How to start fly fishing for trout in 12 easy steps
The following is a complete step by step guide on how to start fly fishing for trout. While it might seem specifically tailored, this step by step program is guaranteed to work for anyone. If you want to start fly fishing for trout, follow this simple 12 step program.
Step 1: Fall in love with a mountain town, and after a winter of skiing and waiting tables, have a friend suggest you apply to be a raft guide for the summer.
Step 2: Have the time of your life on the river. Learn everything you can about reading water and leading a team. Swim through the rapids, do backflips off your boat, lose three hats and flip your boat at least once. Make the best friends you’ve ever had. End everyday sore and sunburnt but happy.
Step 3: Keep white water raft guiding for four summers in a row, then slowly start to become a grumpy, jaded local. Decide you will try landscaping for a summer because you’re tired of catering to rude customers.
Step 4: Realize landscaping is REALLY hard. As you’re roasting in the hot sun planting flowers, day dream of your time on the river. Overnight, notice that your river dreams —where you could hear the rush, feel the waves and get a sense of calmness even in your sleep — have been replaced with dreams about digging holes in the dirt. This will make you extremely sad.
Step 5: Pick up shifts on the river again when your old coworkers want a day off. Understand you miss the water, but you still hate the circus that surrounds the white water rafting gig.
Step 6: Remember the rivalry between raft guides and fly fishing guides that they told you about in guide school? Get over that. Fly fishing guides can be fun too — shocking I know, but it’s true. Go befriend one.
Step 7: Overhear your fly fishing guide friend say they are going on a fun run the following day. Ask if you can join even though you’ve never been fly fishing.
Step 8: Have the most amazing day on the same stretch of river that you used to raft guide on. Learn how to cast, and catch your very first trout! Feel that connection to the water that you found in your first year of guiding. Post your first fish photo on Instagram.
Step 9: Ask the same friend to help you pick out your first fly rod (if you’re lucky they’ll just give you an extra they have laying around). Go to the local fly shop and pick up an assortment of completely random flies because you’re too nervous to ask for help from the shop assistants.
Step 10: Spend your days off in the summer hiking to various lakes and creeks in the wilderness. Some days you will catch one or two fish, but most days you will catch none. Accept that you’ll spend most of the time untangling your line and searching for the flies you lost by snagging the bushes. However, the most important part of this step is to notice how excited you get every time you see a fish swim towards your fly. That will be enough to keep you going back even when you don’t catch anything.
Step 11: Stick with it. Learn the difference between a nymph, a midge and a stonefly. Start to figure out when to use each. You will meet people that give you helpful advice each time you go out. You’ll notice you haven’t gotten your line completely tangled in a while, and you have less and less days where you catch absolutely nothing. On every backpacking or camping trip, you now pack your fly rod, the same one that was given to you as a starting present. You look forward to every day off because you know where you’ll be.
Step 12: Watch “A River Runs Through It.” Cry at the end.
If you follow these 12 easy steps, you too will reignite your love for the river. You will feel connected to the water that shaped this valley, and appreciate every second that you get to explore the nature around you. Thanks for following this guaranteed guide on how to start fly fishing for trout!
This was a submission I wrote for an education scholarship fund for my MBA program. I didn’t get the scholarship.