Dana Sturn

Back near the Dawn of Time—the 1950s—a chap named Esmond Drury designed a shrimpy-looking Atlantic salmon fly in response to a ban on prawns as bait in salmon rivers. He called his fly The General Practitioner and the name stuck. Over the next few decades, as flyfishing for steelhead took hold in North America, fly-fishers looked to the Atlantic salmon traditions for guidance and inspiration, and the General Practitioner—now known more simply as the GP—found its way into the fly boxes of Pacific Northwest steelhead anglers.

Breaking norms, like fishing fast instead of slow, can lead you to more steelhead on the Pacific Northwest's wildest rivers.