As Orvis Guide to Fly Fishing Host Tom Rosenbauer notes, bass are the top sportfish in North America, and he’s right. Just about anywhere you go, from the lakes of Canada to the swamps of the Deep South, bass are readily available. But, as Tom notes, most folks don’t chase bass with flies.
“The key is to get the fly near a bass and make it look like something alive,” Rosenbauer claims. He notes that bass are opportunists, and that bass are a great “starter fish” for beginning fly rodders who may not live within reasonable driving distance of a trout stream.
The beauty of bass fishing, in my opinion? It’s a visual game. Bass are aggressive predators and they often take flies as they are stripped through the shallows, giving anglers a front-row seat to the take. And, of course, they’ll crush topwater poppers and gurglers. And, as you’ll hear Tom say in the video above, you don’t need a super-fancy fly rod-and-reel set-up to chase bass. An affordable rod with a basic reel and weight-forward, floating line is about all you need to start chasing bass on the fly.
The video above is the ideal tutorial to getting started fly fishing for bass. Tom covers everything from fly selection to potential holding water, as well as what kind of bass you might expect to find, depending where in a river or lake you might be fishing.
Enjoy.
— Chris Hunt