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Video spotlight: How to Cast in Heavy Brush
For a small-stream angler, the video below serves as an excellent reminder of the need for cast economy. As Dave Jensen demonstrates in the video, keeping your elbow tight might seem counterintuitive when you're trying to keep your backcast from getting caught on willows or alders behind you, but it really works best, simply because…
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Trout Tips: 40 feet, 4 seconds
When I first waded the flats some years back, one of the Bahamian guides explained to me that I should have a good amount of line out on the water at all times, and if I wasn't fishing, I should have the fly pinched between the thumb and forefinger of my non-casting hand. That way,…
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Video spotlight: Spawning rainbows
We see a lot of video footage of migrating salmon spawning in Alaska and in other places around the world, but we often forget that our inland trout and char run upstream—just like salmon—to spawn, too. The video below shows spawning rainbow trout spawning this spring in a small tributary stream on the Helena-Lewis and…
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Video spotlight: Big Pike on a Fly
The Canada-heavy series The New Fly Fisher (the show will occasionally come south of the border to highlight American fisheries, too) is one of my favorite fly-fishing shows to enjoy, largely because of episodes like the one below. I first ventured north to chase pike on the fly a little over a decade ago, and…
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Short casts: Old dog, new tricks; Far Cry fishing; Instagram fishing pics; the town dock, and more
Never underestimate the town dock. Photo courtesy of Hatch Magazine. We've all been there ... fishing the methods we know and have generally mastered, or the methods we truly enjoy. Sometimes our hubris gets in the way of being effective—this is how we like it, therefore, this is how it's done. Chester Allen had a…
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Voices from the River: The BFW pattern
"The friends I can count on, I can count on one hand". — Anonymous I have a fishing buddy who's fond of sayings and that particular one has resonated with me. He's always been one of the guys I have counted on. Not sure he can say the same thing about m e. We are…
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Video spotlight: Into the Wild
When the float plane disappears into the ether and all you're left with is the pile of gear you unceremoniously tossed from the hold, it takes a minute to realize that you're actually "out here," on the margins of survivability. You're alone (not lonely—that's different). You've got nothing but time to kill before that plane…
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