Welcome to another edition of the OrvisNews.com Friday Film Festival, in which we scour the Web for the best fly-fishing footage available. This week’s collection is very U.S-centric, but there are lots of great fish and fine filmmaking. I’m still a bit curious about where all the great New Zealand footage is from 2012. C’mon, Kiwis, get on the ball. Isn’t it almost winter down there? Show us some giant brown trout hoovering up dry flies, for goodness’ sake! And I’m looking at you, too, Chile. Remember, we surf so you don’t have to. But if you do stumble upon something great that you think is worthy of inclusion in a future FFF, please post it in the comments below. See you next week with a fresh set of films!
We kick things off with a home-made video that has no soundtrack, no fancy editing, a low production value. But what it does have is great footage of a couple of anglers fishing a fantastic small stream in Montana, with plenty of great strike footage. (Note to anglers on video: please do not keep asking the cameraman if he “got it.”) I don’t know where this stream is, but I’d appreciate it if someone would tell me.
I love Luke Bannister’s films because they’re so mellow and low-key, yet they’re still compelling. It’s just a man, his cane rod, and some trout rising in an English Westcountry stream.
Here’s some warmwater action from Denver’s South Platte River, featuring the brownwater Grand Slam of carp, smallmouth, and catfish. And OMG! is that a trout at the end?
Here’s another video from the Italian anglers who brought us yesterday’s “psychedelic” trout. Boy, those Europeans get to the water in style, no? Then it’s time for some sweet dry-fly fishing for colorful browns.
I hope you like steelhead because here’s a whole bunch of them. We start off with some naturalist footage of spawning fish, and then jump right into the slaying of the steel.
This is some of the best GoPro tarpon footage I’ve seen. This angler manages to capture an astonishing number of strikes, misses, hookups, and jumps. There are some true beasties here, as well.
This one could’ve been called “Nothing but Trout,” as it’s essentially just a long series of releases. Shot on the “A” stretch of Utah’s Green River, it features plenty of gorgeous browns and rainbows, and releasing them is the best part, right?
The golden dorado is definitely one of my “bucket list” species, and I’ve never seen anyone fishing for them from a personal watercraft, which seems like a great way to do it (as long as there are no piranha around).
Last week, we had our first-ever cobia video, and now here’s a second already. These big fish look like a blast on the fly, although I’m not sure dropping a giant fish in the boat is such a good idea.
Steve Hoovler has been a guide in southwestern Montana for a very long time, so he know where the fish are. In this short video, he focuses on the spring blue-winged olive hatches that make pre-runoff dry-fly fishing so fantastic in the region. And if there are no bugs, throw a streamer, of course.
Meanwhile, on the East Walker River near the California-Nevada border, big rainbows apparently chow nymphs fished under an indicator.
In this week’s episode of The New Fly Fisher, our own Tom Rosenbauer heads to Rhode Island for some striped-bass action during the famed cinder-worm hatch. Have a great weekend!