The roots of change always seems to start with a couple of old guys whose ardor for fishing overcomes their good sense. It’s a fishing truism that hungry and willing fish make the trek up or downstream half as long, with each new bend or riffle gleefully exploited given the fish are in the mood [...]

At times I think even PETA hates starlings, universally reviled – it seems even little old ladies consider them cockroaches of the sky … When I lived in the woods the local rice farmers would pay for your ammo, sending great groups of killers onto the paddies to blow hell out of yellow-hooded and redwing [...]

This was a reduction of a Upper Sacramento classic, Ted Fay’s Black Bomber. Plenty can be said of Ted Fay flies, most would say “really heavy.” They weren’t graceful or slender, and I dreaded a big order as it was the only fly I had to tie holding my nose. Not that the flies were [...]

Now that the US seafood industry is again flexing its marketing muscle, having been stung with the backlash of Frankenfish, you’ve got to wonder how Madison Avenue will wring wholesome and organic from the vision of a muscular misshapen fish bumping into the sides of a plastic kiddy pool. Like all the other industry trade [...]

As much as we’d like it to warn us, great flies have no aura about them when removed from the vise, no halo to clue its creator to cease embellishment, as his creation will be the bane of local gamefish for the next couple of decades. We’ve taken it for granted we can spot fishy [...]

Every fly tier struggles with genius, when to invent flies versus merely copying others, when to modify classic patterns to suit a unique fishery, and how avoid the wrath of others in the doing.

It’s a familiar story, late night infomercial hawks guaranteed millions using system of made-for-you websites that will make merchandise fly off shelves and change your life forever. What you get is some search engine optimized website with a web crawler that searches the entire Internet for pages that contain keywords, like “trout” or “dry fly” [...]

Most of you recognize that noble profile, that harbinger of clean water, the stonefly, hisself … What you don’t know is this stonefly came out of my soiled little creek, the product of “kitchen table” genetic engineering. Grab some adult females from the Pristine, squeeze the arse end into a vial, mix with a proprietary [...]

After two weeks of cold and dreary, damp and foggy, I’m reminded of all those English classics with Sherlock Holmes and Hounds of Baskervilles, debtor’s prison and moored Hulks. Victorian spinsters attempting to land Mr. Darcy … who fly fished and therefore had the good sense to pledge troth to some crone that owned the Tay, the [...]

We’ve not heard words like that since the Sixties, yet you’ll be sharing much more with trout than you’d expect, given that soon you’ll be deciding whether Caddis taste better than Mayflies, or whether you prefer your Crane fly larvae straight up or with a hint of Sour Cream. As has been well documented, science [...]