sunpost.net.