Methods

Choosing Your First Fly Rod and Line

One rod and one line cannot fish everywhere, but they can fish most places. Start with a floating line, match the rod to your water, and spend the rest on a lesson.

Choosing Your Casting Position

Where you stand decides more than most anglers credit — sun angle, wind, current, and background cover all follow from position.

Line Management

A tangled coil at your feet or a loop caught round a rock costs distance, accuracy, and often the fish itself at the worst possible moment.

Fishing in the Wind

Wind punishes a sloppy cast and rewards a deliberate one — a lower, tighter loop matters more than fly choice once the breeze picks up.

Every Method, and Why

Dry fly to Spey casting — every technique exists because the fish demanded it. Here's when each one earns its keep.

Dry fly, nymphing, wet fly, streamer, Spey

Reading a Stillwater

A stillwater gives away far less than a river — no current to concentrate food, no obvious seam to fish.

Approaching the Water

Most fish that are never caught were never actually fished for — they were spooked before the first cast landed.

Wading for Better Presentation

Wading should solve a problem — reach a lie, improve a casting angle, get below a fish's sightline — not become a habit exercised whenever the bank is merely inconvenient.

Safe Wading in Fast Water

Wading is a means to an angle, not a badge of commitment — and fast water has drowned careless anglers who forgot that a wrong step costs far more than a missed cast.

Fishing Across Conflicting Currents

Some water refuses to cooperate — three current speeds between you and the fish, each pulling the line differently, defeating a simple cast before it's even finished landing.

Sight Fishing

Spotting fish and casting to sighted targets — polarised glasses, stealth, and the art of seeing fish before they see you.

Polaroids on. Slow down. See the fish first.

Fishing Low, Clear Water

Low, clear water is the river holding its breath. Where to fish, when to stop, and how to approach a river where the fish can see everything.

Fishing a River in Spate

A spate is a river changing its mind. Know which stage it is in (rising, peak, falling and coloured, falling and clearing) and you will know where the fish are and what to fish.

Achieving a Drag-Free Drift

Drag is the fly moving unnaturally against the current — and it is the single most common reason a good fly is refused.

Presentation Casts

A reach, a curve, a pile, a tuck — these aren't tricks, they're specific answers to specific problems a standard cast can't solve.

Managing Slack and Contact

Too much slack and you never feel the take; too little and the fly drags before it reaches the fish. Every method asks for a different balance.

Controlling Fishing Depth

Depth is usually the biggest variable in whether a fly gets eaten, bigger than pattern, bigger than colour.

Controlling Fly Speed

The same fly fished fast and fished slow can produce entirely different results from the same fish on the same day.

The Hang

A pause at the end of a retrieve or a drift, flies held beneath the rod tip for a few deliberate seconds — on the days it suits, it accounts for a disproportionate share of the takes.

Setting the Hook

Not every take wants the same response.

Playing and Landing Fish

The take is the moment everyone remembers, but the next sixty seconds decide whether the fish actually comes to hand.

Catching and Releasing Fish Well

The fight is the part you remember; the release is the part the fish remembers. How to land, unhook, photograph and revive a fish, and how water temperature changes the odds.

The Rules of the Water

A day's fishing sits on a stack of rules, and most are not written on the riverbank: licence, permit, close season, beat rules. Know the stack before you rig up.

Emerger Fishing

That awkward inch between water and air where most insects die and most trout feed. When fish refuse your dry, the answer is almost always lower in the film.

In the film, not on it. CDC, Klinkhamer, shuttlecock.

Klink and Dink

Named, with a certain lack of ceremony, for a Klinkhamer sitting on top and a nymph 'dinking' along beneath it, this is prospecting made efficient.

Caenis Fishing ("The Curse")

Anglers call it the Curse for a reason — caenis hatch in dense clouds on summer evenings, trout key onto the naturals with total selectivity, and a fly even slightly too large is refused.

Upstream Dry Fly

The simplest idea in fly fishing, and the most satisfying — a floating fly, cast upstream to a rising trout, drifting back as though it belongs there.

Drag-free drift. Cast upstream, wait, lift.

Downstream Dry Fly

There's a school of thought that says a proper angler always fishes upstream, and there's the actual river, which frequently disagrees.

Across and Down Dry Fly

On broken freestone water a dry fly cast straight upstream often drags before a fish ever sees it. Casting across and slightly downstream buys several extra feet of drag-free float.

Static Dry Fly

Not every rising trout wants movement. On slow glides and stillwater margins, a fly held dead still is often the only presentation a wary, well-fed fish will accept.

