If you fish often enough for trout, it is common to find yourself slipping into something of a seasonal cycle. Each year you might, for instance, first find yourself matching the hatch with dries dead-drifted down riffles in the spring. Then summer sees you deep-dredging pools with weighted nymphs as the water warms. And could it be that finally you go glo-bugging the frosty end-days of autumn, when the trout have cheeks as blushed as your own?

Through years of experience gained in this way, many anglers become highly skilled practitioners in the art of pursuing trout on the fly. Unfortunately for some, such repetition can also lead to a level of fly fishing boredom, and eventually they'll stop finding the time to do the trips they might have done in the days when the sport was new to them.

If this is anything like the current state of your fly fishing, then what you need is a dose of 'fly-rod excitement' to blow away the cobwebs. And given that most of us live not too far from the ocean, may I suggest that it is to the seashores that we should look for a change of scenery. Because there in the washes and waves, you will find fish that will truly monster a fly prior to running so hard for the reef that they can break both your gear and your heart. At land's edge swim fish that can give your fly fishing a new lease of life!

BREAKING THE TROUT CYCLE - Right across the Pacific and all around the coast of Australia there are places where you can fly fish for exciting oceanic species without having to resort to a boat or specialised gear. For instance, fly rodding the ocean rocks of southern NSW can involve a process of evolution that starts with the trout gear you already have. Here is the recipe.

First pick the biggest hook in your tying kit and lash three pairs of white saddle hackles along the side. Then add a pinch of deer tail hair on the top and some lurex threads for flash. Finish by wrapping a large head up front and adding some eyes with a Texta.

Midsummer through to early winter is the best time to start a 'rock swoffing' career in NSW. This is when our ocean waters are at their warmest, and when the life-forms in them are most active. Sometime in this season, tie your newly created Lefty's Deceiver variant onto a stout leader, and give it a swim on the end of your lake fishing outfit off a rock platform near to home.

Pick a headland that has a reasonable depth of water close-in and room to flight a backcast behind. Pick a day when you aren't going to be washed in and drowned on the first trip. Pick a high tide early in the morning and start making your first casts just as the sun climbs over the horizon. In this manner you may be lucky enough to catch your first 'swoff-therocks' fish, which will most likely be a yellowtail pike. It won't matter much that you can't cast far, because pike hang close to the rocks. It won't even count for a great deal that your poor old 7-weight rod seems a bit under-gunned for the environment, because after the initial whack, pike come to hand fairly readily, and a big one will weigh less than a kilo. So for a while with the trout gear you'll catch pike, and wonder what all this rock fly fishing fuss is about. But then one day, you are going to get hit by a trevally of maybe just a kilo - and on your trout rod you'll more than likely be buried.

OBSESSION - After this, for better or for worse, your fly fishing will never be the same. Midges For Finicky Browns will gather dust on your bookshelf, while Lefty's Fly Fishing In Salt Water lies ever open at page 44 on your flytying desk.

Your family will see less of you on weekends and days off, when you'll disappear to the coast before they are even thinking of getting out of bed. And during the week you'll be out in the shed practising knots that don't break, and making tippets that tailor can't chew through.

Perhaps if you get the bug 'real bad', someone will discover that you've been spending a night or two sleeping in coastal car parks, so as to get to the best platforms first. In this way you can keep bait fishers at a distance with dark looks and 3/0 Deceivers slicing through the air.

And now you have a real fly rod. It has # 12 written near the butt, and sports a reel with a 'proper' drag holding a ridiculous amount of backing and a hi-density shooting head. With this new gear you can throw big flies twenty-five metres into the wind, cast after cast, and you'll be able to talk tough to even the meanest trevally.

WARRIOR FEATHERS - When you first started fly fishing for trout, there were probably some way-points that you set on the imaginary journey into your fur-and-feather future. Perhaps you got a rainbow first, and always looked forward to the day when you might put a speckle-sided brown on the bank. Fly rodding the rocks is just the same.

After the pike and the attack of the 'trevors', with resultant upgrade in rod size, most southern NSW based rock swoffers set a course for Pacific bonito and Australian salmon as their next way-points. Bonito on the coast range in size between a little under a kilo and maybe a bit more than three kilos. Experienced swoffers will tell you that 'bonnies' love a fly with a pinch of red on it, and this is as true as the fact that they fight fast and erratic. They usually make sizzling runs seaward and then do a one-eighty turn back towards the rocks. When this happens, you will start stripping-in line thinking that the fish has come adrift, until it turns to sea again and suddenly comes up tight.

