In an article in Outside Magazine, reporter Elliott Woods noticed that Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Department of the Interior, had rigged his fly fishing reel backwards.   This was also discussed on Outside Magazine’s twitter page.

The photo on the left below shows how a fly fishing reel is correctly rigged (with the line farther from the pole).  The photo on the right shows how Zinke rigged his reel (with the line closer to the pole).

Recently, the Department of Interior’s website featured the photo below of Ryan Zinke fly fishing.  In the photo below, the line is closer to the pole, and is, again, rigged backwards.

This is a closer view of his reel.

Somebody else may have noticed this, because a box with a quote has conveniently been placed over the reel, in essence, covering up Zinke’s ineptness as a fly fisherman.

In the lower part of the diagram below, you can see that the line from the reel is farther away from the pole.

In the Outside Magazine article, Elliott Woods wrote:

“As Zinke and I casted over the ice-cold water, I noticed something funny about his setup. He kept struggling to strip line out of the bottom of the reel. For a while, I thought he was simply having trouble concentrating on our conversation while casting. No, there was something wrong, and when I asked him to stand for a portrait, I finally saw what the problem was. He had rigged his reel backward, so that the line was coming out of the top of the reel. Every so often when he went to strip line out, he would grasp air where the line should’ve been.

Seems like an inconsequential thing, but in Montana, it’s everything.”