Articles

Improve your fly casting

Have more fun, catch more trout

by Todd Tanner - Thursday, Dec 29th, 2022

Photo: Jeremy Roberts / Conservation Media.

Whenever a thoughtful, well-written story on fly casting pops up on the web, you can bet that some folks will be incredibly appreciative of the information. They’ll embrace the challenge of becoming better casters and soak up everything there is to learn from the piece.

Others, though, will dismiss fly casting as an unnecessary skill; one that simply isn’t relevant to their trout fishing. They’ll proclaim that they already catch plenty of fish and since “trout-in-the-net” is their metric of choice, fly casting must, of necessity, be overrated.

The Boat Company joins the effort to help fishing guides

Now your year-end donation to the Guide Relief Program can be tripled

by Hatch Magazine - Monday, Dec 26th, 2022

Photo: Chad Shmukler

The Boat Company, a non-profit corporation that operates educational and recreational excursions in southeast Alaska aboard two intimate touring vessels, is following the lead of Orvis and matching end-of-the-year donations to the Guide Relief Program (GRP), up to $10,000.

Catch-and-release hunting

Using hunting dogs in the battle to preserve ... turtles?

by Tom Davis - Thursday, Dec 22nd, 2022

John Rucker waters the pack (photo courtesy: John Rucker).

Curling, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is an arcane winter sport of Scottish origin in which one player slides a 42-pound disc of polished granite down a sheet of ice toward a kind of bullseye target. This disc, called a “stone,” moves at a glacially slow rate of speed, and as it’s doing so the other players furiously sweep the ice ahead of it with brooms in order to influence its velocity and direction of travel.

Orvis steps up for guide relief

Through the end of the year, double your donation to the Guide Relief Program

by Hatch Magazine - Tuesday, Dec 20th, 2022

Photo: Gregory Houska

A fly-fishing industry leader will match all donations up to $10,000 through the end of the year to a program designed to help fishing guides deal with both personal and professional crises, according to one of the program’s creators.

Looking for the Kootenai

Fly fishing the Kootenai River in northwest Montana

by Chris Hunt - Monday, Dec 19th, 2022

An enchanting Kootenai River rainbow trout (photo: Earl Harper).

I realized last week just how spoiled I am to have the South Fork of the Snake River in my backyard. It’s a painfully predictable river that sports typical western river features, like tailouts, wood close to the banks, undercut banks and braided channels that offer some of the best dry-fly and soft-hackle fishing anywhere.