General Interest

  A fly reel serves basic functions. It holds the fly line and backing as well as offers a rudimentary drag system for playing larger fish. Like many products in life that we use and often take for granted, you won’t give the fly reel much thought until it stops working. My first fly outfit […]

  The Mayfly Project began with one angler’s struggles with anxiety. Jess Westbrook has been fly fishing since he was 6 years old, but it wasn’t until 2014 that he discovered the healing power of fishing. Jess and Laura Westbrook started The Mayfly Project to take a local group of children fly fishing. He reached

Scroll through many fly fishing forums on social media and you’ll soon see someone who has posted a trout photo and asked if it was a wild or stocked brown. If you want a good laugh, read the responses. Many times, the answers will be split 50/50, which leads me to believe that most people

  My first cast of 2021 landed in Letort Spring Run, and as soon as the fly hit the water, three small brown trout scattered in different directions. My fly floated down through the abandoned pool. I shrugged it off and moved upstream to a fresh pool where three much bigger browns were gathered. I

  The first fly lines ever used were made of woven horsehair and, eventually, woven silk fibers. I imagine many a fly fisherman back then spending long winter evenings building lines by lamplight and the frustrations they must’ve felt if they messed up and had to start again. With technological advancements and improved techniques for

 Last week, I posed this question on the Dark Skies Fly Fishing Facebook page: If you were to give someone new to fly fishing one piece of advice to get them started, what would it be? And then, just to poke the bear a little bit and get a wide range of responses, I shared

Born on January 19, 1929, in Curwensville, Pennsylvania, Joe Humphreys always had an innate passion for water and the creatures that lived there, a passion that found expression when his father moved their family to State College, in 1935, where he found work. This was the heart of fly fishing country, dozens of streams within

  As I sat at my desk trying to figure out what fly to tie using a package of olive Cactus Chenille, my three-year-old daughter Sophia came into my office and asked what I was doing. If anyone else had asked me that same question with that exact tone of voice, I may have been

  Recently, I had the opportunity to join a team of biologists from the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission (PFBC) as they surveyed the headwaters of East Branch Tunungwant Creek in McKean County. Although the main stem was designated Class A wild trout waters back in the early 1990s, the tributaries that converge to create

A scattering of trout are sipping something off the water’s surface, but there’s no telling for sure what they’re eating. There are no insects visible on the water, but three or four different species flutter in the air – problem is, there aren’t enough of any particular insect to say that’s what the trout are