Skated or Waked Dry Fly

Drag is usually the enemy of a dry fly — until it isn't. Deliberately skating a fly can pull takes from fish that have ignored a dead-drifted pattern all evening.

Terrestrial Dry Fly

Some of the best fishing days happen when nothing is hatching at all. No olives, no caddis, not a fly in the air — and yet there's a decent trout sipping something just under the alders.

Blind Dry Fly Fishing

No rises, no visible fish, no clue where a trout might be holding — blind dry fly fishing is prospecting on the strength of reading current and structure alone.

Fishing the Sedge Hatch

The sedge bursts through the surface and the fish go after it with a splash. The grannom, the evening hatch, the pupa and the skated adult.

Indicator Nymphing

The indicator is a float by any other name, and there is no shame in that. It suspends your nymph at the right depth and shows you takes you would otherwise miss.

Suspend the nymph. Watch the indicator. Set depth.

Tight-Line Nymphing

Take away the indicator and you are left with your rod, your leader, and the current. The most sensitive way to fish a nymph.

No float. Direct contact. Feel or see the take.

Dry Dropper

A buoyant fly on top big enough to float a nymph, and something smaller and heavier hanging beneath it — covering two depths at once beats guessing which one to commit to.

Czech Nymphing

Short-line, heavy nymphs, direct contact with the riverbed. It looks nothing like the pictures in the books, and it catches fish in fast water when nothing else will.

Short range. Heavy point fly. Feel the bottom.

French Nymphing

If Czech nymphing is a hammer, French nymphing is a scalpel — long leader, fine tippet, lighter nymphs, and a reach beyond rod-length into technical water.

Long leader. Fine tippet. Light contact at range.

Spanish Nymphing

Spanish nymphing takes the long-leader principle of French nymphing further still — an even longer rod and slim tungsten Perdigón nymphs designed to cut through fast water.

Modern Euro Nymphing

Modern Euro nymphing borrows freely from Czech, French, and Spanish schools rather than sticking to one — a jig nymph fished at whatever range and depth the water demands.

Skues Nymphing

G. E. M. Skues spent a good part of his life being quietly disapproved of on the Itchen for presenting a nymph to a trout that wouldn't take a floating fly.

Washing Line

Named for the obvious reason — a line of flies hanging the way washing hangs on a line — this is one of the cleverer stillwater rigs, and one of the simplest once you've seen it done.

Team of Nymphs

Three flies, spaced out on droppers, worked back slowly across open water — stillwater fishing at its most fundamental, and a consistent way to find feeding trout.

Working a Team of Flies

Two or three flies on one leader multiply the questions you're asking the water at once — but they also multiply the ways things can go wrong.

Traditional Wet Fly

Before there were spiders and soft hackles, there was simply the wet fly — a winged pattern fished across and down, searching water the way anglers have for two centuries.

Down and Across Wet Fly

Before spiders and soft hackles refined the method, this was simply how a wet fly was fished — cast across and slightly downstream, swung under tension, covering water methodically.

Fishing a Team of Wets

One fly asks one question of the water; three flies, spaced on droppers, ask three at once — different depths, different silhouettes, different triggers, in a single swing.

The Induced Take

Sawyer's lift — a nymph that rises at the end of its drift imitates an insect swimming to hatch, and a trout that was ignoring it suddenly cannot help itself.

Lift the nymph. The fish does the rest.

Soft Hackle & Spider

A turn of partridge on a hook, swung across the current. The oldest effective fly pattern in British fishing, and the fish have not yet worked it out.

Cast across, let it swing. Partridge & Orange, Waterhen Bloa.

Loch Style Wet Fly

The wind does half the work and the wave does the rest — a team of wet flies drifted from a boat, the bob fly dibbling in the surface.

Bob fly in the wave. Fish the hang.

North Country Spiders

One or two turns of partridge hackle on a silk body, no wing and no flash: the oldest and simplest wet fly in the book, codified in 1885.

Irish Lough Style Wet Fly

On the great limestone loughs of the west, a team of wet flies drifted broadside from a boat is fished with a rhythm and fly selection all its own — richer water than most Scottish lochs.

Dapping

The oldest form of fly fishing and the most theatrical — a large fly held on the surface by the wind, barely touching the water, dancing like something alive and about to escape.

Wind, patience, and a willingness to hold your arm up.

Duckfly Dapping

Before the duckfly hatch properly gets going on the big Irish limestone loughs, trout key in on the adults skittering on the surface — and a dapped imitation draws takes no cast fly matches.

River Streamer Fishing

Woolly Buggers, sculpins, baitfish patterns — river streamer fishing is the art of covering water with purpose and putting a fly in front of the biggest fish in the pool.

