Page 3 - All Stories

The PMD hatch comes off in June and this is one of the few times of the year that large brown trout hold in the shallow shelves, tucked in amongst waving weed beds, gently rising to a mix of PMD’s, spent caddis, and any number of clumsy terrestrials. During a strong PMD hatch the largest browns don’t care too much if it’s full sun, full clouds, raining, or whatever . . . they are there to eat.

If you want to fill your fly boxes with traditional No-Hackles, you may be in for a surprise—those flies require patience to master, and even the typically mild-spoken east Idaho legend Mike Lawson calls them, “a real bitch” to learn to tie.

A 9-foot 5-weight is the ideal western trout rod and I can’t disagree; it serves equally well for bass, yellow perch bluegill and crappie. I consider it to be the most versatile stick a fledgling western flyfisher could own.

4:30am, hours after leaving the Costa Sunglasses party we found ourselves at The Black Pearl in Mosquito Lagoon. This is the spot to find big redfish in clear water, and it's about as close to a tropical redfish trip as you can find anywhere in the world. We visit Titusville, Florida and Captain Scott Maccalla.

If you’re planning to fish British Columbia’s southern interior anytime soon you’ll appreciate this piece of advice: get a bigger net.

The Fly Project team takes on Montana's Clark Fork River and comes out in spades with some hefty smallmouth bass.

This variant works well on Montana’s Missouri River, where I developed the pattern. It’s a simple caddis pattern worth trying, whether you’re fishing Montana or anywhere else caddis are hatching. So, why develop a variant of a proven winner like the Elk Hair Caddis?

The Clocks have completed their spring forward. Cold snaps are getting shorter. Chinook winds have carved away the ice and snow. Warm days are sprinkled into the coming weeks. It is ice out time again, and it’s hard to pass up the springtime urge to tangle with some large, hungry trout.

If you are a diehard dry-fly angler and fish the months of December through April, you know a certain angling truth: That is not a mosquito.

The Chubby Chernobyl is synonymous with western stonefly hatches, especially the early season skwala emergence, which makes its annual appearance on numerous western rivers in March, April and May.

Quickly learn how to tie Andy Mill's Tarpon Toad Fly. It's one of the best tarpon flies in history and catches silver kings in the Florida Keys, Cuba, Mexico and Belize.

Basically, you have to want a permit to catch one, because not catching fish, as we all know (unless you fish with DuPont Specials, a.k.a. dynamite), is no fun at all. When you’re fishing permit, there’s a whole lot of waiting and very little catching. One eat a week would be acceptable. Three or four hookups means you’re pretty darn good at your craft.