A rosy cheeked rainbow caught by Nate K.The grainy footage was captured on our family’s shoulder-mounted Panasonic Camcorder, technology so old that its probably come back into style with the kids wearing tight jeans and ironic mustaches. Hopping next to a pond on that Smoky Mountain morning, a towheaded kid fills the frame as [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Ask any fly fisherman and they will tell you that the season to fish dry flies is never long enough. As the bugs start to fly over the water and the trout rise to meet them, the fly angler needs to be able to quickly identify the family of invertebrate and [...]
Whenever I'm on the river and I see the clouds begin to roll over the mountains, their threats of rain and wind brooding in their dark forms, my heart begins to beat a little faster as I put down my nymphing rig and reach for my dry fly box. It is in [...]
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 [...]
"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 [...]
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 [...]
