In theory, fly-fishing is a simple sport: Pick a body of water, choose a fly-fishing rod, select your “fly” (or bait), tie a secure knot, cast your line and, hopefully, land a fish on the other end.

If you find yourself stumped by picky trout with any regularity, it’s probably time for you to learn how to fish a soft hackle fly. These time-tested patterns are characterized by their wispy, “buggy” ...

There’s much more to fly fishing than tying on a fly and whipping your line around a pond. Casting, hook setting and reeling all demand a level of finesse that goes beyond what anglers experience when ...

I’m not suggesting you drift a pair of dry flies through fast water or stained water. The double dry rig works best when fishing slow, clear water that offers the potential for rising fish – if you ...

A dry dropper is a two-fly rig that combines a dry fly and either a nymph or emerger, allowing you to fish on the surface and subsurface at the same time. If you’re fishing shallow water but not ...

We fly-fishers really look forward to the fall, with its cool weather and big trout. But when it arrives, it races by at breakneck speed, or at least that’s how it seems to me. Once the streams begin ...

As I embark on my fifty-first season of fly-fishing and fly tying, I find the many changes that have altered these pastimes over that timespan to be nothing short of mindboggling. And of course they ...

Dry-fly fishing didn't become popular until near the end of the 19th century, says Gray. And when it did, a sort of class snobbishness grew around the sport of fly-fishing. Some well-heeled anglers, ...