Fly Fishing

For twenty years the Orvis Company has been recognizing excellence in sporting experiences through its Endorsed Lodges, Outfitters, and Guides program. Each endorsed operation has its own character, but all share the same high standards: great service, great fishing or wingshooting, and an experienced, professional staff. These standards of excellence are continually reviewed by the Orvis staff and evaluated by visiting guests in post-visit critiques sent directly to The Orvis Company. Orvis-Endorsed operations cater to every ability from beginners to experts.

At their annual Endorsed Operations Rendezvous in Key Largo, Florida and Endorsed Guide Rendezvous in Casper, Wyoming the Orvis Company announced the winners of their 2011 Endorsed Lodges, Outfitters, and Guide Awards. There are seven categories, three for lodge operations and four for guiding operations. The awards are chosen based on customer survey feedback that Orvis solicits from their customers who patronize these operations.

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Choosing the correct fly at the height of an insect hatch, when the trout are selective, is the most complicated, exasperating, and, when you find the right fly, satisfying experience in fly-fishing. The challenge involves not only what species of insect the fish are feeding on, but also the stage—is it an emerging adult, a drifting nymph, or a spent egg-laying adult?

The classic case of dry-fly fishing is when you arrive at a stream or lake to find the trout rising and the water covered with hatching mayflies. You pluck a fly from the air or the surface of the water, lay it on the lid of your fly box, and choose the fly in your box that matches it in size, shape, and color. Then you proceed to catch lots of fish.

It’s seldom that easy. . . .

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[Editor’s Note: A buddy of mine just returned from Montana, where the water was pretty high everywhere he fished. He stressed that the key to success was getting flies deep, so it seemed a good time to repost this from last September.] 

Many years ago on Maine’s Rapid River, when I was still a relative newcomer to the sport, I learned a valuable lesson about getting my flies deep enough. It was the middle of a hot June day, . . .

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Gordon M. Wickstrom at the London Fly Fisher’s Club. photo by Linnea Wickstrom

Editor’s note: For the next few months, we will be featuring entries from Gordon M. Wickstrom’s The History of Fishing for Trout with Artificial Flies in Britain and America: A Chronology of Five Hundred Years, 1496 to 2000. In this chronology, Gordon marks significant events—the publication of seminal books, tackle developments, important social changes, the dissemination of trout species beyond their native ranges, etc.—on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Wickstrom is the author of Notes from an Old Fly Book (2001) and Late in an Angler’s Life (2004), editor of The Boulder Creek Angler newsletter, and writer and director of The Great Debate—A Fantasia for Anglers, an imagined debate between Frederic M. Halford and G. E. M. Skues.

Click “Read More” for Part I.

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I cut my teeth fly-fishing on Maine’s Rapid River for landlocked salmon and brook trout, and it was on that steep, tumbling freestoner that I first fell in love with traditional streamer patterns. Of course, the Rapid begins at Middle Dam, just a lake’s length from Upper Dam, the spot where Carrie Stevens invented her famous featherwing streamers, such as the Gray Ghost and the Colonel Bates. The Black Ghost was first tied by Herbert Welch, of Mooselookmeguntic, . . .

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