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Rigging madness

The question is not how to fish, but why you do it. The author and his fishing buddies do it out of necessity. It’s more important than life and death to them to escape the human world, step in to water and wave a stick. Left on the shore is their misery and worries. Standing in the water they find freedom, healing and occasionally a fish.

Battles are lost and won with tongue in cheek and always celebrated with mountains of cake and an endless stream of fresh espresso coffee. To the band of brothers it’s more important who you fish with than how big the fish is; except for the ones lost.

You may not learn a lot about catching more and bigger fish, but reading these stories is like holding a mirror up in front of yourself getting a little wiser. The small why is a big one.

Please remember you can find many of the articles as podcasts on our PodBean channel here:

This artickel is written by Danish photojournalist Søren Skarby

Big flies – big fish?

Photo: Matt Gymon / Freestone River Photography.

I’m sure there’s some truth behind that – to an extent, because it’s certainly far from impossible to catch big fish on small flies. However, this is about big flies and there can be little doubt that big, predatory fish mainly feed to bigger prey, mostly smaller fish. A dense hatch of bugs will bring any trout up, but a bif fly will tempt them consistently, all year round.

Train wreck

Photo: Undefined fly fishing project.

As the salmon season is developing at the moment, there is reason for serious concern. We publish this blog on Fridays and it’s always nice to be able to give the readers something good to start the weekend on. I don’t like it, but this one’s not good – it is, in fact, quite grim.

Weight on flies – or not?

For many, the epitome of fly fishing is a fly fisherman in a river who casts his dry fly and lets it drift slowly with the current until it disappears in a small ring and a nice trout tightens the line. And for many, that’s exactly what fly fishing is. However, many people like nymph fishing, and so you face a number of challenges to get the fly to fish correctly. A floating fly is easy to follow and correct if it behaves unnaturally. A nymph that is fished below the surface is much more difficult to handle, as you cannot follow the fly’s movement in the same way. It is also difficult to know how the current moves below the surface or how the fly is affected by the stream, rocks and deep holes.

3 Styles of Streamers

Today I’m pleased to present af blog text from Matt Redmond, who has kindly submitted this text about his awesome looking streamer flies and how he fished them. Matt Redmond is an avid fly angler and tier based in Northeast Ohio. He’s spent the last decade exploring the Great Lakes and their connecting waters with a special interest in steelhead, smallmouth bass, and freshwater drum.

Enjoy this!

It’s pod cast day

There are a lot of popular and big pod cast channels on fly fishing. We have our own pod cast channel, which, as of yet, doesn’t contain material we’ve produced ourselves, but hopefully that’ll change some day. Today we still have five no less than seven pod casts to present.

It’s that time of year again

It’s the middle of may and the most important hatch of the year is on. At least in Northern Europe. There are plenty of hatches in the World, where huge insects hatch that can bring the big ones to the surface. In Europe, it’s the Ephemera danica and it’s slightly smaller still water cousin, Ephemera vulgata.

Stoneflies – the Isoperla nymph

Stoneflies are truly fascinating insects. The fully developed form as we know it today is up to 250 million years old. They are widely distributed and unless you’re fishing on Antartica, it’s likely that there are stoneflies in a river near you. There are over 3000 species registered across globe and they come on all sizes. Some of them are huge, some are very small. If you happen to be an insect nerd and enjoy chasing small critters and can’t wait for the season to get started, there’s actually a lovely small stonefly, Capnia bifrons, that hatches while there’s still snow on the banks.

May and pop-pop-pop!

The spawning season for pike is over and the fishing is open again. And that is of course good news for those of us who enjoy fishing pike on the fly. Pike may not deliver the strongest fights, but they offer good chances of really big fish. And even so, I think most are in it for the take.

Stoneflies

Photo: Matt Guymon / Freestone River Photography.

By far the first insects to appear on the scene when spring arrives are the stoneflies. They start moving even before all the snow and ice is gone. Ice fishing anglers can sometimes be visited by small stonefly nymphs, which crawl out of the holes in the ice they are fishing in. Especially if they are fishing near an outlet of a lake or near a flowing water. Because flowing water is the home of stoneflies, they are adapted to living in and near running water.