Many fishermen find winter to be a miserable time to fish, the trout are sluggish and the temperatures cold. Well, they are missing out, because on warm winter days the fishing can be spectacular. In this article, I will share some hints on how to catch trout during even the coldest of months. Surface –…
Many fishermen do not know that fly lines should be clean. They then start to complain when there three month old floating line starts to sink. I use to think to myself, “But, my line gets washed every time I cast it into a crystal clear spring creek or alpine brook”. I do not have…
When out try fishing, most of the trout we see are feeding close to the surface, maybe sipping down mayflies. Sometimes, they have laying in the shallows, drifting side to side intercepting any nymph that floats by. These trout that we see in shallow water are the exception rather than the rule. For most of…
Quite a common sentiment is that the fly line is more important than the rod. Hence it is more important to spend more money on the line than on the rod. It is a sentiment I broadly agree with, and have probably even suggested doing exactly that in other articles. But, at the same time,…
I learned to fish spring creeks in the early 2000s, and at that time I spent a lot of my time fishing alongside an elderly English ex-pat, and fly fishing purist. let’s call him Malcolm because that was his name. Malcolm was a fanatic spring creek fisherman, every time I drove by the parking lots…
Fly fishing reels range in price from around $20 at the low end, to around $2500 for a high end Abel, some limited edition hardy reels are more expensive still. But just how much does someone need to spend to get a fly reel up to the task of landing trout? I have been fly…
Late summer, during the hopper the afternoon is one of my favorite times to fly fish. There is little that is more exciting than watching the swirls and splash as a trout rises from the depths to consume a hopper fly. There are three main ways to fish a hopper. As a dry fly, targeting…
Many fly fishermen struggle to cast. I am no exception, my casting is not always the best. Shorter casts, with light flies are fine, But my casts deteriorate rapidly at distances beyond about 40ft. I know what I do wrong, and if I concentrate I can even fix them. But bad habits are hard to…
Pheasant tails are some of the most fished nymphs for trout. Initially designed to imitate mayfly nymphs of the baetis family it quickly become apparent that trout mistook them for a wide range of mayfly, caddis, and other aquatic species. Choosing which pheasant tail nymph (PTN) to fish can be difficult, simply because there are dozens if not hundreds of variations of pheasant tail nymphs. So, which…
Welcome to my guide for the best fly rods for fishing overgrown streams. All the fly rods I will be recommending will be 3wt that are shorter than 8ft in length. Such short rods are what I typically use when chasing trout in such streams. When fishing in overgrown streams space is often very limited,…
