In theory, fly-fishing is a simple sport: Pick a body of water, choose a fly-fishing rod, select your “fly” (or bait), tie a secure knot, cast your line and, hopefully, land a fish on the other end.

There’s much more to fly fishing than tying on a fly and whipping your line around a pond. Casting, hook setting and reeling all demand a level of finesse that goes beyond what anglers experience when ...

Traditionally fished in the down-and-across presentation common to wet flies, the natural materials of a soft hackle fly impart dramatic and lifelike motion in river currents, resembling mayflies and ...

I’m not suggesting you drift a pair of dry flies through fast water or stained water. The double dry rig works best when fishing slow, clear water that offers the potential for rising fish – if you ...

A dry dropper is a two-fly rig that combines a dry fly and either a nymph or emerger, allowing you to fish on the surface and subsurface at the same time. If you’re fishing shallow water but not ...

As I embark on my fifty-first season of fly-fishing and fly tying, I find the many changes that have altered these pastimes over that timespan to be nothing short of mindboggling. And of course they ...

A few months ago, I wrote two articles on Presentation—the skill of putting a fly in front of a fish in a way that makes it eat. This article sits in the same wheelhouse, but from a different angle.

Hearing Dave Allbaugh of Wet Fly Waterguides speak at a recent Maryland Trout Unlimited meeting on wet fly fishing on the Gunpowder, I knew I had to return to my “first love,” wet fly/soft hackle ...

To help pass a few long winter evenings in the past couple of months, I read once again several classic fly-fishing books that had greatly influenced me during my early years. Absorbing the familiar ...