You have to figure a woman who plucks Hendrickson dubbing from her Brittany spaniel for a pragmatist who is serious about fishing. Or perhaps the casting pond in her backyard gives it away. Or a home stuffed with enough rod tubes, reel cases, wader bags, map files, and fly-tying paraphernalia to make a hard-core trout junkie tremble with admiration and envy. Rhea Topping admits her obsession without embarrassment: “I love everything about fly-fishing-the people, the places, the fish, the rivers. It brings out the best in a lot if us.”

It has clearly brought out the best in the intense but affable Topping, who was named 1999 Woman of the Year by the Federation of Fly Fishers (FFF).

The daughter of a woman who boated a record, 587-pound tuna off Montauk, Long Island in 1949, Rhea Topping has some serious fishing in her bloodlines. Her late father, one-time New York Yankees owner Dan Topping, was an inveterate deep-sea fisherman and saltwater angler. “I come from a fishing background, Rhea recalls without regret. My mother loved fishing and my father couldn't get enough of the ocean.” She remembers spending many hours as a kid hanging onto the business end of a fishing pole on a boat out of Southampton, Long Island, or Miami, as well as trips out of Islamorada during the winter holidays back before the Keys were overrun with anglers.

But those childhood stints were nearly forgotten by the time Topping encountered fly fishing in 1988. Other obsessions had occupied her time and attention-dog breeding, quail hunting, horseback riding, and golf. Her first experience fly fishing didn't quiet take however. She had fun at the Orvis school in Manchester, Vt. But couldn't accept the technical aspects of the sport seriously at first. The world of insects and flies, tuck casts and double hauls was a strange one.

Like any good novice, she went hog-wild buying gear and vividly remembers “flirting like mad” with her instructor. Then, in 1990, accomplished fisher friends invited her to dust off all that barely-used gear for two weeks of total immersion fly fishing in western Montana. You know the drill-the full cult experience that makes or breaks prospective fly fishers-ten hours a day of relentless fishing, then talking fish until 2:00 a.m., a few hours of not very deep sleep, then out again. What should have been a dream trip turned into “the trip from hell.”

“I couldn't cast well. I didn't fish well. I was frustrated and embarrassed.”

The more her friends tried to help, the worse she got. “I was getting a lot of contradictory advice, and I learned then and there that's the worst thing for new students.”

Her own competitiveness-fueled perhaps by her mother's tuna-hauling grit-sent her to George Anderson's fly shop in Livingston where she hired Rick Smith for a day of guiding and patient, unambiguous fly-fishing instruction. She fought a private war that day on Armstrong's spring creek, which she says Smith-who in her innocence neglected to tip-considers “the longest day of his life.” The details of her metamorphosis are shrouded in mystery, but she managed to bring “six lovely fish” to hand. Rhea Topping had gotten into fly fishing and was starting to get something out of it.

After passing through what she called her “Polly Predator” phase, during which she was intent on catching as many fish as possible, Rhea attended Joan Wulff's school in 1991 and had her eyes opened wide by Wulff's casting.

“I thought, because I was catching a lot of fish, that I was a good caster. But I watched Joan cast, and it was gorgeous-beautiful, graceful, fluid. Bells rang and lights flashed, and I thought I really want to learn how to cast properly.”

Joan Wulff changed her whole approach to the sport.

“I got less into fishing and more into casting and adopted Joan's philosophy that casting well is the key to angling successfully anywhere. If you can put the fly where you want, you'll catch fish.”

Topping audited Wulff's school for two years, soaking in everything she could, then in 1995 became an instructor at the Wulff School of Fly Fishing in Lew Beach, NY.

“Joan opened all sorts of doors for me.”

In addition to working for Wulff, Topping became the head fly-fishing instructor for Vermont's Becoming an Outdoors-Woman program. She also started instructing and guiding on her own and now runs the Rhea Topping School of Fly Fishing out of her Upperville, Virginia home.

