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It could have been witnessing your first Hex hatch covering the Great Lakes like an armada of small boats, a brown trout rising to the Spring's first Sulphur mayfly on an Appalachian creek, or late summer Green Drakes bringing the river to a boil as every fish in the river seemed to be rising right [...]Read now -
How to Read Hatch Charts and Match the Hatch Year Round
Available for most popular trout lakes and rivers with a quick Google search, hatch charts can provide an angler with the basic knowledge of which aquatic insects will be present in a specific water and when the adult insects will be active. While all fly fishers love to fish the dry fly patterns highlighted [...]Read now -
How to Fish Double Indicator and Two Fly Rigs
There are times on the river when a little excess and doubling down can turn an average day on the water into one for the record book! Double dry fly rigs, double indicator rigs, and double beadhead nymphs can enable the fly fisher to go all-in on a hot hatch, detect the light strikes, [...]Read now -
Ask the River Oracle: If fishing is slow, how often should I change flies on the water?
Coast to coast, year in and year out, this is probably the question we receive the most from fly fishers. When our go-to fly patterns don't produce fish, and the hot patterns sold by the local fly shop don't get the fish to rise, when do you know it is time to change out [...]Read now -
The Fly Fisher's Ethic
There was a time in each of our fly fishing journeys that we were green anglers, uninitiated, uneducated, and stumbling down the riverbank. Whether the introduction to fly fishing was a recent event as you accompanied a friend to a local river or at the side of your mother as was my experience more [...]Read now -
The P.A.U.S.E. Method for Matching the Hatch
Exhale.... You've done it. You've successfully escaped the office. You've tunneled under the suburb's privacy fences, and the incessant drone cell phones and email notifications are fading into the distance behind you. In front of you lies a day without obligation and a river full of potential with the promise of [...]Read now -
A Fly Fisher's Guide to Identifying and Matching Stoneflies: Part 2
I'm not interested in simply filling your head with scientific bug names and entomology facts. While we took an in-depth look at the characteristics that will enable the fly fisher to identify stonefly nymphs and adults at a glance in last month's article, The Rise of the Stonefly, that information won't do you any [...]Read now -
A Fly Fisher's Guide to Identifying and Matching Stoneflies: Part I
A morning mist swirled over the surface of the water just as it had thousands of times before, but this morning was destined to be different than those that had proceeded it. Breaking through the dark surface of the water emerged two long antennas followed by a head that one would expect to see in prehistoric [...]Read now -
A Fly Fisher's Guide to Identifying and Matching Midges: Part II
Having covered the characteristics that define each stage of the midge life cycle in last month's article The Midge Master: Part 1 it's time to take that knowledge into your fly box! With almost 17,000 species of midge populating North America's waters, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of fly patterns sold by your [...]Read now