Beginner Tips for Fly Fishing

If you’re looking to get into Fly Fishing, there’s a few key pieces of gear you’ll need – and a few tips to help make your first fly fishing trip successful!

Your basic setup needs to include the following:

1.        Fly Fishing Rod

2.        Fly Fishing Reel

3.        Fly Line

4.        Backing

5.        Leader

6.        Tippet

7.        Flies

When setting up your beginner fly fishing rod, you’ll want to pick a basic rod that can handle most freshwater fish. Fly Rods are designated by weight and length – the larger the fish you’re going for, the heavier the weight you’ll want. However, when starting out freshwater fishing, anything from a 4wt to a 6wt should work just fine – this will cover anything from panfish to trout to bass.

Fishing Fly

Next, you’ll need to get a fly fishing reels. Reels often can be matched with a few different weights, so a 5wt rod could take a 4 – 6wt reel. This also means you can mix and match reels and rods as your gear collection grows (if you are wondering how fly fishing gets expensive, this is how).

To complete your rod setup itself, you’ll need a fly line, backing, leader and tippet. You can often find basic fly reels that come preloaded with backing, fly line and even leader. The order on the reel is this: backing first, followed by fly line, then leader, and finally tippet. Tippet is what you use to tie on your fly, and allows you to change out flies easily without cutting into your leader or line, as well as change your fly “presentation” to the fish.

Finally, flies. There are a lot of different flies to choose from! An easy guide to starting out is to have a few different options: a woolly bugger, which is a great go-to fly to start as it imitates minnows and can be used across species and locations. Bugs: you can look at specific flies that match the bugs in the area you are fishing, from dry flies that float on the surface and imitate dead bugs, to beetles, ants and more.

There are a lot of techniques when starting out fly fishing, but there are two main basic ways: drifting and streamer fishing.

“Drifting” is where you drift your flies down with the water current. Fish tend to like cover, and to sit at the bottom or outside of currents where they don’t have to work as hard, and can wait for bugs to flush down to them. You’ll cast your flies upstream of yourself (being careful to have them land out in front of you – a fish isn’t going to come eat at your feet!) and let the flies drift down with the current past you. If you feel a gentle tug, you’ll want to set the hook by putting a little pressure on your line and lifting, to catch your fish mid-bite! Drifting is most commonly used somewhere with a little current, so your flies look like bugs being pulled downstream.

Streamer fly fishing is a little more active, and typically used with a woolly bugger, or a fly meant to imitate a fish. You’ll cast out and strip your line (meaning, pull it in by hand) slowly, to imitate a minnow swimming around. A common cadence for this is “strip, strip, bump” where you pull in a short piece of line, again, and then bump the tip of your rod up to look like a hurt minnow. You repeat this until either the fly is back at your feet, or you feel some pressure, where you will want to set the hook as discussed above! Streamer fishing can be used in “flat” water like a lake or pond, or in current.

Now that you’ve got your beginner fly fishing set up and basic fly fishing instructions, you are ready to go try to catch your first fish!