Reservoir Streamer Fishing

A reservoir is a very large piece of water with no current to tell you where the fish are, which means the streamer angler's real skill is reading structure rather than working a retrieve.

Streamer Swinging

Not every streamer needs stripping. Cast one across a deep run, mend to control the swing, and let the current bring the fly alive on its own.

Dead-Drift Streamer

A big trout did not get big by chasing every meal. Dead-drifting a streamer presents a large fly the way you'd present a nymph, drifting naturally with the current.

Pike on the Fly

Pike do not sip. A big streamer fished past a weed edge or a sunken tree draws a take that arrives like a slammed door — no warning, no following boil, just a sudden, jarring weight on the line.

Autumn Fry-Feeding Imitation

By September, big trout that spent the summer sipping small flies switch targets entirely — hunting shoals of that year's fry, and a fly that imitates one can draw the biggest fish of the season.

Night Streamer Fishing for Trophy Trout

A big brown trout did not get big by feeding in daylight. After dark, the largest fish in the river hunt — and a big, dark streamer worked slowly can draw takes no daytime method will produce.

Booby Fishing

The Booby looks like a joke fly — two foam eyes on a bare hook, designed to float indignantly upright while everything around it sinks.

Pulling Lures

Sometimes the fish want something that looks like it's trying to get away. Pulling a lure — a Cat's Whisker, a Blob, a Cormorant — is fly fishing's answer to spin fishing.

Stillwater Dry Fly

There's a particular pleasure in watching a trout's head break the surface on still water, rather than guessing at what's happening beneath it.

Indicator Fishing

An indicator is a bung by another name, and there's no shame in either — the simplest way to present a fly at an exact depth and see a take you'd otherwise never feel.

Anchored Boat Buzzer Fishing

Anchored over a known depth with buzzers hung static beneath a bung, a boat angler can present a team of flies at an exact depth no bank angler can match.

Using a Drogue

A drogue is a small parachute you throw over the side, and it solves a problem every boat angler eventually runs into: the wind blows the boat faster than any fly can be fished properly.

Boat Drift and Positioning

A boat opens water no bank angler can reach, but a badly set drift wastes it just as thoroughly — the right angle to the wind changes everything.

Greased-Line Salmon Fishing

A.H.E. Wood's method for low, warm summer water: a small fly fished just under the surface, broadside to the current, for salmon that ignore a deeply fished fly.

Night Sea Trout

Not a variation of daytime fishing — a different pursuit entirely. The fish that lay invisible through the day become active and aggressive between dusk and dawn.

Know the pool. Fish slow. Resist the temptation to rush.

Waking a Surface Fly for Salmon

Skated so it wakes a visible V on the surface, a Bomber or hitched tube becomes one of the most exciting ways to move a salmon — the take arrives as a boil you see coming.

Tube Fly Swing

A tube fly separates the dressing from the hook entirely, letting the angler fish a large, mobile silhouette without the weight and leverage of a big fly on a fixed shank.

Floating-Line Salmon

The floating line is the summer salmon angler's tool, and in low, warm water it is very often the only tool required.

Sunk-Line Salmon

Cold water changes everything a salmon angler thinks he knows about presentation — below about 8°C, the fly has to be brought down to where the fish is lying.

Riffling Hitch

A single half-hitch of leader tied behind the head of a small fly, and it stops swimming and starts waking — cutting a visible V a salmon or grilse cannot leave alone.

Stripping the Sunray

Alistair Gowans tied the Sunray Shadow for his own water on the Aberdeenshire Dee, for the particular problem of low, warm summer water in which salmon had stopped responding to anything fished slowly.

Surface-Lure Sea Trout

A Muddler fished dead across the current does nothing more than swim. Skate it, and it becomes a wake fly that a sea trout will come a long way to investigate.

Deep Night Sea Trout

Not every sea trout night rewards a fly worked on or near the surface.

Reading a Salmon Pool

A salmon doesn't feed, so it doesn't sit where a trout would. Reading a pool means finding where a resting fish is prepared to move for a fly — and that changes with water height.

Spey Casting — Single & Double

A Spey cast changes direction and delivers a heavy fly without a backcast — essential on rivers where trees, banks, or other anglers leave no room behind you.

Sea Trout by Day and in the Estuary

A sea trout is not only a night fish. The estuary on the tide, a coloured river in spring and autumn, the finnock, the Irish loughs and the Cantabrian reo.

Winter Grayling Nymphing

Heavy nymphs, slow drifts, deep runs, and the reward of fishing when nobody else will. The method that makes winter worth getting out of bed for.