In this frantic fighting fashion they are a lot like rainbows except faster, and they don't have much life left when hoisted ashore. If you keep them out of the water long enough to take some photos for the study wall, they're likely to go into a kind of 'death rattle' that says there is a pile of sushi in your hands. The message for bonito catch-and-release is - do it quick.

On the other hand, Australian salmon, or 'kahawai' as they are known in New Zealand, are more like browns. They are tough customers which go back fit-as-fiddles. They fight like browns as well, with lots of low range grunt, and the occasional deliberate drive towards the bottom. The main differences though, between Awipis trutta and Salmo trutta, are that the Aussie fish will leap much more regularly, and that the average 'sambo' could pull a brown trout inside out.

Also, the 'average' salmon around Sydney will scale somewhere near two kilos. In fact if you have a look at the tippet class records for a saltwater fly-caught fish in the IGFA world record book, you'll find one taken in '91 at Jervis Bay by Steve Starling, that weighed more than six kilograms. With a salmon even half this size your new 12-weight won't be anywhere near too much gun when you want to put the stoppers on. Bonito and salmon are the staples of swoffing the rocks in southern NSW. They are the 'warrior feathers' that an experienced rock swoffer wears in photographs on his den wall.

DREAM FISH - There are nonetheless other species that can make every hit a potential surprise. These range from the previously mentioned trevally and tailor, through to 'ooglies' like 'sergeant baker' if you let the fly sink close to the reef. Beyond these are the 'dream fish' that turn up less often but which you will remember most.

Most likely to be encountered amongst these is the yellowtail kingfish, which is a swoffing opponent that commands respect once it grows beyond legal size. Twenty kilogram 'kingies' are caught from the rocks by live baiters each year, as long as the fish forgets for a moment that it is a 'hoodlum' and doesn't head straight for the bottom. On fly gear, (even with ten kilo test tippets) any kingie over five kilos is going to bust you off on that first crash dive, that is, if you aren't foolish enough to let it run and consequently lace an expensive shooting head in amongst the kelp below.

If you swoff the rocks often enough in NSW, about once every season or two you might expect to meet one of these bad guys. When you do, the first thing to do is to curl your toes around the rocks; the second step is to lock up the reel, and the third is to pray that the tippet pops instead of your shooting line or rod!

Beyond kingies, though, there are other 'possible' fish to keep alive an interest in swoffing the rocks. The most exciting prospect amongst these is the mackerel tuna, with an encounter every leap-year or so being a possibility depending on the location. They are also the most likely to be landed, as the records indicate that they don't go much beyond thirteen kilos.

From 'macks' up, the sky is the limit as far as dreams go. Who, for instance, would dare to be quoted as saying that a broadbill swordfish will never be caught land-based on fly. Certainly a small yellowfin would not be impossible from the rocks. However, with no chance to get the boat-skipper to 'back down' on such a hot running species, a 'spooling' would be the most likely outcome of any such a hook-up.

SENSE OF PROPORTION - Land based saltwater fly is a dreamer's game which at first will consume a lot of your fishing time and energy. What happens is that you go through a period of the same kind of fly fishing obsession that burned when you first discovered trout and the vinyl line. But swoffing the rocks, like all obsessions, eventually assumes a sense of proportion in your life.

Then one day you will go trout fishing again in an alpine creek where a jewel-like rainbow will rocket out of six inches of water, and run up and down the pool before spitting the hook. Or you might be night fishing the Frying Pan Arm of Eucumbene when you hook and land a personal-best brown.

Suddenly you will remember just how wonderful the feeling of catching a trout on a fly really is. Except this time you'll know it better than before because you'll have the feeling of a salmon launching out of a swell to compare it with. And if you are smart you will realise that there can never really be a comparison between the fish you chase on the fly - because they are all great in their own special way.

In this way you come to the happy realisation that what you have succeeded in doing by taking up flyrodding the rocks, is to give yourself a chance to fish more often.

And when you aren't fishing, you'll have more fish to dream about - like the next kingie, or the run of that first tuna. How will you react when that 'big hit' comes along?