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Fly tying: Ken’s Crystal Worm
I have the same discussion with a lot of different folks about this time every year. Are flies that imitate worms ... ethical? My take? Absolutely. They mimic a naturally occuring prey base in rivers, lakes and streams all over America, and, with high flows approaching in some of our snow-locked rivers, worm patterns are…
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Fly tying: The Puff Daddy Blue-winged Olive
The warmer weather this February here in the West has a lot of us thinking about rising trout. What started as a brutal winter with record snowfall is kind of going out with a wimper—I can see the grass on the front lawn here in Idaho Falls for the first time since mid-December, and we're…
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Trout Tips: Don’t get cocky
Editor's note: The following is exerpted from The Little Red Book of Fly Fishing by Kirk Deeter and Charlie Meyers. The number-one mistake most novice fly casters make is going back too far on the backcast. The only tipoffs are the noises of line slapping the water or the rod tip scraping the ground behind…
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Fly tying: Koga’s Bonefish Shrimp
My first trip to chase bonefish several years back was a disaster. The Atlantic gales blew through the southern Bahamas, and bones were few and far between. I saw a few, got to cast to one or two and came home after a week without landing a single boneffish. It was horrible. But it steeled…
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Trout tips: The Mend
We often make fly fishing more complicated than we need to. A good example of that is mending our fly line to get a better, more natural drift as our flies work their way downstream. Often, as TU's Kirk Deeter points out in the video below, our mends are too jerky or move the flies…
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Fly tying: The Navy Diver
I've always been a fan of tungsten in my fly tying. For some reason, I just tend to cast heavy nymphs and streamers better when the weight is at the fly, instead of pinched onto the line as split shot or paste. It's a personal preference, I suspect, and it works for me. I especially…
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Trout Tips: Casting from a tight spot
We've all been there. The fish are rising on the far bank, and you can reach them ... if only you had enough room behind you for a backcast. But you don't. What to do? In the video above, TU's Kirk Deeter demonstrates a simple technique borrowed from spey casters that simply helps you get…
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