Since selling off her real estate business and turning full-time trout bum in the 1990's, she has found other fly-fishing professionals to be very generous with their time and talents. She counts Gary Borger, Lefty Kreh, Gary LeFontaine, Tim Rajeff, and Dave Whitlock among her tutors in tying and casting, but reserves the warmest praise for Mel Krieger, “my second mentor to Joan and one of the greatest instructors ever.” She is an advocate of Krieger's ideas and teaching methods and strongly supports the instructor Certification Program that Krieger created for the FFF.

One of only 55 certified masters worldwide, Topping's skill as a casting instructor is proof of the worth of Krieger's program. The afternoon I visited her in Upperville, I watched her work with two students at opposite ends of the spectrum. The first, Lynn Dunbar, was determined to fish along with a fly-fishing husband on an upcoming trip to Montana. She hoped Topping could take her from zero to competent in a few afternoons at the casting pond.

“I love teaching beginners and children,” Topping admits. By the end of an hour, Lynn was casting well, if not flawlessly, to 30 feet and, of more importance, was beginning to internalize her own sense of good casting mechanics. Topping had quickly given her a few rudimentary skills, instilled confidence, demystified the aura of fly casting as difficult, and kept the whole experience casual and fun. There was more to learn but the process had begun.

Topping teaches quietly and patiently, like a good golf pro or shooting instructor. In explaining the mechanics of fly casting, she draws easily on insightful metaphors from tennis, gold, and wing shooting-whatever might help her students visualize what they need to be doing. As an instructor, Topping sees herself as a composite of her teachers. She cites Joan Wulff's discipline, Lefty Kreh's accuracy, Gary Borger's analytical skills, and Mel Krieger's inspiring sense of fun as the key components in her approach.

Her second student, Frank LoPresti, was more of a challenge. Already an excellent caster who practiced almost every day, LoPresti, like Topping, is a perfectionist in search of a little more speed, a little more loop control, a little more distance without sacrificing the soft turnover necessary to effective presentation. Topping and LoPresti traded the practice rod back and forth between them as they experimented with variations of Frank's casting motion. They broke that motion down and put it back together again, intently discussing its nuances all the while like the two Boeing engineers tinkering with the lift properties of an aircraft wing. And they had fun doing it.

Topping is a superb casting instructor because she continues to be a student of the cast. Although she originally modeled herself on Joan Wulff's style of casting, she has become more eclectic over time and adapts more methods most suited to a given student's tendencies. Mindful of the difficulties she encountered during that first trip to Montana, she watches students and listens to them before offering advice.

“I sounds like a cliché, but I learn from every student I teach.”

Now, only a dozen years after picking up a fly rod, Topping is deeply involved in every aspect of the sport. She is particularly-and justifiably-proud of her involvement with the FFF, for whom she has been a national director since 1995. A member of the Rapidan Chapter of Trout Unlimited, Topping sees TU's efforts on behalf of habitat conservation as critical to the future of quality trout fishing and as proof of how beneficial the expanding interest in angling can be for the environment.

“The resource needs to be protected. Trout Unlimited understood that from the beginning.”

A tireless professional, Topping serves as an advisor to several fly-fishing manufacturers. She was the associate producer of Joan Wulff's “Dynamics of Fly Casting” video and is writing a book about fly-fishing etiquette, which she feels is a neglected subject. When she is not teaching, she travels and guides groups to fishing destinations throughout North, Central and South America. Despite her accomplishments to date, she considers herself a “work in progress,” a fly-fishing professional intent on “learning forever.”

In the end, fly fishing for Topping, as for the rest of us, is a way to focus travel. Those tight loops point right at the hart of places we love. Although she is happy to fish locally on Shenandoah Valley spring creek or a Blue Ridge freestoner, and is equally happy to get on the road to fish in the West-particularly her old nemesis Montana-Topping has a special passion for southern Argentina. She is fascinated by the sea-run browns of Patagonia-“so big and wild coming in from the sea like Atlantic salmon.” She likes everything about the country-the landscape, the people, the culture-and jokes that perhaps she was Argentine in another life.

“It's bleak and windy down there, but the people are warm and wonderful. You fish all day until dark then eat and drink and talk and go to sleep and get up early and go fishing again.”

Sounds like that “trip from hell” had become the trip of a lifetime.