Heavy nymphs. Deep and slow. Cold hands, warm heart.

Dry-Fly Fishing for Grayling

A rising grayling rarely announces itself the way a trout does — smaller, quicker, often just a dimple where a fish has come up from three feet down and gone straight back.

Czech Nymphing for Grayling

Grayling live where trout often can't be bothered — the fast, broken water at the head of a run, the deep seam beside a boulder, the kind of unglamorous water a dry-fly angler walks straight past.

The Duo for Grayling

The Duo asks little of the angler and a lot of a single buoyant dry fly: float, indicate a nymph's location, and — every so often — catch a grayling on its own account.

North-Country Spiders for Grayling

Three hundred years of Yorkshire and Derbyshire anglers have caught grayling on a wisp of partridge or snipe hackle wound sparsely round a hook, and the fish have not yet grown wise to it.

Upstream Nymphing for Grayling

Not every grayling angler wants to learn a continental leader system before catching a fish. Upstream nymphing is the accessible version — and it still catches plenty of grayling.

Pocket-Water Grayling

Pocket water looks like nothing — a boulder, a patch of white water, a seam no wider than a dinner plate — and grayling anglers who walk past it in search of a proper glide are leaving fish behind.

Small-Stream Tenkara

Enclosed streams — overhung by trees, squeezed between boulders, barely wide enough for a proper backcast — are exactly where tenkara's long rod and short line earn their keep.

Fishing the Kebari

Kebari simply means an artificial fly in Japanese — not one pattern, not one hackle style.

Fixed-Line Nymphing

Bolt a weighted nymph onto tenkara tackle and something genuinely useful happens: the long rod keeps line off the water exactly as European contact nymphing demands, and the direct connection transmits a take with no indicator lag at all.

Keiryu Fishing

Keiryu is a genuine Japanese fixed-line stream tradition, and traditionally it isn't fly fishing at all — long rods, fine lines, and terminal weight built around bait collected from the riverside.

Pesca alla Valsesiana

Below Monte Rosa in northwestern Italy, anglers have fished the fast, broken water of the Sesia valley with a long fixed rod and a horsehair line for longer than anyone writing about it today can precisely date.

Fixed-Line Grayling

A tenkara or keiryu rod solves a specific grayling problem: getting a short, sensitive drift into a seam without the intervening currents that plague a longer fly line.

Tenkara on Larger Rivers

Tenkara's reputation is built on small streams, but a longer line extends its reach onto broader water without abandoning what makes the method work.

One Fly, Six Presentations

Tie on a single trusted kebari and refuse to change it for the rest of the session, and something useful happens: instead of reaching for a new fly at the first refusal, you're forced to solve the problem with position, depth, drift, and movement instead.

Building a Balanced Fly-Fishing Leader

A leader is not a single piece of nylon — it's an energy-transfer system. Understand what butt, taper and tippet each do and a packaged leader stops being a fixed product.

Choosing Tippet: Diameter, Strength and Material

Breaking strain on the packet tells you almost nothing useful on the water — diameter is what actually governs drag, sink rate, and how a fly behaves.

The Dry-Dropper Rig

A dry-dropper rig fishes two depths from one cast — a buoyant dry doubling as a strike indicator, and a nymph hanging beneath it to cover the water column the dry can't reach.

Droppers and Teams of Flies

A team of flies multiplies what a single cast can ask of the water, but a badly built dropper rig tangles, wind-knots, or collapses in the air.

Stillwater Leader Setups

Every stillwater method needs its own leader. The lesson that carries across buzzers, washing line, pulled lures, dries and the indicator is adapting to depth, wind and casting ability.

Streamer and Predator Leaders

A delicate tapered leader is wasted on a bulky streamer or a wire-shy pike fly — what's needed instead is a short, powerful leader built to turn the fly over and survive the fight.

Essential Fly Fishing Knots

Six knots cover nearly everything: line to leader, leader to tippet, fly to tippet, a loop for streamers, a dropper and a wire trace. When to use each, and how to tie it.

Leader Formulas

One rule for thickness, one for matching the fly, one for the split. X sizes, millimetres and lengths, and starting points for dry fly, nymph, Euro nymphing and streamers.

Bottom-Contact Nymphing for Barbel

A barbel lives in pushy water with its mouth at the gravel. How to get a heavy nymph down to it and keep in touch.

Small-Stream Cyprinids

A small hill stream, a light rod, one small fly and a fish that hits the surface as if it had somewhere else to be.

Winter Pike on the Fly: Reservoir Tactics

From October to January a big reservoir is yours. Where pike lie in the cold, the line for each depth, a slow retrieve, the wire trace and the rules.