Where to Find Study Resources for Fly Fishing

Series Summary

Modern fly fishing is centuries old, having begun in North England and Scotland; however, the history of fly fishing be traced back over 1800 years to the now mysterious Astraeus River in the Roman province of Macedonia. In the 2nd Century A.D., Marcus Aelianus described Macedonian fishermen's use of fastening feathers and wool to hooks to attract fish to their lines. Fly fisherman today continue the adventurous yet relaxing sport of fly fishing in some of the most beautiful and tranquil places on earth, casting their flies in waterways of the Colorado Rockies, where all that is heard is the flowing stream and soft breeze in the aspens.

In this free fly fishing video instruction guide, learn some professional fly tying tips and techniques. Our certified expert fisherman, Jim Dowd, will show you how to get your fly fishing abilities up to speed so that you can start catching some walleye, trout, bass and more. He’ll walk thorough how to tie your own flies, how to determine what the fish are biting on, how not to scare fish away, water safety, and a few other tricks of the trade. Enjoy!

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Jim Dowd at Zoar Outdoor for Expert Village to talk to you about fly casting and fly fishing. In our next segments, we are going to get out on the water and actually get our hands wet and hopefully show you some real interesting information about fly fishing and how it is done. But before we do that, I would like to recommend some videos and some textbooks that I have personally benefited from, and I hope you will too. They are really worth your time to have a look either at the local library, or better yet, buy them for yourself so you can look them over and study them and use them as you grow on your journey of fly fishing. The first two are The Essence of Fly Casting by Mel Krieger and John Wolf’s Dynamics of Fly Casting. These are two wonderful videos that take slightly different approaches to the different things that you have to do to propel a fly line through the air with a rod. In video form, they give the best instruction I have ever seen. The L.L. Bean Fly Casting Handbook is a text written by my friend Macauley Lord, and as you can see, I’ve marked many of the pages. This is a go-to book for me. I find this to be a wonderful straight forward great resource. For technical detail and for analysis for pretty much everything cast you can imagine, you can find a no finer book than the casts by these gentlemen. These guys are legends in the fly fishing industry and I urge you to have a look at this book. For an introduction to fly fishing to cover all the basics, which it’s really not possible for us to do in small 1 minute or 2 minute segments, get a hold of this video by Dave Whitlock. It covers the entire basics, and if you can master the things that are put forward in this video, you will be fishing. Here’s another book where Lefty Cray, a legend in the fly fishing industry, has given some really wonderful information and it is extremely pragmatic. Information in this book is a lifetime of expert advice. Here’s another Dave Whitlock text, The Fly Fishing Handbook, which is a great companion to the introduction to fly fishing that I mentioned a few moments earlier. This covers knots, prey, casting: all that you need to know to fly fish successfully. So get a hold of these resources. They will serve you well. "