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No matter how diligently we may tie flies through the winter and pack line after line of our favorite patterns into our fly boxes, inevitably we will find ourselves thigh deep in some river looking blankly at a piece of broken tippet and our last "Hot Fly" swimming downstream in the mouth of a big fish. Now before [...]

Being born and raised in the Mid-West, my life was intimately connected to land. From working on farms and ranches during my early years, to selling sweet corn on the side of the road to pay for college, the seasons were marked by their own unique rhythms of planting and harvest. From the [...]

The astute fly angler doesn't wait until they are on the water before they attempt to match the hatch, but begin the process while driving to stream, and continue to hone their fly choice while trekking down to the water. Each summer and fall, clumsy hopping, crawling, and flying terrestrials (land insects and animals) [...]

With the progression of summer, fishing across the country is heating up both figuratively and literally. Anglers can anticipate waves of hatches throughout the day, with fish feeding in every level of the water column. Water clarity will improve daily as runoff continues to slow and flows decrease. With the long sunny days and stable summer [...]

"A fly by any other name would fish as sweet." These words were penned by playwright and middling rod manufacturer, William Shakespeare, in a play about the forlorn love between the son of a fly fisherman and the daughter of a worm dunker. While this melancholy tale clearly illustrates the heartbreaking consequences of [...]

(Before you read this article, please click on the image above or the song title here to cue Richard Wagner's piece, Ride of the Valkyries).With Wagner now providing a soundtrack for this article, imagine with me hundreds of thousands of mature mayfly nymphs, caddis pupa, and midge pupa staging among the rocks along the bottom [...]

Sitting alongside the river in the morning and surveying the spread of fly boxes that surround me, each with closely-packed ranks of flies, I feel like a general inspecting his troops before battle. At this point, I face the perpetual question of which fly to deploy to outwit my foe, the trout. Before [...]

I kept the True Flies installment of the Fly Selection 101 articles until last because these patterns are near and dear to my geeky, invertebrate-loving heart! Not to be confused with the broader invertebrate order Diptera that also goes by the moniker "True Flies" and includes midges, mosquitoes, crane flies and black flies, we are [...]

 Like a high-stepping line of Las Vegas showgirls or the cast of Baywatch, the family of flies called Attractors rely more on flash and embellishment than attempting to represent any true invertebrate species. Making up roughly 20% of dry patterns and 30% of wet patterns, flies from this family are dressed in tinsel, copper, mirrored Mylar, [...]